With the July 1 start of the new fiscal year for Virginia and the City of Falls Church this week, it is an occasion to celebrate the work of our elected officials who brought us new and thoughtful legislation that has translated into new laws and regulations now in effect. Our esteemed Del. Marcus Simon has provided us with a primer on those new laws in an article published elsewhere in this edition. But we’d also like to call attention to the important contributions made in the last year by our freshman State Sen. Saddam Salim.

This has been Sen. Salim’s first year working for our interests in Richmond, and it is heartening to see the good job he has done on our behalf. Sen. Salim stepped up as the heir to a seat held for many decades by his predecessor, the now retired Sen. Dick Saslaw. Saslaw is still around, of course, most recently at the annual potluck of the Falls Church City Democratic Committee where he boasted of his octogenarian status, reminding us in the context of the current presidential election of the tireless work of billionaire businessman Warren Buffet who still shows up for work everyday at age 93.

On the factors of age and accumulated experience Sen. Salim and Sen. Saslaw could not be more different, yet our newly minted senator has made his older predecessor proud by his performance in Richmond this year, and that goes for us at the News-Press, too. After all, we endorsed him ahead of the contentious Democratic Primary that he turned into a major upset when he prevailed over veteran State Sen. Chap Petersen, who had served in Richmond as a delegate and senator for over 20 years.

Petersen, out of the City of Fairfax, had seen by virtue of redistricting his district grow to the east to include the City of Falls Church for the first time, and that proved his downfall. Petersen was challenged with winning over a new constituency in the context of his conservative positions on the issues of guns, masking during the pandemic, and more.

In his new book, “Rebel,” subtitled “The Story of a Democratic State Senator Who Fought Against the Covid 19 Lockdowns,” Petersen has been less than complimentary about his would-be constituents in Falls Church. He described us as “a highly educated community with few minorities,” adding, “It was also very progressive with a local newspaper owned and operated by a flamboyant leftist with a public loathing of traditional Christianity. Few people wanted to talk about schools – it was all about gun control and post-Dobbs abortion access.” He characterized Sen. Salim a “card carrying progressive whose social media feed reflected the modern day Jacobin agenda.” To Petersen, Sen. Salim was just someone with “no prior experience in public life and minimal work experience.”

There’s a lot more to this story that we’ll explore later. But as you can imagine, we’re so glad that Sen. Salim won.