From: ABC 13

Perriello Helps Library Get Closer to Goal

The Campbell County Public Library System is $500,000 closer to building a new Timbrook facility.Congressman Tom Perriello is to thank. He signed them up for the grant. Directors say the current space is too small for the number of people they serve daily. The new library will cost $3 million, half of which has been collected though corporate, community, private and government monies. 
The two-story library will be built in the Timbrook Park on Leesville Road and will be 14,000 square feet.That's almost four times the size of the current space."We are really excited. Congressman Tom Perriello has been very supportive of libraries in general and last year he came down to visit this library as well as the new site and really got behind the project," Nan Carmack, Director of Campbell County Public Library System, said.

From: Danville Register and Bee

Perriello supports rural energy savings bill

 Rep. Tom Perriello, D-5th District, cosponsored a bipartisan energy bill Wednesday that caters to rural areas, according to a news release.

 The bill, H.R. 4785, would establish a “rural energy savings program” to create jobs, lower electric bills for families and businesses and save energy through $4.9 billion in loan authority from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service. The loans would create electric cooperatives to offer low-interest loans to families and small businesses for investments in energy-saving retrofit and structural improvements.

 “Rural households are getting hit the hardest with rising energy costs,” Perriello said in a statement. “These efficiency programs will not only create jobs locally, but make our rural homes more sustainable and cost efficient in the long run.” 

From: NBC29 News

Perriello Talks Up The Census

Reported by Kasey Hott

Congressman Tom Perriello took a break from Washington and visited Greene County Saturday to stress the importance of the 2010 Census. 

Perriello stopped at the library in Stanardsville to encourage people to fill out the census forms and to highlight the many jobs that the census bureau has to offer in central Virginia. Perriello says, "So many things in our community - funding for schools, for seniors, political boundaries - are all affected by making sure we have a good, accurate count of the American people." 

The Census will create 1,100 temporary jobs in central Virginia over the next few months. 

From: America's Quarterly

The Activist Politician

By

Tom Perriello

I belong to Generation X, which I think can be more accurately described as the Community Service Generation. We don’t sit on the sidelines. We have volunteered in record numbers and pioneered nonprofit organizations, using entrepreneurial savvy to solve our communities’ seemingly intractable problems. We took our talents directly into the schools and prisons.

But for years we did not vote.

We took from our grandparents in the Greatest Generation a call to serve, but we also came of age as then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan preached that government itself was part of the problem. We asked what we could do for our country, but we were not willing to put up with the slow pace and productivity level of the public sector. We wanted results now.

Nevertheless, as we got deeper into service and social entrepreneurship, we kept coming in contact with government. Sometimes it was the problem, sometimes the solution and sometimes the chance to translate a success into policy. After a decade, the community service generation was increasingly taking its experiences and results-oriented approach into public service.

From Danville Register Bee

Tom Perriello’s political obituary was written before most people ever heard his name. Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District was drawn by the General Assembly for a Republican to win, not a Democrat like Perriello.

Television attack ads started airing almost immediately after Perriello took office a year ago. During his first few months in office, a newspaper in South Boston refused to publish his name. After casting his most controversial vote — in favor of health care reform — Perriello subjected himself to the full fury of the opposition by holding an unprecedented 21 town hall meetings around the Fifth District last summer.

We can’t recall former Rep. Virgil Goode ever being yelled at in public like Perriello was at those town hall meetings. For that matter, we can’t recall Goode ever going out of his way to meet with his political opponents.
Perriello is sometimes called “one-term Tom,” one of the few nicknames the opposition has given him that can be printed in a family newspaper.