Kaine Meets with Business Leaders, Lays Out Economic Agenda

A little over five years ago, Dan Yates and Alex Laskey were trying to figure out where they should start their business — OPower, a business that would work with utility companies to help their customers conserve energy and save money.

“Consistently, going from person to person, we got feedback that Virginia was a great place to start a business,” Yates told a small crowd of Northern Virginia business leaders Wednesday.

“That’s an applause line,” U.S. Senate candidate and former Gov. Tim Kaine interjected. The crowd chuckled and complied.

Kaine and U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., toured OPower before meeting with more than 30 area business leaders last week. It was the first day of Kaine’s two-week tour of Virginia in which he’s laying out his economic agenda.

Last week, Kaine's wife also toured Virginia, spending much of Saturday in Vienna.

“So, we started a company here. And we’ve been very happy here and, I’m grateful to say, very successful,” Yates said. “The cool thing about what we do is it works. It leads to saving energy.”

has grown to more than 250 employees, most of them working out of the company’s headquarters in Arlington’s Courthouse community. It reaches more than 10 million homes across the U.S. and, in five years, has saved consumers almost $100 million, Yates said. OPower has help reduce carbon emissions by 1 billion pounds and is counting down to its goal of saving 1 terawatt-hour of energy — that is, enough to power a city of 250,000 people for a year.

The crowd included entreprenuers and representives of venture capital firms, the health care sector and the state’s community college system — and a good deal of national and regional press.

“This is a tremendously inspirational story, that really actually hits right at the heart of… taking some of those Virginia lessons and taking them nationally,” Kaine told Yates.

Kaine, who announced his Senate candidacy a year ago Thursday, laid out the three planks of his economic agenda:

• Sustainable growth
• Talent
• Balance, in budgets and politics

On growth, Kaine said that he was a big believer in infrastructure spending — including rail and ports — that startups and small businesses need better access to capital and that this country needs a comprehensive energy policy, one in which conservation and efficiency “is probably the most important kind of investment.”

“Now, that’s an applause line,” Yates said.

America needs to make reinvestment in its talent pool this generation’s version of the Apollo mission, Kaine said. That means improving early childhood education, revamping No Child Left Behind, investing in community and technical colleges and making college more affordable.

“Win the talent war, and you make your economy strong,” Kaine said.

Balance, he said, involves not just financial matters, but policy in general. Every $2 to $3 of cuts made to balance the budget should be complimented by $1 made as a targeted investment, he said. Kaine also said tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans should be allowed to expire, and that “giveaways to companies that don’t need them” need to be written out of the tax code — specifically citing corn-based ethanol subsidies.

“We can all have the best ideas, but none of it will work if we can’t find the balance of being able to work together,” he said, citing his work with Republican legislators while governor.

Speaking with reporters afterward, Kaine criticized George Allen, the Republican frontrunner in Virginia’s Senate race, for “ridiculing” new forms of energy production.

Warner predicted more jobs and wealth will be created over the next 25 years in the energy sector than any other.

“We were happy to have them here,” Yates said. “They both have a long record of being progressive and right-minded about energy and efficiency.”