Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Virginia Business Council supported the bill, as did nine other local chambers.

The biggest champion of the tax-and-pave package might be the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce. This organization has advocated higher taxes for transportation since at least 1999. In 2002, the Fairfax Chamber backed a ballot measure to hike sales taxes in order to pay for new roads. In 2004, the Fairfax Chamber rallied behind Democratic Gov. Mark Warner’s tax-and-pave plan.

This broad business support was a big reason so many Republicans in Richmond went along with McDonnell’s plan. Sensitivity to business concerns was clearly a driving force for McDonnell.

McDonnell and his spokesman, Tucker Martin, separately cited a 2012 CNBC report on the best states in which to do business. Virginia had fallenAt first, East German hockey star Dieter Frenzel didn’t really understand the opportunity stolen by the communist authorities.

It was December 1989 and East Germany, the country for whom Frenzel had played 296 games as captain of its national hockey team, was disintegrating in the aftermath of the opening of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9. In the midst of the chaos, an offer for Frenzel’s services had come from a West German team and East German authorities had accepted.

Frenzel would make history by becoming the German Democratic Republic’s first team sport athlete allowed to play in the West. But when he appeared at the ministry of the interior to sign his contract, a bureaucrat let slip that there had been a previous offer for Frenzel’s services in 1983.