The Virginia Public Access Project has a brilliant new feature—lobbyist disclosures. They’re connecting the dots between companies, the lobbyists who they hire, and the bills that those lobbyists are trying to influence. For instance, twelve organizations hired lobbyists to influence the outcome of this cigarette fire-safety bill, including the Virginia Fire Chiefs’ Association and S&M Brands (a Virginia-based cigarette maker). The Virginia Fire Chiefs hired one lobbyist to shepherd dozens of bills, while S&M hired three lobbyists for seven bills. VPAP is shining some sunlight on a crucial link in the connection between money and politics in Virginia.

A big Richmond Sunlight fan? Keep up with our latest updates and improvements on Twitter or become a fan of Richmond Sunlight on Facebook. We’ll be using each to provide updates on the goings-on of the General Assembly and the new features of Richmond Sunlight in more detail and with greater frequency than a more casual political observer might care for. Sign up today!

The General Assembly has their very own government audit organization, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), which is producing reports that you might just be interested in. JLARC exists to study the effectiveness of state government, and routinely publishes reports at the request of the General Assembly. Their most recent reports are on all sorts of interesting topics, including requiring insurance companies to cover autism treatment, concerns about the accuracy of the voter registration system, making preschool available for free as a part of the state public education system, state spending on meeting Standards of Quality for K-12 education, and even an annual study of state spending increases. Some studies are specific and timely, like their recent investigation into VCU awarding a degree to a former Richmond police chief despite that he hadn’t earned it. The fact that you’re reading Richmond Sunlight means that you’ll almost certainly find something well worth reading over at JLARC.

Although the General Assembly doesn’t convene for almost three months, bills are being prefiled by members of the house and the senate already. In addition to the 317 bills carried over from this year’s session, dozens have already been filed, with hundreds more trickling in over the six weeks, when the flood will begin. You can track them as they come in on Richmond Sunlight.

Here’s one for the programmers: we’ve established Richmond Sunlight Labs. This is a section of the website where we can test out new features before they’re promoted on the rest of the website. Right now we’re letting people play with XML for legislators, so that web applications can gather real-time data about members of the General Assembly. And we’ve got a few other things under development that will be available in Labs in the coming months.

The 17-day transportation session wrapped up in the wee hours of the morning yesterday, and nothing was accomplished. The legislature only met during six of those days. The Republican majority in the House of Delegates would not increase taxes to cover the costs of expanding and maintaining transportation infrastructure, with Majority Leader Morgan Griffith (R-Salem) saying that “it’s not the time for massive tax increases.” Republicans blame Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, for calling for a special session without having established support for a particular solution to the funding problem; Kaine says that Republicans simply refused to provide any solutions and weren’t willing to work with him on his proposals.

As a temporary solution to the shortfall, the state has called off $388M in road construction, reallocating all of that funding to this year’s maintenance costs. The state is fast reaching the point at which all transportation funding will be locked up in maintenance, with none available for new construction, followed by annual maintenance shortfalls as the road network ages out.

The legislature was also unable to agree on judges to fill vacancies in the State Corporation Commission and the State Supreme Court. Most legislators believe that another special session is unlikely, meaning that the General Assembly will next convene in January of 2009.

This coming week brings the General Assembly’s special session, called by Gov. Tim Kaine. The governor has proposed a $1B tax increase to deal with the state’s inability to fund new road construction, which he intends to raise via a $0.01 sales tax increase in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads (areas particularly in need of transportation funding), a $10 increase in the yearly vehicle registration fees, and an increase in the “grantors tax” paid when selling a home from $0.10 to $0.25 per $100 of value. The proposal is broadly opposed by Republicans in the General Assembly, and by some Democrats. Tim Craig writes about the session in the Washington Post, and he includes a wide variety of forecasts about the special session, made by a dozen members of the General Assembly. Taking the predictions collectively, it’s in no way clear what to expect in the days ahead.

The General Assembly session wrapped up on Thursday night after the House and Senate managed to agree on a budget for the next two years…but they immediately started a new, special session. After the Virginia Supreme Court’s recent decision that local transportation taxing authorities are unconstitutional, the legislature will have to figure out how to fund the state’s ballooning transportation needs. That’s the goal of this special session.

Most legislators have gone home, though, with only a few legislators from each chamber remaining behind to do the legwork of establishing transportation funding proposals. Everybody is likely to return in late April to hash things out collectively. Expect a rural/urban split to define the debate as surely as the partisan division will. Nearly all of this special session will take place in the form of discussions between legislators, rather than through advancing legislation, so there won’t be much to follow online.

The General Assembly has gone into overtime, unable to resolve the budget in the alloted sixty days, Tyler Whitley and Jeff Schapiro write in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The Republican House and Democratic Senate, unable to agree on spending, did manage to agree that they should shoot for wrapping up the session by Tuesday. This is not unusual. In fact, the session has gone long for five of the past seven years, making this the new normal.

The particularly interesting news is that both the Senate and the governor are planning on having a special session of the General Assembly–separate from the normal sessions at the beginning of each year–specifically for figuring out how the state will pay for the ballooning costs of the highways. The Virginia Department of Transportation forecasts that we’re a decade away from the cost of maintaining existing roads eating up the whole of the transportation budget, leaving no money left for building new roads. It’s this problem that the legislature would like to avoid.

Few people appreciate how big Virginia is quite like Del. Terry Kilgore (R-Gate City). Kilgore lives farther away from the capital than any other legislator, yet still lives an hour east of the farthest western reaches of the state. It’s a six hour drive from Gate City to Richmond, and it’s with that in mind that the state maintains a small plane just to ferry those legislators from west of Roanoke back and forth from the capital each weekend. (Folks in southwest Virginia are closer to a half dozen state capitals than they are to Richmond.) The state will spend $1M covering legislators’ travel costs this year, an inevitable byproduct of a part-time legislature whose members all have jobs at home. Richard Quinn explains all of this and more in an article in Thursday’s Virginian-Pilot.