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.

The majority parties in the divided General Assembly have different budget priorities, and the result is something that’s looking a lot like deadlock. Bob Lewis explains for the Associated Press:

Two days ahead of the scheduled end to this year’s legislative session, bickering teams of budget negotiators had no deal Thursday and each blamed the other for it.

After a promising exchange of proposals Wednesday evening, bargaining over the two-year, $78 billion state spending turned peevish Thursday morning.

Even though there was almost no monetary difference in the competing proposals, House and Senate negotiators fought it out with barbed claims in dueling news conferences.

The differences are divergent priorities on relatively small funding items and a dispute over the “methodology” for funding public schools. The intemperate tone the talks assumed Thursday, however, makes it possible that the General Assembly, for the third time in four years, won’t finish its work on time.

Each chamber has a team of a half dozen negotiators, and those dozen legislators have been working on hammering out an agreement, but things are clearly not going well.

The decision of Richmond Sunlight to put video of the floor sessions of both the House and Senate online is an attempt to provide additional access for the general public to floor debate and the legislative process.  Like our elected officials, we want to combat voter apathy and encourage civic participation to ensure our great democracy stands strong and representative.

Our hope is that additional sunlight on Richmond’s debates will facilitate community conversations, online or offline, about the vital issues challenging our Commonwealth and we welcome the continuing opportunities associated with providing this service to the general public.

On the heels of adding Senate video to Richmond Sunlight, we’re pleased to announce the addition of House video, found in the new Minutes section of the site. Like Senate videos, the House videos are sprinkled throughout the site, with links provided from each bill page to every video that includes mention of the bill.

This entire video project is made possible by a grant from The Sunlight Foundation, which has provided us with the money necessary to purchase daily session DVDs from the House Clerk’s office.

We’re excited to present an important new feature on Richmond Sunlight: complete, unedited video of the Senate floor sessions. It’s one thing to read about what’s going on in the legislature, but it’s another entirely to be able to watch. Though the Senate already provides live video, this new video is archived for the ages, integrated with the rest of Richmond Sunlight, and uploaded to Google Video for anybody to download, remix, embed, sample, and otherwise play with. All of this is possible thanks to a generous grant from The Sunlight Foundation (no relation), which has provided us with the money necessary to purchase daily session DVDs from the Senate Clerk’s office and free them for everybody to have.

These videos will be added to each day’s official minutes, which we’re now archiving (see the Senate’s February 13th minutes, for instance), going back to the beginning of the session. And each bill’s page will report the days in which a bill came up on the floor of the Senate and thus may well have been discussed on video — see, for example, Del. Matt Lohr’s HB886.

Here is, to demonstrate, the video for last Thursday:

Clicking on that little Google Video icon in the lower right hand corner will take you to Google Video’s page for that Senate video, where you can find a link to embed the video on your own site or e-mail it to a friend.

It will take us a week or so to get the contents all of these DVDs up onto Google Video and integrated into the site, but expect to see more and more video archived on and integrated with the site each day.

Tuesday’s marathon General Assembly session was a result of it being “crossover,” the deadline for bills in either chamber to make it over to the opposite chamber. Any House bill that didn’t make it to the Senate (or vice versa) yesterday cannot become law. As a result, a great many bills fell victims to the time crunch. Though those bills are listed as “dead” on Richmond Sunlight, a peek at the detailed status listing will reveal that many were “Left in Appropriations,” or whatever committee didn’t finish with it in time. Those bills that did make the cut are listed as “Communicated to Senate” or “Communicated to House.”

It’s worth noting that crossover is a popular method of dispatching bills. When a committee wants to kill a bill, but doesn’t want to be blamed for doing so, they’ll simply fail to take action on it by the time crossover comes around. If they’re feeling extra sneaky, just a few days before crossover they’ll assign the bill to another committee…one that doesn’t meet before crossover.

In the few weeks left in the session, each chamber will consider the bills already passed by the opposite chamber. Often they’ll be amended somewhat, and so a team will have to match the two up and reconcile them, and then they get passed along to the governor for his signature. But we’ll talk about that next month.

Interested in visiting the General Assembly? We’re exactly halfway finished with the sixty day session, so you’ve got a month left. The legislature’s website provides all sorts of information that will help you with your visit, including how to plan your visit, how to get an official tour, and how to testify before a committee. There’s even an extensive protocol guide, providing a Miss Manners-style guide to how to address legislators, how to invite the governor to an event, and how to mourn the death of a sitting legislator. (Let’s hope you won’t need to know that last one.) If all else fails, contact one of your legislators. He’ll be happy to help you plan your visit.

We hit a small milestone a few days ago: 100,000 cumulative visits to the website and, in the same day, 500,000 cumulative pages viewed. That’s all come during the thirteen short months in which Richmond Sunlight has existed. We’re grateful to those all of you visiting and promoting Richmond Sunlight. With the rate at which traffic has picked up in the past few weeks, we should reach the 200,000 mark in considerably less than another year.