Members of the General Assembly are required to disclose at the end of each year from whom they’ve received gifts worth $50 or more. The Virginia Public Access Project has just posted the 2007 list. Cumulative gift values seem to average out just south of $1,000, consisting mostly of tickets to university football games, meals, and admission to events at which the legislators themselves are often the draw. Sen. Ken Stolle (R-VA Beach) and Del. Adam Ebbin (D-Arlington) come in at the top of their respective chambers with $11,142 and $10,736, respectively. The bulk of Stolle’s gifts came in the form of a pair of Texas deer hunting trips courtesy of the Virginia Sheriffs Association, while Ebbin received dozens of smaller contributions from a variety of organizations. There are a few hunting trips and vacations sprinkled among the 140 legislators, but mostly the disclosures serve as a record of events attended and cheap gifts bestowed. About $100k of reimbursements were provided from state money to legislators who attended legislative conferences.

The Associated Press’ Bob Lewis asked Sen. Tommy Norment whether his voting could be influenced by his all-expenses-paid hunting trip, to which Norment told Lewis that he’s “disappointed in [his] professionalism” for daring ask such a question. The Richmond Times Dispatch’s Tyler Whitley named the legislators who disclosed the most and least, finding that Del. Phil Hamilton (R-Newport News), Del. Glenn Oder (R-Newport News) and Sen. Roscoe Reynolds (D-Henry) had done especially good jobs of listing every possible gift, and that Sen. Ryan McDougle (R-Hanover) was one of several legislators who listed gifts and events without actually saying what the gifts or events were. And Anita Kumar at the Washington Post conducted a study of the disclosures and found that 23 legislators declared no gifts at all and that the Virginia Sheriffs’ Association and Institute’s $16k in gifts was more than any other business or organization, followed by the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association, Dominion Resources and Altria.