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.

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.

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.

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.

A strange scene presented itself on the floor of the House today, pitting Republicans against Democrats in a procedural debate. The Associated Press’s Bob Lewis explains:

Del. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, had asked that his legislation to allow collective bargaining by state and local government employees be withdrawn. Such requests are often made and routinely granted every year.

But Republicans refused, intent on forcing Democrats to take a floor vote that could potentially alienate unions, among the Democrats’ most generous constituencies.

[…]

The ensuing roll call showed 55 Republicans, two conservative independents and two Democrats voting not to advance the bill. There were no votes in favor of it, and 42 of the House’s 44 Democrats did not vote.

Then, invoking a rare parliamentary privilege, Republicans singled out 25 Democrats who did not vote and, one-by-one, ordered that the official record reflect that they had voted no, just as the Republicans had, creating an inflated final count of 82-0 to effectively kill Ebbin’s bill. Griffith said he quit after 25 because he got tired.

Here is the official House video of Griffith’s challenges to the votes.