General Assembly Adjourns With No Budget

The Virginia General Assembly will head into a special session later this month to work on a two-year budget in what will likely be a bitter strategic battle between the two parties.

The normal eight-week session ended Saturday night. The General Assembly worked on more than 2,800 bills and resolutions, but the two-year $85-billion budget was left unfinished until the March 21 special session begins. Del. Mark Cole, R-Spotsylvania, said the Senate Democrats "have taken the budget hostage in a dispute over committee assignments." With a House of Delegates that's dominated with GOP members and a Senate that's evenly split 20-20, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, a Republican, gets the tie-breaking vote. Republicans used this to their advantage when making committee assignments. Democrats want more assignments to even out the committees and have stalled the budget in an attempt to reach a compromise in a session that was dominated by partisan bickering of social policies.

The Washington Post reports that Gov. Bob McDonnell called in some of the leading Republican lawmakers Saturday afternoon to hammer out details of an overhaul plan of the state's expensive retirement system, and before it was approved the Democrats argued that the governor's last-minute attention to the details was bad governing.

Without a budget, Fredericksburg and other localities wait in anticipation of how much local funding they will get from the state. The waiting game has to be over by July 1 or government services could shutdown. The Post reports that it will cost $20,000 for each day the group of budget negotiators meet.

“I am extremely disappointed that the Senate Democrats would hold the budget hostage for partisan political reasons,” Cole said. “They are behaving like their counterparts in Washington by refusing to pass a budget."

Freshman Sen. Bryce Reeves, R-Spotsylvania, said that on Wednesday the Democrats handed out a list of demands for the budget, but the list of $450 million in requests "did not include how the items would be paid for." Reeves toned down his statements this week after calling Democrats "obstructionists" last week in his weekly address.

"Then on Thursday, Senator Colgan, a Democrat from Prince William and the longest-serving Senator in Virginia history, delivered a speech to the Senate indicating that he does not want to see the budget process drag into April.  That was the first indication that any Democratic Senator might be willing to break from his caucus and vote to enact a budget," Reeves said.

Senate Democrats said Saturday night that they are committed to passing a budget but too much time was spent on social agendas.

"When Senate Democrats came down here several weeks ago we were focused on jobs and public education, repairing our tattered safety net, and solving our transportation crisis, but were instead faced with an onslaught of extreme social agenda bills," said Senator Janet Howell. "The deck has been stacked against us, but we have succeeded in defeating many of these outrageous bills."

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Senate Democratic Leader Dick Saslaw said a bugdet wasn't passed during the regular sessions in 2001, 2004, 2006 and 2008, but he feels they are farther along today than they were during those years. But the Richmond Times Dispatch reports that this is the first time in memory that the General Assembly ended a session without an actual budget document.

"There are states smaller than we are with six-month legislative sessions that won't get done on time what we will do this year in about 70 days," Saslaw said.