RICHMOND -
Bills dealing with the death penalty, lending practices and the face of public education hang in the balance in the last six days of the 2010 General Assembly.
But it all takes a back seat to a budget bill that, more than any in generations, could alter Virginia government and change daily lives.
Faced with a $4 billion shortfall and the need to trim $2 billion through 2012, a dozen lawmakers have only days left to compromise on divergent ways the House and Senate would make the cuts.
Saturday is the 2010 session's scheduled adjournment, a deadline lawmakers have blown as often than they've made the past 10 years.
The toll of the pending cuts, the drain of a hard winter session and the knowledge of the grueling week of post-midnight work days ahead showed Friday on the face of 83-year-old Sen. Charles J. Colgan.
In his 35th legislative session and battling prostate cancer, the gentle and soft-spoken chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said he'd never experienced a session so draining or consequential, nor a fiscal condition so dire.
"The budget is the thing. It's everything," Colgan, the Senate's senior member, said after leading his team of negotiators in a round of Friday afternoon talks with their House counterparts.
The budget dictates a variety of circumstances, like how many state and local workers and teachers will lose their jobs, what services government will offer, and the retirement plans of public employees. In some jurisdictions, it will decide whether Friday nights are still for high school football.
It will decide whether thousands of low-income, disabled or elderly Virginians are eligible for health care benefits under Medicaid.
Cuts — unprecedented deep cuts — are assured, in either the House or Senate version or whatever hybrid of the two emerges from the budget conference by midweek.
The Senate feels the House cut too deeply from public school funding; the House blames the Senate for cutting too deeply into the health care safety net.
But the immediate dispute that precludes all others is how much revenue is needed for the spending blueprint for the next two years, and what fees or taxes are used to generate it.
The House claims the nearly $250 million in new fees endorsed by Senate is excessive, but on Friday afternoon delegates offered a first compromise proposal that agrees to about $76 million in new fees.
The proposal also would reduce contributions to the "rainy day" reserve fund by about $65 million, and impose savings in the state employee compensation and retirement packages.
Senate negotiators said they wanted the weekend to consider the House offer and planned to return Sunday with a comprehensive counterproposal.
As is customary for governors, Gov. Bob McDonnell is acting as an intermediary for House and Senate negotiators.
But he's also an intermediary who regards high fees with no clear tie to a service provided the same as he does the new taxes he promised as a candidate and now as governor to reject.
That includes some of the fees the Senate proposed.
Still, McDonnell acknowledges that it might be impossible to pass a budget without some fee increases.
Not that other measures — some of life-and-death consequence — aren't in play. Among them:
• Legislation to rein in car title lenders, now unregulated, who charge more than 300 percent annual interest and can repossess a vehicle if the borrower falls behind on the payments.
• A bill to make it easier to create charter schools — publicly funded schools run by private operators that would be freed of many state regulations and allowed to operate more like private schools.
• A measure that expands Virginia's expansive and well-used death penalty to apply to people who kill on-duty auxiliary police officers. Several other bills that would have expanded capital punishment to a variety of other violent offenses were killed by a Senate panel.
• Even several gun-rights bills — the most ambitious expansion of pro-gun legislation in years — might be revived Monday after seemingly dying at the hands of a special subcommittee last week. Among the bills that the full Senate Courts Committee will be asked to resurrect is one that would end Virginia's 17-year-old law limiting handgun purchases to one per month.
McDonnell, not yet two months in office, has done well enough with his legislative package, winning passage for 23 of 28 bills that were in his economic development and jobs initiative.
Among McDonnell's legislative pieces remaining are bills that would offer Hollywood tax incentives for filming new blockbusters in the Old Dominion and funding for the opportunity fund used to lure industrial prospects to Virginia.
Also awaiting passage in the final week are education measures that would establish online "virtual schools" and "laboratory schools" run by major state-supported universities.
But it all takes a back seat to a budget bill that, more than any in generations, could alter Virginia government and change daily lives.
Faced with a $4 billion shortfall and the need to trim $2 billion through 2012, a dozen lawmakers have only days left to compromise on divergent ways the House and Senate would make the cuts.
Saturday is the 2010 session's scheduled adjournment, a deadline lawmakers have blown as often than they've made the past 10 years.
The toll of the pending cuts, the drain of a hard winter session and the knowledge of the grueling week of post-midnight work days ahead showed Friday on the face of 83-year-old Sen. Charles J. Colgan.
In his 35th legislative session and battling prostate cancer, the gentle and soft-spoken chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said he'd never experienced a session so draining or consequential, nor a fiscal condition so dire.
"The budget is the thing. It's everything," Colgan, the Senate's senior member, said after leading his team of negotiators in a round of Friday afternoon talks with their House counterparts.
The budget dictates a variety of circumstances, like how many state and local workers and teachers will lose their jobs, what services government will offer, and the retirement plans of public employees. In some jurisdictions, it will decide whether Friday nights are still for high school football.
It will decide whether thousands of low-income, disabled or elderly Virginians are eligible for health care benefits under Medicaid.
Cuts — unprecedented deep cuts — are assured, in either the House or Senate version or whatever hybrid of the two emerges from the budget conference by midweek.
The Senate feels the House cut too deeply from public school funding; the House blames the Senate for cutting too deeply into the health care safety net.
But the immediate dispute that precludes all others is how much revenue is needed for the spending blueprint for the next two years, and what fees or taxes are used to generate it.
The House claims the nearly $250 million in new fees endorsed by Senate is excessive, but on Friday afternoon delegates offered a first compromise proposal that agrees to about $76 million in new fees.
The proposal also would reduce contributions to the "rainy day" reserve fund by about $65 million, and impose savings in the state employee compensation and retirement packages.
Senate negotiators said they wanted the weekend to consider the House offer and planned to return Sunday with a comprehensive counterproposal.
As is customary for governors, Gov. Bob McDonnell is acting as an intermediary for House and Senate negotiators.
But he's also an intermediary who regards high fees with no clear tie to a service provided the same as he does the new taxes he promised as a candidate and now as governor to reject.
That includes some of the fees the Senate proposed.
Still, McDonnell acknowledges that it might be impossible to pass a budget without some fee increases.
Not that other measures — some of life-and-death consequence — aren't in play. Among them:
• Legislation to rein in car title lenders, now unregulated, who charge more than 300 percent annual interest and can repossess a vehicle if the borrower falls behind on the payments.
• A bill to make it easier to create charter schools — publicly funded schools run by private operators that would be freed of many state regulations and allowed to operate more like private schools.
• A measure that expands Virginia's expansive and well-used death penalty to apply to people who kill on-duty auxiliary police officers. Several other bills that would have expanded capital punishment to a variety of other violent offenses were killed by a Senate panel.
• Even several gun-rights bills — the most ambitious expansion of pro-gun legislation in years — might be revived Monday after seemingly dying at the hands of a special subcommittee last week. Among the bills that the full Senate Courts Committee will be asked to resurrect is one that would end Virginia's 17-year-old law limiting handgun purchases to one per month.
McDonnell, not yet two months in office, has done well enough with his legislative package, winning passage for 23 of 28 bills that were in his economic development and jobs initiative.
Among McDonnell's legislative pieces remaining are bills that would offer Hollywood tax incentives for filming new blockbusters in the Old Dominion and funding for the opportunity fund used to lure industrial prospects to Virginia.
Also awaiting passage in the final week are education measures that would establish online "virtual schools" and "laboratory schools" run by major state-supported universities.
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