Virginia lawmakers adopted more expansive gun policies, restrained car title lenders, thumbed their noses at a federal insurance requirement and tweaked education law over the last three months. But after passing more than 1,500 bills, the General Assembly is slated to disperse without a signature legislative accomplishment.
Last year’s session saw a historic compromise that banned smoking in bars and restaurants. A year before, legislators revamped the state’s mental health system in response to the Virginia Tech shooting.
This year’s victories have been incremental by comparison, overshadowed by efforts to fix a $4 billion budget shortfall through 2012.
“I think it’s been somewhat of a quiet session,” said Del. Tim Hugo, R-Centreville, who said fiscal constraints curbed legislative ambitions. “Pretty much up front everybody said, ‘If your bill costs anything, it’s not going to go anywhere this year.’ ”
Notable legislation
» Capping interest rates and length of loans for car title lenders
» Allowing concealed weapons in bars, provided the owner doesn’t drink
» Granting the state a greater role in the approval process for charter schools
» Defying the federal government on a potential mandate to buy health insurance
Gun advocates were successful in passing legislation to allow concealed weapons in bars, but failed to scrap the 17-year-old “one-gun-a-month” limit on buys. A proposed expansion of the death penalty to include accomplices in capital murder cases — which many thought a sure thing at the outset of the session — died unexpectedly in a Senate committee.
Two years after passing a crackdown on payday lenders, the assembly agreed to rein a close cousin of the high-interest loans that use a car title as collateral. Both sides agreed to a compromise that would limit the loans to a year’s length, but left a ceiling on interest rates of as much as 22 percent per month.
A bill to put the power to approve new charter schools in the hands of the Department of Education was watered down to limit the state to an advisory role, diluting one of the key bills in new Gov. Bob McDonnell’s agenda.
McDonnell, however, shepherded through several of his economic development bills. The Republican governor also supported a measure that seeks to exempt Virginia from a potential federal health care mandate that passed both chambers.
“We’ve focused on jobs, we’ve focused on saying no to taxes … we got the things done that we needed to do,” Hugo said.
Lobbyists measure success as much by passing legislation they support as by killing bills they oppose. The Virginia Association of Counties, for example, helped defeat bills to allow hunting next to neighborhoods and change the appeal process for property tax assessments.
“On the whole, we were relatively successful in either preventing the enactment of bills harmful to local government or amending to improve bills that would have otherwise been harmful,” said Michael Edwards, the group’s deputy director for legislative affairs.
