The 78th Legislature, Episode I

West Virginia's Legislature has a thing about pacing. A part-time body, it performs the bulk of its work during a 60-day session (meeting on holidays but not weekends until the final day) held toward the beginning of each year. The latest session convenes today.

Last year, the 134 delegates and senators sponsored 2,301 bills (a third of which were carried over from the previous session and introduced on the first day). Of the 264 that reached the governor, only 11 passed before the final week. Nearly half the total cleared the Legislature only on Day 60.

But those numbers say nothing about the quality of the bills, or whether a session was good or bad for the state. They also don't include a particularly important bill, that of the state budget. The Legislature must routinely have the governor extend the regular session a week or so to reconcile differences and pass one.

I covered my first session in 1993, when the general revenue portion of West Virginia's budget first passed the $1 billion mark. The 2006 budget bill spent $3.6 billion in general revenue, while detailing total spending of $10 billion.

The Associated Press has posted several articles (including some here and here) highlighting potential top issues of the 2007 session. So have The Charleston Gazette and The Register-Herald of Beckley - the only newspapers in West Virginia that consistently cover the Legislature. During the 1993 session, at least eight papers were represented in the Capitol press room.

I must also give props to MetroNews, which had at least seven Legislature-related stories posted overnight. MetroNews left the AP fold well before my arrival, and so I consider them the AP's biggest competitor in a pure, direct sense. And like the AP bureau here, they have a relatively small staff yet still do a lot with a little _ making the competition all the more healthy.

Together, we've identified topics expected to dominate the session's competing legislative agendas: mine safety, school safety, ATV safety, taxes, table games, highway funding, targeted pay raises, health care billing and the state's civil justice system.

But, as former House Speaker Clyde See would say, "All fat possums travel late at night." Folks should remain wary of bombshell bills that sneak through the session, typically during the waning hours. Sometimes, these bills are overlooked or underestimated. Other times, they are innocuous until 11th hour tinkering.

"Fat Possum" has also come to mean quirky bills that somehow seize the Legislature's attention while retaining enough force to propel themselves onto Jay Leno's cue cards. They include the road kill and English-only bills of recent years. Every session has at least one.