ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 8, 1996 TAG: 9603080081
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
WILL THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY have a budget to vote on by the time it adjourns Saturday? The legislators working out the details are just getting down to business.
"Two a.m. on Sunday," predicted budget negotiator Sen. Charles Colgan, D-Manassas, as he exited a closed-door huddle on Virginia's $35 billion spending plan.
"I'd say 7:30 p.m. Saturday night," predicted Sen. Virgil Goode, D-Rocky Mount, who's in his first year as one of eight budget negotiators.
In the roving lottery on when the 1996 General Assembly will "sine die" (Latin for "without a day," literally; "go home," roughly translated), it was anyone's guess Thursday.
After a weeklong procedural delay over just how many legislators would be on the conference committee, the House and Senate budget negotiators were just beginning to wade through disagreements on the size of bond packages, teachers' salaries, and dozens of other issues.
During a 5 p.m. break in the action, Colgan said the conferees had achieved at least one minor breakthrough. They had tentatively decided to drop a House plan forcing Gov. George Allen to accept federal Goals 2000 money if he wants a pet project: expanded testing of Virginia schoolchildren.
But other conferees said there were still numerous disagreements to be resolved.
Hanging over the discussions is the fact that it will take from about 18 to 36 hours after the negotiators complete their work to get the revised budget document on the members' desks.
Even if the conference committee completed its work in the wee hours this morning - far from a certainty - it still would be Saturday before members would have the revised document.
"I don't see us getting it in time to read it," said Del. Jay DeBoer, D-Petersburg.
No one was watching the deliberations with a keener eye than Doug Mitchell, publications director for the legislature.
Since Wednesday morning, Mitchell has had a change of clothes and a sleeping bag stashed in his office in the basement of the General Assembly, waiting to get to work printing out the anticipated 400 or so pages of budget amendments.
It will take him and a co-worker about 31/2 minutes to run off each copy of a document that size, Mitchell said. That means he can make fewer than 20 copies an hour. Even if he brings in an outside printing company to help, he expects it will take him about six hours to produce enough copies for the members.
And his work can't begin, Mitchell added, until Senate and House staffs have gone over the work of the budget conferees line by line. That process, he said, can easily take a day.
"We're just kind of on hold," he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996by CNB