The Virginia House of Delegates during its 2025 legislative session, Jan. 8, 2025. (Photo by Markus Schmidt/Virginia Mercury)
Here’s Exhibit A that sessions at the Virginia General Assembly, dictated under a half-century-old state constitutional update, aren’t nearly long enough:
Since 2000, special sessions to complete legislative tasks have been held in all but eight years. Sometimes – like in 2018 and 2021 – two additional sessions took place. Another extended period of deliberations will likely occur this year to respond to President Donald Trump’s planned cuts to the federal workforce and federal spending, which could have an outsized impact on the commonwealth.
The regularity of special sessions is just one indication the current calendar should be fixed.
Many Virginians don’t care about the workload that state legislators endure annually, both during and outside the sessions. But they should. Lawmakers must wade through mountains of bills and their legalese, confirm gubernatorial appointees, sit on study commissions, and travel to and from their home districts.
No one, of course, forced the 140 Honorables in Richmond to run for their seats. They signed up for the prestige – and frequent fatigue. Sessions in even-numbered years are 60 days, and in odd-numbered years they’re 45.
The amount and intensity of tasks that legislators encounter each year, though, are crazy. That’s not good for the lawmakers, the functioning of state government, or Virginians in the long run. The regular session should be extended, perhaps to four months, maybe to six.
Legislators and then voters would have to amend the constitution to modify the current legislative calendar.
“On the one hand, there is still value for members of the General Assembly to be connected to the community in the way they are, to not be full-time politicians, and have encounters with the people they represent,” said Andrew Block, a law professor and director of the State and Local Government Policy Clinic at the University of Virginia.
“On the other hand,” Block told me, “we’ve had the same-sized pipe for decades, and there’s more and more information that has to pass through it.”
Besides, they’re often doing work year-round, he added. Whether the state should revise the current session “is worth a robust conversation and investigation.”
It’s amazing a more serious discussion hasn’t taken place already. I chalk it up to Virginia’s general inertia on certain issues, plus hoary cries of “tradition” regarding the Assembly’s status dating to 1619 as the “oldest continuous law-making body in the New World.”
A.E. Dick Howard, now 91, led the commission that rewrote Virginia’s constitution that took effect in 1971. “The argument for longer sessions is powerful,” Howard told me. “I understand the concerns people have … that the longer they’re in session, the more laws” would be enacted.
Yet, modern times show the issues that legislators face today are more complicated and more technical, Howard said. Longer sessions would allow extra time for lawmakers to think, deliberate and make better use of their staff. Continuity is a virtue, too, when legislators can stay in Richmond and complete their work.
“It also might mean less reliance on lobbyists,” Howard noted. That would be a plus for residents.
The Virginian-Pilot, reporting on a scene decades ago, noted a legislator had consulted a Dominion Energy lobbyist during a public hearing. The legislator asked the lobbyist whether a proposal would “be OK with you?”
How chummy. And not exactly putting Virginians first. Today, lobbyists still hold outsized clout over average citizens at the Assembly.
Legislators often have limits on the number of bills they can introduce: It was 15 in the Senate this year, excluding bills recommended by legislative commissions, a Senate official told me. In odd-numbered years, the limit is 15 in the House, its clerk said, but there aren’t limits in even-numbered years.
Some other things to consider: The state’s population today, at 8.8 million, is nearly double the size it was in 1971. Tremendous technological gains, from computers to data centers, are part of the landscape now. The budget has ballooned to nearly $84 billion in Fiscal Year 2024. That’s a huge increase over FY 1998, for example.
Put simply: Virginia doesn’t look anything like it did a half-century ago. It’s absurd the General Assembly tries to legislate under the same constrictions.
It would cost more taxpayer money for a session that’s longer, but because Virginia pays less to lawmakers than similar, so-called “hybrid” legislatures, the amount might not be overly expensive.
In a December briefing, the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission said Virginia’s salaries for delegates, at $17,640 annually, is 90% below the median of salaries in comparable legislatures. The Senate salary, at $18,000 a year, is 86% lower than median salaries elsewhere. Virginia is the 12th-largest state in the country.
“This is not a part-time position, and with the pay we receive it is really only viable for the rich and retired,” one legislator told JLARC.
I couldn’t reach the speaker of the House or the minority leaders in both chambers.
However, Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, said he’s contemplated what a new calendar could look like. He said he doesn’t support a full-time legislature, which a handful of states have.
“I’m not convinced a longer session is the way to go, not yet,” Surovell said. “It’s something we need to explore.”
He admits, however, the current strains. “In a lot of ways, the systems we have in place are bulging at the seams,” Surovell said. “ … It’s getting harder to get things done efficiently.”
Any longtime observer of the Assembly, and the legislators themselves, know that. Changing the current calendar would improve deliberations and their decisions – and conditions for Virginians.
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