We are in the final homestretch of the 2022 legislative session which ends at midnight Saturday, March 12. The West Virginia Senate has the House of Delegate’s bills and vice versa.

We already saw the budget bill presented by Gov. Jim Justice at the beginning of the session move. Other priority bills for each body are floating around in each other’s chambers. We’ll see what crosses the finish line.

Anymore, the final day of the session is quite boring. To the credit of both Senate President Craig Blair and House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, both do a good job of keeping the calendar moving. This helps limit the number of bills remaining to be passed on the final day of the session.

The budget process is largely set up in such a way by the House and Senate Republican leadership over the last several years that there usually is never a big fight between the chambers. Beyond attempts by the Democratic minority to amend the budget bill so that Republicans vote against the amendments (often redundant amendments to provide funding for something already funded in the budget), the drama is gone.

••••••

I’ve been under this golden dome in one role or another (reporter, staffer and reporter again) for more than 11 years. I’ve come to have several pet peeves for things that happen or are said during nearly every legislative session. I try not to get opinionated in this column about individual lawmakers or specific bills. But I think I can safely maintain my objectivity and complain about the following things:

••••••

I hate it when a lawmaker rises to speak for or against a bill and begins their floor speech with something along the lines of “I didn’t intend to speak on this bill, but …”

For now, I’ll take a lawmaker at their word that they truly didn’t intend to rise to speak about whatever bill they were speaking about. But whether one intended to speak about a bill, if you are rising from your chair and you are recognized to speak, you are in effect intending to speak on the bill. Stating you didn’t intend to speak on the bill is irrelevant.

Related: I do wish some lawmakers who typically don’t speak would speak up more. Many times, it’s the same lawmakers who rise to speak for or against bills, even the ones who frequently say they never intended to speak.

As a reporter, I wish I could go to as many lawmakers as possible to find out why they voted one way or another. But lawmakers don’t have time to wait on me to find them, and many times I don’t have the time to speak with all whom I’d like to speak. I often have to rely on what lawmakers say during debates on bills.

••••••

I hate originating bills. For those who don’t closely follow the legislative process down here, an originating bill is a bill that is developed by a committee instead of being introduced by an individual lawmaker.

The benefit to bills introduced by lawmakers is you often have plenty of time to review those bills once they are introduced before a committee takes the bill up for consideration. Oftentimes, you don’t realize an originating bill is coming until you see it on a committee agenda that same day. Since an originating bill is considered a draft until a committee adopts it, it’s not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and doesn’t have to be released publicly before the committee’s vote.

In fact, originating bills take lawmakers by surprise as often as they do reporters, such as an originating bill that came out of the House Government Organization Committee Feb. 25 that converts the Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training from an enforcement agency to an agency focused on training and support for coal mine operators (the House decided to pull that bill and study the idea).

Republicans have used originating bills more frequently since taking the majority in the House and Senate in 2015. During my previous stint as a statehouse reporter between 2010 and 2013, the previous Democratic-led majority didn’t use originating bills very often. It is my opinion that originating bills should go back to being used sparingly.

••••••

I also hate the process both chambers have used as long as I’ve been in Charleston under both parties when it comes to committee substitutes for introduced bills.

Committee substitutes for bills have some of the same problems as originating bills. Sometimes a committee chair might give you an early look, but for the most part you don’t know what is in a committee substitute until committee counsel explains the differences between the committee substitute and the original bill or once the committee adopts the committee substitute.

It’s even worse when lawmakers offer amendments to committee substitutes, because since those committee substitutes are not publicly available, it’s sometimes hard to see exactly what is being amended if the lawmaker doesn’t thoroughly explain the amendment. Often, you don’t know exactly how it was amended until the committee adopts the amended committee substitute.

It becomes a larger problem toward the end of session when bills are changing frequently, making it hard for reporters to accurately describe what is in a bill for you, the reader.

••••••

I could go on, but these are some of the things I think about throughout each legislative session.

I’ll have one more dispatch next week once the session comes to a close.

(Adams is the state government reporter for Ogden Newspapers. He can be contacted at sadams@newsandsentinel.com)