Columns

With only two days remaining to consider possible vetoes and some unresolved issues, the General Assembly completed much of its work this legislative session early last week.
Since the House and Senate only meet for 30 instead of 60 working days in odd-numbered years – and four of those are set aside to elect leaders and appoint committees – we spent the relatively short amount of time we had tackling a fairly long agenda.

In some ways, the end of a legislative session is not much different from the final weeks of the college basketball season: Both take months of preparation and teamwork to be successful; and both are at their most exciting as the clock winds down.
That proved to be the case last week as the House and Senate looked for common ground on a wide variety of issues with only a handful of days remaining to meet.

ACROSS
1. Old Toyota model
6. Priestly garb
9. “Yes, ____!”
13. Shrek and Fiona, e.g.
14. Neither
15. “Dancing with the Stars” number
16. Country alliances
17. ___-Wan Kenobi
18. Potter enemy
19. *Sweet number
21. *Some fill out more than one
23. Mork’s planet
24. Kind of moss
25. Company that loves logistics
28. *The shot clock measures how much you have
30. Loose Hawaiian unbelted dress

Long before this year’s legislative session began, my colleagues in the House and Senate and I knew the biggest task before us would be putting the retirement systems for state and local governments on firmer financial ground.
These systems were doing extremely well as recently as a decade ago, but the country’s two recessions since then have hit them especially hard, much as they have shrunk the state’s budget, which has been cut $1.6 billion over the last five years.