The second week of session was full of legislative activity. Both chambers are now fully engrossed in legislative hearings and are moving through the enormous number of bills in a swift manner. Friday was the last day to introduce legislation and the total so far is 1731 house bills and 1089 senate bills.

The full list of bills that we are following can be found at the link below. Most of these have not been taken up yet, but will be considered over the next two weeks before the February 11th crossover deadline. One thing that moved this week is legislation to require the Department of General Services (DGS) to post on its central electronic procurement system executed contracts and any modifications to such contracts helping inform vendors and potential vendors of opportunities to provide technology services to the Commonwealth. The Senate approved this bill on Tuesday and the House bill was heard in committee the same afternoon.

Legislators also submitted their ideas for amending the state budget this week, and they can be found here. We have reviewed the proposed amendments and flagged several of them for your review in our legislative tracking document linked below. The House Appropriations Committee and Senate Finance committee will review these proposals and put together their own versions of the amended state budget for approval on Sunday, February 16th. The full House and Senate are scheduled to adopt their versions of the budget on Thursday, February 20th before budget negotiators will begin crafting a new two-year spending plan to send to the governor.