"Attorney General Bob McDonnell called 2008 “a tough year” for the General Assembly, and said Thursday that lawmakers did “an overall good job” passing a budget in a challenging economic period as well as in crafting significant reform of the state’s mental health system.

He told the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce that good news includes top rankings for the state, as Forbes magazine and CNBC have rated Virginia the most business-friendly state in the nation with “all those good things that make people want to come here and do business.”

The harder news is that once they arrive in Virginia, they find traffic congestion clogging Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, which he said are the state’s primary economic engines and face “challenges in building transportation projects … in tough times.”

He said he is optimistic the legislators will return next month to deal with flagging transportation revenues.

“The transportation challenge is one that is partially fixed,” but a $600 million hole in funding for those two regions must be closed after a Virginia Supreme Court ruling last month voided the regional taxing authority funding mechanisms.

“This year was a tough year,” McDonnell told 200 business and community leaders attending the chamber’s 2008 Commonwealth Breakfast at Glenmore Country Club.

“It was the second time in all of Virginia history that you had a partisan split between the House and the Senate,” said the former Virginia Beach Republican delegate, who was elected attorney general in a razor-tight election in 2005.

“I like to see this good bipartisan breakfast that we’re having this morning, but you had a Republican House and a Democrat Senate,” he said.

From 1997 to 1999, “you had just the opposite. In every other year you’ve had one party running the show,” McDonnell said. “That doesn’t mean everybody’s going to get along, as the Republicans have proved the last two years, but it does mean that there are some big challenges to governing.”

The unfinished business of the legislature includes eliminating unnecessary regulations and fighting Internet crime in future years, and solving remaining transportation funding challenges more immediately, he said.

McDonnell said in an interview that he knows of groups of lawmakers “that are working on it and trying to work on some things in a bipartisan way.”

“Obviously it was a challenge last year with Republicans in control of both houses, and I helped at least bring people to the table,” he said. “I think the challenges are greater when you have a partisan split.”

“I do think that there’s an understanding that to continue to bolster our free enterprise system that you’ve got to provide Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia the infrastructure that’s needed to allow them to continue to grow,” he said. “I think there’s broad agreement on that. … There’s a lot of work to do to in order to find out which plan can get votes.”" (Bob Gibson, The Daily Progress, March 21, 2008)