Now comes the heavy lifting.
Legislators brought the ridiculously overextended 17-day special session to an end Tuesday with a 2016-17 state budget that patches things together (barely) for a year, but does little to address long-term structural problems with the state budget.
Even with passage of the tobacco tax increase, the 2017-18 budget is on pace to have a larger budget shortfall than the $270 million funding gap that legislators struggled for the better part of the past three months to close.
After being unable to find much in the way of budget cuts in the 2016-17 budget - less than 1 percent of the general revenue budget beyond the $86 million in cuts Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin built into the base budget - legislators will need to spend the off-season looking at systemic changes in the way the state operates to reduce costs.
Which gets us back to the folly of the severely shortened legislative interim meetings.
Used to be, there were eight sessions of three-day interims meetings during the year (generally skipping the month after the regular session ended and one month in the summer).
This year, after about four hours of interim meetings last week, the Legislature has scheduled four day-and-a-half interim sessions from now through the 2017 regular session, in August, September, December and January.
In other words, instead of 24 days of meetings in the off-season, the Legislature will have a total of six days to study issues facing the state. As we saw with last year's truncated interims, topics of study either never made it on a committee agenda, or got the short-shrift of perhaps a single hour of review with no follow-up.
This year, one of the topics of study is to be a thorough vetting of state spending by the Joint Committee on Finance, which was to begin last week with an overview of the state's Six-Year Financial Plan. That meeting, however, was canceled because of the ongoing special session.
Assuming that's rescheduled in August, the current schedule leaves Joint Finance with all of three hours to analyze the structure of state government and come up with recommendations for systemic cuts. (Hope members aren't late to any meetings.)
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As noted, real savings would come from making systemic changes. One question worth addressing: Can a state with shrinking population and revenues afford to operate 55 separate county governments and Boards of Education?
For a start, here's a modest proposal: Consolidate administration of the struggling counties of Boone, Logan, Wyoming, Mingo and McDowell into, let's call it, the Coalfields Consolidated Governing Board.
It could operate under a seven-member Board of Supervisors, with one member elected from each county, and two members elected at large, with a similar consolidated board administering public schools for the five counties.
Besides the savings by eliminating duplication of county officers and staffs, consolidation could eliminate the last vestiges of political machines in those counties by limiting potential for patronage jobs and contracts. Just a thought.
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Of all the low-hanging fruit of state spending cuts, elimination of state subsidies for greyhound racing seemed to be practically touching the ground, and yet in both the regular and special sessions, legislators could not bring themselves to pull the plug. (Greyhound lobbyists were effective in claiming 1,500 jobs would be lost - about 900 more than the Spectrum Gaming study gauged state employment linked to greyhound racing - as well as claiming that 3,000 greyhounds would have to be put down if racing ended.)
Instead, the House of Delegates took the ham-fisted approach in the regular session of just eliminating the state subsidies, and in the budget bill passed Tuesday, the Legislature removed $4 million of greyhound subsidies.
Never mind that it's probably not legal to zero out the $14.1 million Licensed Racing Regular Purse Fund account and create - without benefit of companion legislation - a new Licensed Regular Thoroughbred Regular Purse Fund line item, with $10.1 million to go for horse racing purses only.
If the intent was to commit a death of thousand cuts by cutting subsidies of greyhound purses to the point where it's no longer viable to race, that dog just won't hunt.
Bottom line is that without decoupling of greyhound racing, the racetrack casinos at Nitro and Wheeling are still obligated to put on dog racing of some sort as a condition of maintaining their racetrack video lottery and table games licenses, state subsidy or no.
Unless the intent is to embarrass Tomblin by forcing him to line-item veto the cut, in order to revisit issues about his family's ties to greyhound breeding, the $4 million reduction was a knee-jerk attempt to make it look like the Legislature is cutting spending.
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Finally, I've heard from numerous folks from both houses and both parties who thought the Gazette-Mail's "Countdown to shutdown" box was particularly effective in finally hastening a compromise on the 92-day budget impasse, particularly as days left to shutdown and total days in special session (at $35,000 a day) came closer to matching.
Still to be determined is the level of voter backlash over the extended special session, particularly for Senate President Bill Cole, R-Mercer. (Conspiracy theorists, including some in the Cole camp, contend that House Dems conspired to vote en masse against the first tobacco tax bill May 24 in order to extend the session, embarrass legislative leadership and hurt Cole's gubernatorial campaign. However, last I checked, Republicans have a near-supermajority in the House.)
One lobbyist I talked to surmised that every day in session cost Cole 1 percent of the vote in the governor's race. That remains to be seen.
However, the fact that the Cole campaign has replaced Chuck Flannery with Brian Reed as campaign manager, and Abby Sobonya with Rachael Wilson as finance director, suggests that all is not well. (Reed and Wilson are former staffers for Kentucky senator and former presidential candidate Rand Paul.)
Reach Phil Kabler at philk@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1220, or follow @PhilKabler on Twitter.