Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

Without question, the 46-day legislative session was dominated by a budget debate colored by the worst downturn in state revenues in a half-century. In the past year alone, a sizeable $6 billion has been trimmed from the state's $52 billion, two-year spending plan. That's no small amount of money to whack away.

Several weeks ago, we peeled back Gov. Mark Warner's proposed budget onion in an effort to see what parts of it, if any, would make us cry. Now that his proposal has been reworked by the General Assembly - the budget is the legislature's responsibility - let's look at it again to see how it all turned out.

Before the session began, both Warner, a Democrat, and the Republican-dominated legislature made public education a priority. Specifically, everyone vowed to spare K-12 spending from any cuts.

While Warner initially shifted money from a school construction fund to put into other educational initiatives - that's right, he took money from schools in order to give more to schools - the General Assembly balked at that. School construction, legislators reasoned, is too important to short shrift. So the final budget agreement restores $10 million in school-building funds that'll leverage about $100 million more. Schools all across the state will benefit.

Overall, the budget passed on the Assembly's last day has more money in it for public education - for everything from operations to student testing to technology, construction and renovation - than Warner's original proposal.

And when it comes to our colleges and universities, well, the best was made out of a bad situation. Over the last handful of months, more than $300 million has been cut from higher education, representing about 40 percent of all cuts to state agencies.

The budget now authorizes 5 percent tuition increases to in-state undergraduates as well as additional increases to help pay for faculty and staff salary bumps. Out-of-state students will continue to pay even more. No, nobody likes tuition hikes - but the alternative is eliminating academic departments and degree programs and laying off professors. On the upside, however, budget-writers added an additional $4.5 million to financial aid for the 50,000 students who currently get state tuition help. The notion is that it'll all wash out in the end.

There's also some $60 million in the budget for a 2.25 percent salary increase for state workers and public school teachers. Well, sort of. It's this amount of money that has been set aside once the economy rebounds and tax revenues pick up. Let's hope it all pans out, for state employees have gone a couple years without any pay increase at all.

There isn't much more money, however, for transportation. One major initiative to induce about $1 billion in road-building bonds was defeated in the Senate after it passed the House of Delegates. So the battle for more transportation dollars will continue another year.

In what was perhaps the Republican legislature's biggest political victory, delegates and senators restored more than $17 million to reopen the 12 DMV offices that Warner closed last fall in a cost-cutting effort. The shuttered offices - the vast majority of which were coincidentally in Republican legislators' districts - had become symbolic for virtually everything contentious between the governor and his Assembly critics.

While Democrats generally claimed that some GOP legislators' near-daily vitriol over the DMV closures was much ado about nothing, Republicans indeed found themselves on the side of every incensed Virginian trying to figure out where to go for a driver's license renewal.

Oh, to be sure, not everything - by a long shot - in the final budget smells rosy. It's still overly dependent on fixes that won't be available next year. Nearly half of Warner's budget proposal contained "savings" - more than $900 million in all - that are from one-time sources. That means this time next year, all things being equal, we'll still be at least a billion dollars short of revenue projections.

This budget has no general tax hikes - would you expect otherwise in an election year? - but there are scores of millions of dollars in fee increases. Booze at your local ABC store will cost you 5 percent more, and a five-year driver's license will cost you another five bucks. And if you get caught speeding, well, expect to pay more in court costs.

No, nobody is completely happy about this budget. The governor isn't; the legislature isn't.

The budget now sits on Warner's desk. He'll have yet one more opportunity to make changes to it, and the General Assembly will approve or reject those changes when it returns to Richmond for a one-day session in early April.

Yep, as it's been said before, budgets are political documents. They are, after all, put together by politicians who build into them certain political priorities. That's a fact, and there's no getting around it.

At the same time, though, state budget-writers, both governors and legislators, do take seriously their responsibility to provide billions of dollars in services in the most efficient way possible.

In this year's budget, Warner and the General Assembly generally have agreed more than they've disagreed. There have been millions of dollars worth of government streamlining, a good deal of which can rightly be credited to Warner's initiatives.

In years to come, however, much will have to be done to capitalize on today's cuts and savings. If we continue to rely on quick fixes, then we'll continue to have a pretty rotten budget onion.