Ever notice that lovely, gravel-covered, fenced-in parking lot on East Broad Street, between Eighth and Ninth streets, opposite the state library?

For reasons having more to do with politics than policy, most of it has been a vacant eyesore for 15 years. Your tax dollars at work -- not.

Gov. Tim Kaine and the Senate envision a sparkling $194 million building there. House Republicans say it's an indefensible waste at a time of want.

The project is stuck in a House-Senate standoff over the priciest pork: construction projects across the state. At stake is roughly $2 billion in bond-financed bricks and mortar.

Overshadowed by the budget fight -- itself a pig-out -- this unfinished business from the 2008 General Assembly is supposed to be settled by its spring session, April 23.

Gene Trani, president of Virginia Commonwealth University, is watching closely. He wants bonds for the medical and academic campuses, whose growth has remade the cityscape and economy. "Look how downtown Richmond has changed," says Trani.

So far, lawmakers who'll craft a compromise are only talking about talking. That could bury the Broad Street build-out. Legislative inaction costs a ton.

What House R's don't tell you is the bill, so far, for keeping the lot as is, is about $9 million. It could climb by $3 million.

Those figures include the recent demolition of the Eighth Street Office Building, formerly the historic Murphy Hotel, and drafting plans for its replacement.

That would be the $194 million behemoth that has the House and Senate doing what they do best: fight.

The price covers a new Eighth Street tower, which would wrap around a renovated Ninth Street Office Building, nee the Hotel Richmond, once hostelry of choice for legislators.

The longer the property stands fallow, the more expensive it is to develop.

It's guesstimated that for each year the lot is undeveloped, inflation bumps up costs 8 percent. For this venture, that's an extra $15.5 million.

That money gets flushed away on leases because there's a shortage of state-owned space.

Just ask the tax department: It rents space downtown. Now it has a chance to buy the building for $60 million -- bucks it would recover through the billions it collects. But the House is balking.

Buckets of money also go to the upkeep of rundown buildings that might be cheaper to replace. Among them, the Senate says: the General Assembly Building.

Since 2000, nearly $3 million has been spent on repairs.

The building, portions of which date to the early 1900s, was for the birds even before cedar waxwings turned it into a toilet. The Senate proposes $15.9 million to plan a replacement; the House, goose eggs.

This is part of a Senate push -- the House would say conspiracy -- to fill out that infamous lot, using the new edifice for temporary legislative quarters while a successor GAB goes up on the footprint of the previous one.

The debate over construction should be about common-sense investments and protecting them for the future. Instead, it's a reminder that the definition of a Virginia conservative is someone who repairs the roof only when it leaks.
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 649-6814 or jschapiro@timesdispatch.com. He provides news analysis each Friday at 8:33 a.m. on WCVE radio (88.9 FM)