By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — The General Assembly’s slow pace in moving legislation this session has forced unpleasant choices on both itself and Gov. Donald Carcieri.

The legislature had hoped to wrap up its 2009 session on Friday night, or early Saturday morning, but now, at least the Senate is resigned to return for more debating and votes next week. House leaders would not say whether they planned to complete business Friday or Saturday, or would come back next week.
But at 11:15 p.m. the House still had more than 100 items left on its calendar, and that does not count additional bills still to come over from the Senate.
During the late hours of debate in the House, leaders decided to move several items to “Monday’s calendar.” The Senate had wrapped up business at about 9:30 p.m. Friday and had gone home for the night.
Gov. Donald Carcieri, on the other hand, now must put his imprimatur on the $7.7 billion state budget passed Friday by the Senate, or veto it and keep the legislators around even longer for the almost certain override.
After an unexplained one-day delay, the Senate voted 34-2 to pass the budget as it had come over from the House of Representatives.
Reports that the Senate planned to add provisions to the budget regarding dog racing at Twin River (see below) proved to be unfounded.
Senate Majority Leader Daniel Connors of Cumberland summed up the budget by saying: “It’s fair. It’s what we could do.”
“This is certainly not a budget we are all that happy with,” Connors said. “There is not money  for cities and towns and tax breaks for everyone … because we have to live in reality. The economic conditions we are in have deteriorated and continue to deteriorate. I’m not quite sure we’ve seen the bottom yet.”
But, he said, budgeters realized that “we could not balance this budget on the backs on any one group of people.”
Most years, the governor has the third option of allowing the budget bill to become law without his signature. This year, however, is different because the pension changes in the bill must become law by the end of June for the changes to be effective in the 2009 budget year, which ends on Tuesday. It would take a week — according to the state constitution, six days excluding Sundays — for the measure to become law without his signature. That means it would become law in July, and tens of millions of dollars in 2009 pension savings would be lost. Carcieri spokeswoman Amy Kempe said the governor “does not anticipate making a decision” on vetoing the budget bill on Friday.

In other business in the chaotic Friday session of the assembly:

TWIN RIVER
The House passed, by a veto-proof margin, a Senate bill to allow Lincoln's Twin River casino to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The same legislation requires the facility to hold greyhound races on 200 days each year, including this year.
Current law requires 125 days of dog racing, but for the past several years there have been about 200 racing dates a year. Twin River announced earlier that it would suspend dog racing after 125 days this year, which falls on August 8.
In it's bankruptcy petition announced earlier this week, Twin River sought to seek dog racing altogether  and the governor's office agreed to assist in that effort.
Almost immediately after the vote, Kempe issued a press release saying the governor would veto this bill.
“He believes we need to be getting rid of the dogs” at Twin River, Kempe said. “He can not support this legislation.”
While the General Assembly has enough votes to override such a veto, it was not clear Friday night whether lawmakers would return to take that action.
Legislative sources have said the assembly will return sometime in the summer or fall, but it is not known whether they would do that in time to extend the current year's racing season beyond Aug. 8.

E-VERIFY
Legislation by two Woonsocket lawmakers, Rep. Jon Brien and Sen. Marc Cote, that would require Rhode Island employers to use a federal government program called E-Verify to determine the employment eligibility of newly hired employees died for the third year in the Senate after passing in the House.
Cote told The Times Friday that Senate leaders once again thought the bill was legally flawed even though “we feel confident the bill is sound, but we’re not going to be sure until after the end of the session.”
Cote said he plans to introduce a resolution seeking an advisory opinion from the RI Supreme Court on whether the measure meets legal muster. He had not done that by the time the Senate adjourned for the night on Friday.
Senate Majority Leader Connors said federal law prohibits a state from applying criminal penalties on employers in relation to the E-Verify program. The law Brien and Cote proposed requires employers to document to the Department of Labor and Training that they use the E-Verify system and if that is found not to be true, would prosecute them for filing a false document.
Asked about the fate of his bill on Friday, Brien said sardonically, “I think E-Verify is in the netherworld with Michael Jackson.”

PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS
It appears, but is not yet certain, that Rhode Island voters will be asked in a 2010 referendum whether they want to change the name of the state.
Minorities in particular take umbrage at the Ocean State's official name: The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. They say the word plantations is burdened with overtones of slavery in the antebellum South.
“Healing is still needed after hundreds of years of denial of Rhode Island's participation in the Triangle Trade” of slavery in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Metts said, arguing that lynchings, whippings and other degradations of black Americans in Rhode Island continued into the early years of the 20th century.
The Senate and House each passed identical but different bills, a House measure by Providence Rep. Joseph Almeida passed the House 70-3 on Thursday and a Senate bill by Metts passed the Senate 32-3 on Friday. But neither bill had passed in both chambers by press time.

CENTRAL FALLS SCHOOL IMPROVEMENTS
Likewise, the House and Senate each passed identical but separate bills to allow Central Falls to borrow up to $5 million dollars for emergency repairs to school buildings without going to a public referendum. Neither bill had passed both chambers, however.

'EVIL EMPIRE' LICENES PLATES
New York Yankees fans may be allowed to show their pinstripe pride with license plates displaying the New York Yankees logo.
The sponsor, Rep. Charlene Lima, an avowed Yankee fan in a chamber filled with Red Sox faithful, eased the pain of passing the bill by amending it to direct $10 of the $40 cost of the plate to the Hasbro Children’s Hospital Cancer Research Fund rather than a to the New York Yankees Universe Fund, as the bill previously contemplated.
The plates will not be issued until there is a minimum prepaid order for 900 of them.