The first move in the annual game of budget poker at the state Capitol is to collect a few bargaining chips.

In the House, you cut out $2 million that's supposed to go for a new library in Gov. Sonny Perdue's Houston County.

You nick the $2.4 million for a classroom building at Gainesville State College, in the hometown of Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, the presiding officer in the Senate.

For good measure, you drop a couple of projects from Savannah, home of Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) and one or two in the district of Senate Appropriations Chairman Jack Hill (R-Reidsville).

Then, it's the Senate's turn. First, you put all that stuff back in. Then, you up the ante by cutting what's near and dear to House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram), House Majority Leader Jerry Keen (R-St. Simons Island) and House Appropriations Chairman Ben Harbin (R-Evans).

For the 2008 legislative session, the two sides have done all of that.

Now, the House and the Senate are in the proper frame of mind to negotiate the $21.2 billion fiscal 2009 budget, which must be approved before lawmakers leave town this week.

The budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1 is just one of dozens of bills that will come to the House and Senate floor for a vote this week. But it is by far the most important because it affects the lives of most Georgians.

In those negotiations, House and Senate leaders will haggle over education and health care, prison funding and the court system. The slowing economy will turn up the heat, but it won't short-circuit the perennial debate over pet local projects.

To get leverage, the chambers drop and add projects in hopes of ultimately getting what they want. Sometimes they cut out of revenge.

The House, for example, has been warring with the governor for more than a year, so it's not surprising that his proposals would take a hit. Perdue, however, is not the first governor to receive such treatment. Lawmakers have been whacking governors' projects for years to make room for their own.

"It's part of the gamesmanship that I don't really like, but it's there," said Keen, one of the budget negotiators for the House. "It's been here longer than me, and I'm sure it will be here after I'm gone."

Former Senate Appropriations Chairman George Hooks (D-Americus), known as the dean of the Senate because he has served longer than anyone else, said the horse-trading for projects is a generations-old tradition at the Capitol. "The secret is to find those things that they are interested in that are not obvious," Hooks said.

When Hooks ran the Senate budget committee, his then-counterpart in the House, Terry Coleman, was a railroad and small-town airport enthusiast. Coleman would support railroad and airport projects that were important to him even if they were not in his South Georgia district. So, the Senate could use them as a bargaining chip.

The House meanwhile, could always play on Hooks' love of history. He frequently pushed for money to restore the state Capitol. House members knew that and took full advantage of that knowledge when needed.

Many times, late-session budget debates, like the one that's ahead this week, get bogged down in seemingly minor issues. "We got hung up one year on flathead catfish," Hooks recalled.

One side wanted to put money — less than $100,000, according to Hooks — into the budget to get rid of the aggressive catfish because they were eating game fish. Hooks said the project eventually got funded, but, "We got hung up for hours."

The budget cycle began this year in January, when Perdue made his recommendations. When House budget writers got their chance, they surgically removed many projects in the home counties of Perdue and Senate leaders.

In addition to the library, for instance, Perdue's home county lost money for a bomb truck garage. A $7.3 million improvement project was cut at the Georgia National Fairgrounds and Agricenter down the road from Perdue's home. The Georgia Sports and Music halls of fame in Macon, two facilities Perdue traditionally has supported, were slashed.

The House got rid of several college building projects in the districts of Senate leaders. Included was a $4 million renovation project at Georgia Southern University, which is represented by Hill.

When it was their turn, Senate leaders returned most of those projects to the budget, added some new ones and cut House spending.

Among the cuts was

$4 million the House had put in to construct a flight building at Paulding County Regional Airport in memory of three of Richardson's friends who died in a February plane crash. Another one was $500,000 for airport improvements in Glynn County, Keen's home.

Now, the budget is in the hands of negotiators from the two chambers who will work throughout the week so lawmakers can end the 2008 session and start campaigning for re-election.

In the end, those projects, and many more, probably will wind up in the budget when it passes, probably late on Friday, the 40th and final day of the session.

"I tell our guys that every House project is in a Senate district, and every Senate project is in a House district," Keen said. "There is plenty of credit to go around. The reality is voters never know who put it in [the budget].

"Usually," Keen said, "when the budget is done, there is always something that somebody didn't get, but for the most part both chambers get their priorities met."