By Paige Winfield Cunningham

Tis the season for filling hundreds of vacated seats on Virginia’s 347 boards and commissions.

This month, Gov. Bob McDonnell appointed or reappointed 113 Virginians to groups like the Milk Commission and the Board of Towing and Recovery Operators after many of the appointments expired on June 30.

But some of those boards may not be around next year, if the governor’s reform commission finds some to be redundant or unnecessary. McDonnell offers an example: multiple boards that deal with potatoes, including the State Seed Potato Board and the Virginia Irish Potato Board.

“There are three boards of potatoes,” McDonnell said on Tuesday. “It’s an important product in Virginia, but maybe they can be combined.”

A project of the 35-member commission, says McDonnell, is to find out whether it makes sense to do away with any of the boards that deal with everything from aviation to eggs.

“We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of boards and commissions, we have 167 state agencies and part of what I’m looking at is which are updated and which don’t get the bang for the buck anymore,” McDonnell said.

Some of the boards are regularly part of daily news headlines—like the Beverage Control Board or the Commonwealth Transportation Board. Others, like the Plant Pollination Advisory Board or the Virginia Peanut Board, many have never heard of.

Of the estimated 4,000 positions McDonnell will fill over the course of his term, most don’t come with a salary—although members are compensated for their travel. But the sheer volume of applications requires three staff members in the Secretary of the Commonwealth to spend all their time on reviewing applications and making recommendations to the governor.

And once recommendations reach his desk, McDonnell says he personally reviews each one before signing off.

“There’s not a lot of money there, but every one of those boards and commissions take staff work for the administration,” McDonnell said. “It takes money for people traveling.”

McDonnell said he’s filled about 40 percent of the open positions so far, and expects to announce the rest next month. Of the 32 most recent appointments, only 10 have donated to McDonnell’s gubernatorial or attorney general races, according to data provided by the Virginia Public Access Project.

In the six months since McDonnell took office, the secretary has received 2,500 applications for about 1,000 available slots, said Director of Appointments Jenni Aulgur.

Most competitive are seats on the boards that preside over universities, called boards of visitors, and have authority to approve budgets, policies and long-term planning.

“It varies by board,” Aulgur said. “Obviously boards of visitors are really competitive…anything that is a policy-making board is very competitive.”