Legislature reaches first adjournment with work half-finished on unbalanced budget
by Andy Marso, KHI News Service
Lawmakers negotiating a fiscal year 2016 budget agreed on a framework before leaving town last week for a month-long break.
But it’s a shaky one.
It rests on a Senate-passed budget bill that tracks closely with the spending blueprint that Gov. Sam Brownback outlined at the beginning of the session. But it’s not balanced because neither the House nor Senate has yet given serious consideration to the tax increases needed to fund it.
That leaves lawmakers with a lot of work left to do when they return to Topeka on April 29 for what is supposed to be a brief wrap-up session.
Unusual process
Traditionally the House and Senate separately debate and pass their own versions of the budget, then hammer out the differences in a conference committee made up of three House negotiators and three Senate negotiators.
That hasn’t happened so far this year.
The Senate stripped the contents from an unrelated House bill and replaced them with its budget. That unusual maneuver allowed leaders to appoint a conference committee to begin negotiating a final version of the budget even though the House had not debated and passed a budget bill of its own.
While that move is perhaps not unprecedented, veteran lawmakers said the House going into conference negotiations on the budget without passing its own bill was a significant departure from the rules that normally govern the budgeting process.
“That’s very unusual,” said Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, the Legislature’s longest-serving member. “Because they don’t have a position to conference on.”
Rep. Jim Ward, a Democrat from Wichita, said he thought the House’s Republican leadership avoided a floor debate on the budget because of his intention to propose an amendment expanding Medicaid under the federal Affordable Care Act.
A spokeswoman for House Speaker Ray Merrick told the Wichita Eagle that’s not the case, and that the House merely preferred to wait for the state’s revenue estimating experts to meet April 20 and update their projections for the upcoming fiscal year’s tax collections.
But Ward stuck by his assessment last week, pointing out that in addition to negotiating on the Senate’s version of the budget, the House had concurred with the Senate on a number of other bills. The House avoided general orders — when it convenes as a chamber for the purpose of debating and offering amendments on bills — throughout last week.
“It’s a terrible way to run a government — afraid all the time,” Ward said.
Merrick’s spokeswoman did not respond to an email asking for an explanation of why leaders had avoided scheduling bills for debate on the House floor.
Republicans dominate the House and Senate, but the House Republican caucus is more fractured and its floor votes less predictable.
The House’s moderate Republican faction breaks with House leadership and the Senate Republicans on some issues. Rep. Stephanie Clayton, a moderate Republican from Overland Park, used her Twitter feed to express frustration with the number of times the House was concurring with Senate bills.
“This is a bicameral legislature, quit shutting the House out of debate,” Clayton posted.
Out of balance
Hensley said the absence of an open floor debate in the House wasn’t the only odd item about the budget framework heading into the veto session.
“This is a budget also that’s not funded,” Hensley said.
The Senate’s proposal closes most of a projected $600 million hole through a number of budget cuts and one-time fund transfers. But it still comes up about $130 million in the red unless the Legislature approves new taxes during the veto session.
An upward trend in revenue when the April numbers come out could lower that figure. But if revenues go the other direction, legislators will need to approve even more new taxes or initiate another round of deep budget cuts.
Brownback has proposed increasing taxes on tobacco and alcohol products to avoid further cuts. But lawmakers have yet to consider the tax-increase proposals and Brownback isn’t pushing them to do so. Instead, he seems to be doing the opposite. At a Statehouse news conference last week, the governor acknowledged that he was reluctant to push his own proposals.
“Somebody was complaining that well, we don’t seem to be pushing the taxes. Well, I’m not excited about that,” Brownback said. “But what happens in this process is you get your budget set and then figure out OK, what can we do, trying to stay as pro-growth oriented as we can, to try to have the revenues we need to meet the budget the Legislature wants?”
Rep. Ron Ryckman Jr., a Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, is among the key lawmakers who say that the governor hasn’t lobbied them on the tax proposals.
Lawmakers understand that tax increases are “part of the governor’s proposal,” Ryckman said. Additional spending cuts are “always a possibility,” Ryckman said, if lawmakers reject the governor’s proposed tax increases.
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