And We’re Back!  Last week was a quiet week at the Legislature as the budget committees finished their work prior to the break for the religious holidays and most of the major budget bills made their trek through either the House Ways and Means Committee or the Senate Finance Committee by the end of last week.  The House omnibus bill cleared the House Ways and Means Committee last Thursday and will be heading to the House floor at some point this week.  The Senate omnibus bill cleared the Senate Tax Committee last Thursday and is scheduled to be heard in the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday, April 19.

The Legislature took a big leap forward this past week as the omnibus bills across all funding were assembled in both the House and Senate. Some of those bills—most notably the omnibus Education Finance and Policy bills—will make the trek to the Tax Committee early this week for that panel to assess changes in levies in each bill and how levies have been shuffled around to maintain a zero-levy target. In a bygone era, the omnibus Education Funding and Policy bills could contain levy increases that would be bought down by the Tax Committee. In recent years, leadership has insisted that the education funding bills come to the Tax Committee with no overall levy increases. There are levy increases in the omnibus education funding bills this year to ensure menstrual product availability and extend Long Term Facilities Maintenance Revenue to cooperative facilities to name two instances—and those increases have been brought back to net zero by increases in the second-tier Local Option Revenue and Total Operating Capital equalizing factors.

The Governor’s proposal for the district revenue runs.

It was a bit of an anticlimactic week in the discussion of education funding and policy last week at the Legislature.  There was a bit of a rush getting the last fleet of bills onto the legislative sea in hopes of them reaching port in the omnibus funding and policy bills being assembled.  With the deadline for the omnibus bills to be in the House Ways and Means Committee or the Senate Finance Committee by Tuesday, April 4, it is expected that the content of all of the omnibus funding bills will be posted by today (March 27) on the corresponding committee webpages.  That means that the committees spent much of the past weekend putting together their omnibus bills.

We’re at the point in the 2023 Legislative Session where big things will be happening. With the first policy bill deadline behind us and the second approaching this week, there’s a mad rush to hear as many bills as possible and keep them alive in the discussion. On top of that, the funding bill deadline falls a mere ten days later (April 4) at which point all of the finance bills will have to be out of their committees. That makes it likely that the Senate and House majorities will be setting their budget targets later this week and those targets will provide the parameters for what will be contained in the appropriations bills.