The Joint Budget Committee advanced a $104 million mid-year school finance reduction and dozens of routine supplemental items, but deadlocked on whether to ratify the governor's $9.5 million executive order cut to higher education institutions — deferring that vote to Monday pending legal research on whether the governor has authority to restrict funds already under contract.
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Senator Kirkmeyer argued the committee should not ratify the governor's $9.5 million executive order cut and specifically wanted to know whether the governor has legal authority to restrict funds 'when the funds are under contract' and already encumbered, noting 'How many times have we sat here and listened to this administration tell us, oh, the funds are encumbered, so you can't cut that.' Vice Chair Bridges countered that institutions said they could absorb the cuts, that 'this is not the place that I would dip into reserves to make up the difference,' and that the governor's office indicated it would respect different committee decisions. Representative Brown argued pragmatically that rejecting the cuts would not restore the money 'because the governor has the ability to withhold it, regardless of what we do.'
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“I'll do both. I still have a question. No, that's okay. It's not really a question. I guess I would just say this isn't the statutory change that I would to see. So I don't want us to do that now because I think we need a different statutory change. So having said that, I move S2csi mil levy equalization staff recommendation but not the statutory change. Okay. Any objection? I vote yes. That passes on a vote of 5 to 0 with Taggart excused. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we are on to Mr. Kem and the Department of Higher Ed. It. Mr. Kim. Thank you, Madam Chair. Alfredo Kim JBC staff presenting department of Higher Education supplemental budget requests primarily for fiscal year 252611331 approved by the committee for”
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Sign in to subscribeThe Joint Budget Committee will come to order. We are continuing consideration of supplemental requests today for the Department of education. We have. Ms. Ewell. Thank you. Andrea Yule, JBC staff this is supplemental requests for school finance, or what we commonly refer to as the mid year adjustment for school finance. So I just have a couple things related to that today for you. As you can see in the Overview on table two, there's a big $104 million reduction and that is the adjustment for this year. And so I'll just get right into that, which is the big one on page four. So every year at this time is when we have received real data about what what needs to go into the total program calculation for each district. So this recommendation is to adjust the FY2526 current year appropriation to reflect that at the time we set the appropriation last year. The only thing that is ever known for sure at that time is the inflation rate that you use to adjust the base per pupil funding. Everything else related to the pupil counts, the local share at risk counts. That all is data that gets…
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