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Joint Budget Committee

Wednesday, March 11, 2026·▶ Watch / Listen

The Joint Budget Committee spent an evening upon adjournment clearing drafting permissions, introducing three long-bill measures 6-0, and grinding through a contentious Higher Education figure-setting where a tuition cap and a billion-dollar gap dominated. The sharpest splits came on a community-corrections subsistence footnote and a handful of higher-ed line items.

Key Actions

·Mental health transitional living homes fixAction

+ 8 more actions

Notable Quotes

This greatly worries me that we are going to fundamentally start shutting down higher education institutions because they won't be able to afford a 3% increase on tuition to keep up with their costs.

Barbara KirkmeyerKirkmeyer's central objection to the tuition cap — that limiting increases while state funding stays flat could threaten institutions' viability.

+ 6 more quotes

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TranscriptPreview
All right, The Joint Budget Committee will come to order. We have a few things on our agenda today. I think we're going to go in reverse order at least to start. So you can turn to Tab 3. And we are going to start on consideration of potential legislation. Packet number four, Ms. Pope. Thank you, Madam Chair. Emily Pope, JBC staff I'm here to request permission to start drafting a bill around the issue that we talked about with mental health transitional living homes in the state hospitals where Medicaid revenue that's going to DHS is counting multiple times. At the time of my presentation, we had not identified an option that I think everyone felt comfortable with. But I've been working with Mr. Lively and we think we have a path forward and we feel like the best way to go about that is to bring a bill draft for you to look at. But we do think it will be very narrow and very simple and basically state that funds expended by HICPUF and received by cdhs, regardless of whether funds passed through a raise, should not be included in state fiscal year funding. We just
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