Supplemental bills today February 16 2011

Today we worked the supplemental bills from the JBC. Now, if you are confused about my first sentence, I understand, I was as well. There are two parts of that sentence I wouldn't understand if I was not at the Capitol every day. So to address this backwards, I will start with JBC. This stands for the Joint Budget Committee. They are charged with making sure that we have a budget to vote on and they have to make sure that budget is balanced. That is the easy part. The hard part is what they have to do first. This is where the supplemental bills come into play. The JBC has to balance the current budget that was voted on last year. You may ask why, and you would be right to do so. This is because the projected revenues did not come in as high as expected and or the spending was set too high and the revenue could not match what they wished would come in. The supplemental bills are bills which take that into consideration and re-balance the budget. These to me are harder because we are telling agencies that they have a certain amount of money to make it through the year, and then we have to tell them a couple months into the year that, OOPS we were wrong you have less. I think it would have been easier to use the lower number to begin with and let everyone be angry, but, they could budget for a year not two months and they would know what they could or could not do with their funds. Now we have to go back and have them all re-adjust their entire systems.

We had a few of the bills that were a bit contentious. We were able to work out most of them. In the end we put a provision on the committee of the Whole that allowed for excess funds to be sent to k-12 education. We now have to see if the Senate will ratify them.