JEFFERSON CITY — After watching the Senate reject some of its funding initiatives during the spring legislative session, the House is launching its budget-writing task for next year more than a month earlier than usual.
Beginning Dec. 5, an appropriations subcommittee will launch the first hearing on agriculture, conservation, natural resources and economic development spending for the fiscal year beginning next July.
Typically, those types of budget talks don’t get underway until lawmakers begin their annual session in January. And, it comes before Gov. Mike Parson has laid out his funding priorities in his State of the State speech held in mid-January.
The early start is designed to help the House finalize its version of the spending blueprint earlier next year in order to allow time for more fruitful negotiations with their counterparts in the Senate.
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“We’ll be starting early simply to allow ourselves more time with the process,†said House Budget Committee Chairman Cody Smith, R-Carthage.
The move could be helpful at a time when the state is expected to be far less flush than the current fiscal year’s budget.
Parson’s budget office said last week that net general revenue collections for October declined by .7%, with much of that due to a 9.2% decrease in individual income tax revenue from the same period last year.
Johnathan Shiflett, a spokesman for the governor, said he favors an early start, even though lawmakers will be discussing budget plans without the governor’s input.
“Governor Parson appreciates legislators taking a proactive approach to reviewing departments’ budget requests this year,†Shiflett said.
And, the early launch could counteract delays that might occur because 2024 is an election year, with a number of members in each chamber running for higher office.
Smith, himself, is running for state treasurer.
House Speaker Dean Plocher, R-Des Peres, is running for lieutenant governor.
The ranking Democrat on the House budget panel says Plocher’s decision to launch talks early is unlikely to alter the dynamic between the two GOP-controlled chambers.
“I think it’s another harebrained idea for him to try and change how budget is done,†Merideth said. “But it’s clear he’s never served on the budget committee.â€
The budget was a point of conflict between the two chambers this spring.
The House took longer than usual to finish its work on the plan, leaving the Senate facing tight deadlines to navigate a record-setting $50 billion spending plan through the upper chamber.
When the Senate Appropriations Committee did start moving on the plan, they said “no†to a number of House proposals.
On higher education, for example, the House plan did away with Parson’s request for a 7% increase for the state’s public universities, worth $59 million. Smith wanted to base increases on performance measures, which had not yet been developed.
Opponents argued that a failure to provide additional money to the universities while officials wait on the study could result in tuition increases to accommodate inflationary increases.
The Senate agreed and restored Parson’s request.
Smith’s budget plan also aimed to cut all $4.5 million in state funding that local public libraries were slated to get next fiscal year, after libraries sued to overturn a new Missouri law that bans sexually explicit material in school libraries. He said the state shouldn’t subsidize the lawsuit with funding.
But the Senate restored the money, saying libraries serve a variety of important purposes in communities and shouldn’t become victims of a political culture war.
The Senate also ignored a less-ambitious House plan for widening Interstate 70, more than doubling the funding being made available for the landmark project.
The Senate also rejected Republican language in the House blueprint that would have prohibited the state from spending tax dollars on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The rejection came after Sen. Lincoln Hough, a Springfield Republican who leads the Senate budget panel, said the language could derail major state contracts and affect state efforts to recruit a diverse workforce at a time when the state is struggling to fill front-line positions.