Hopkins' Legislature Update

HELENA - Things are starting to move on the budget side here at the Legislature and I wanted to share some information with you as we move forward. First, explaining a bit about the process and then including a quick update on where we are at with infrastructure.

The legislature has two budget committees, House Appropriations and Senate Finance and Claims. The first stage of the state budget is these two committees breaking down into six subcommittees. Subcommittees on General Government, Natural Resources and Transportation, Education, Health and Human Services, Corrections (Judicial Branch, Law Enforcement and Justice) and Long Range Planning each take a different portion of HB2 and begin to build the individual budgets.

Each subcommittee (except for long range planning) will begin their meeting with what is called a starting point motion. This is the starting mark for their sections budget that they will then build upon. Building a budget up, instead of cutting a budget down, is just a more effective way of doing things and leads to a better product, so often times the starting point motion of any subcommittee will be the lowest number possible, they will then build the budget up from there.

When you hear media or political organizations talking about cuts to agencies, just remember that we are still early on in the process and they don't know what they are talking about. Subcommittees are just starting their work, so agency budgets will be being built up in the next few weeks.

As you know, I serve on the subcommittee for Long Range Planning where we build the state's infrastructure package for the session. We don't have starting point motions because we do not directly set agency budgets. We administer a set of grant and loan programs and hear project requests for infrastructure across the state. In the next week, my subcommittee will finish its work after having heard more than 400 different applications for projects ranging from elementary school HVAC and sewage systems to regional water projects.

The initial infrastructure package (from the Governor's budget) wants to take all of the cash out of the accounts used for infrastructure and use it for other parts of the budget, using general obligation bonds to pay for the project requests that would usually be funded from those accounts. Republicans feel like we can clear more of the backlog of requests and get more shovels in the ground if we do not transfer those funds and instead use that cash for its intended purpose, funding infrastructure.

In the next couple weeks you will start to see various infrastructure bills making their way through the system. Just remember that last session, we had the infrastructure package go through a total of six different incarnations. So the early versions may very well not be what the final package looks like.

When I campaigned for your vote, I told you that I would work to see a real infrastructure bill passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor. That's exactly what I intend to do.