Building the budget up

We are two weeks out from the deadline for General Policy bills in the legislature. These are policy bills that do not have any dollars associated with them. Every committee has been having full hearing schedules trying to work through them all and either pass or fail them before the deadline. This also means that you can count on seeing a substantial increase in the number of bills coming alive this week as legislators try to get their bills through the process in time.

Any bill that deals with money, whether it is appropriating dollars or dealing with tax/fee/surcharge increases do not have to meet this deadline, but a lot of them are still already up and moving. This includes my bill to get property tax relief to Montana seniors living on a fixed income.

That bill (HB340) passed out of House Taxation and is waiting to go to the House Floor for second reading. It may not hit the house floor until after the transmittal deadline, as it is not a general bill and as such does not have a deadline to meet yet. I think it has a pretty good chance of making it all the way through the legislature, and if it does, it will be the first major property tax relief for seniors in about two decades, but it still has a long way to go so we will just have to wait and see.

On the budget side of things, the other subcommittees are finishing up their work this week. After this week, Sections A (General Government), B (Health and Human Services), C (Natural Resources), D (Judiciary/Corrections) and E (Education) will have finished their work and will submit their recommendations to the full House Appropriations Committee, which should begin holding hearings on the State Budget (HB2) right after we come back from transmittal. It could start earlier, but there are some bills from Appropriations that technically count as general bills, so those will have to be handled first so that they can meet the transmittal deadline.

When Appropriations begins to hear HB2, we will split it up just like we do with the subcommittees and hear the budget one section at a time. The important thing to note in the run up to those hearings is that when the individual sections make their way through the hearings, the sections are not in their final form, or the form that they will be in when the budget finally passes. The basic concept is that its easier to build a budget up than it is to cut a budget down, so subcommittees recommendations will start at the low end and will serve as the starting point that we will then build the budget off of as we get updated revenue estimates and get a clearer picture of what we have to work with.

As always, if you have any questions, you can always reach me by call/text at (406) 531-1775.