More specifically, they found themselves grappling with the difference — amounting to tens of millions of dollars — between the appropriations listed in the House version of the bill and the Senate’s.

More than $70 million separates the two versions of the budget bill, according to Monday’s updated fiscal profile – known colloquially as “the goldenrod” due to the color of the paper it’s printed on. According to those numbers, $22.8 million of that difference exists in the School Foundation Program, a little over a million dollars of difference lies in the School Capital Construction Account, and the vast proportion of the difference — nearly $52.5 million — is tied to differences in General Fund spending.

The Joint Appropriations Committee met on Friday afternoon to begin early discussions on the budget bills, and on Monday, the House Appropriations Committee convened again to learn where they were in the process, hearing a recap of the bills coming over from the Senate side.

Sometime this week, said Senate President Drew Perkins, both he and Speaker of the House Steve Harshman will name their appointments to the budget conference committee, likely from the Joint Appropriations Committee. There, the differences between the two bills will be identified and reconciliations between the two bills will begin.

It was unclear Monday afternoon when the committee would convene.

This year’s process, Perkins hinted in an interview Friday morning, could be complicated, particularly looking at several new proposals from the lower chamber that have led to a spending bill significantly larger than a version initially produced by the Joint Appropriations Committee over the past several weeks. Many of the House’s spending proposals – and cuts – were in different areas than in the Senate’s version of the bill, and where each side is willing to reduce or increase spending was still unclear as of Monday afternoon.

“Those are pretty big differences, and the money that’s allocated are in different areas, so it’ll be interesting to see how we’ll rectify that and how you conference that out,” Perkins said Friday. “If you have a new program you’re funding, and you cut that funding in half, what’s the point of having that program? So it’ll be interesting how we’ll get that. But that’s what we do, we work things out.”

“And if we don’t get a budget, we might be back for a special session,” he added, noting that some unresolved funding concerns from last year’s budget – including second-half funding for the Department of Health and the Department of Human Services – still need to find a resolution this year. “If we get bogged down on all these extraneous things … it’s almost half of our general fund budget we have to resolve, because they need money to operate after July 1.”

Differences and similarities

As discussions move forward to begin reconciling those bills, the committee will find itself bridging two differing philosophies in how each side crafted its legislation.

“The Senate side is trying to fix that structural deficit through revenue generation and reduction of expenditures – putting [new revenues] in the general fund and expending those as education needs,” said JAC member Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander. “The House, I think, has come across with a different color set of shoes, generating what revenues we can and through reduction of taxes and maybe, dedicating some of those revenue sources specifically to education to where we don’t have the general fund and education budget competing for those same funds.”

In the House, Harshman approached the coming negotiations with a different attitude than Perkins, highlighting that a significant share of the difference was created by the Senate’s $4.25 million cut to the Department of Revenue, where the House actually increased funding to the Department by $15 million for an upgrade to the state’s tax systems to match a corporate tax proposal by Rep. Jerry Obermueller, R-Casper.

“The Department of Revenue has got [an excise tax system] that probably two people on the planet know really well,” he said. “I always say they shouldn’t be traveling in a car together. It’s the same system we’ve had for decades, so as these folks are getting ready to retire, with that institutional knowledge, I think it’s important we get a couple guys ready to roll behind them. So we need to build a bench, but we also need to look at upgrades.”

While numerous bills contribute to the differences between the two chambers, some have more impact than others. An external cost adjustment for the state’s K-12 education system passed by the Senate as part of the budget – but not mirrored on the House side – also contributed to the gap. While the Senate reduced the amount recommended by the appropriations committee, the House increased it, lending to a nearly $23 million difference in appropriations from the School Foundation Account between the House and Senate.

However, this year’s process has also been simpler than in the past, Harshman said, with the House running as few budget amendments – 84, compared to 69 on the Senate side – as he’s ever seen.

“We’ve had years where we’ve run 110 amendments on one reading,” said Harshman.

Though this has made discussions simpler, the budget picture will continue to take shape as bills pass or fail while being considered on the House and Senate side. All eyes, then, will be on the revenue bills, like Obermueller’s corporate tax, a lodging tax, and a $1 dollar increase on packs of cigarettes, among others.

“[The revenue side] are our companions in this discussion, because we can’t spend if we don’t receive,” said Larsen. The revenue committee and those guys working on revenue ideas in Wyoming really have a difficult challenge. It looks like we have a good chance of the lodging tax passing, but this is the second year. People look at it and think it’s such an easy thing to do and wonder why it takes two years to do. Well, it’s because Wyoming has kind of said, ‘we don’t like taxes.’ But it seems like the message we’ve finally been able to get out there is that we have hooked our revenue sled to the extracting industries, so all these wonderful programs we receive from state government – our schools, everything we’re dealing with – is because of our strong mineral industry.”

“But over the past few years, minerals has struggled,” he added. “How many of these sleds can we afford to hook up? Maybe we need to unhook a couple and spread that burden of funding general government to some other horses.”

The governor’s recommendations

Notably, this year’s budgeting process involved supplemental budget requests from two governors – former Gov. Matt Mead and now Gov. Mark Gordon – both of which haven’t come out of the process unscathed. About $25 million in funding recommended for local governments was eliminated from those requests, not because the Legislature doesn’t want to support them, said Rep. Andy Schwartz, D-Jackson, but because they “didn’t think it was the time” to give that funding – in part due to lowered revenue expectations in a January forecast report.

The biggest thing lawmakers didn’t fund was Mead’s $30 million recommendation for a contingency fund – otherwise known as emergency flex spending – which the appropriations committee figured could be drawn from other sources and paid back as needed.

Among the winners in the recommended budget was the wildlife trust fund, which between Gordon and Mead combined for a take of $10 million. The appropriations committee also carved out a half million dollars in matching funds to be leveraged for other projects, a new $300,000 for invasive species mitigation efforts and $1.2 million for current projects.

“We haven’t had that kind of money in the wildlife trust fund since I’ve been in the Legislature,” said Larsen. “They’re like a pig in mud, they think this is the best thing that has happened to them in a long time.”

A $10 million request from Gordon for clean coal research was cut in half, inspired by a question of how much money the University of Wyoming actually needed to leverage the appropriate amount of funding from the United States Department of Energy for research projects.

“We’re not trying to spit on their fire and put it out – we’re trying to spread those dollars as far as we can,” said Larsen.

What’s next

Negotiations between the two bodies are a bit of a wrestling match. Over the next week, the appropriations committees for the House and Senate will present their versions of the bill to their respective chambers and establish positions on where they stand on various aspects of the bill.

The Senate president and speaker of the house will then appoint five members from each chamber to the conference committee, though there is no set date to do so. Once that happens, both sides will try and find middle ground between the two bills.