Pub. 6 2016-2017 Issue 2

8 Navigating the Appropriations Process: Passing SB 180 BY ROYCE VAN TASSELL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF UAPCS T his past session UAPCS worked closely with the leadership of the State Charter School Board, the chairs of the public education appropria- tions committee and the chairs of the Executive Appropriations Committee to make sure the Legislature continued the funding for the charter school start up grant program (SB 180, Senator Howard Stephenson). Passing a bill like SB 180 which was going to cost the state money it had not previously planned to spend, means navigating two processes. Not only must both the House and Senate approve the bill, but the Public Education Appropriations subcommittee must put the funding for that bill in its budget. (The Public Education Appropriations subcommittee is just one of 8 appro- priations subcommittees.) As you can imagine, competition for that funding is fierce. A bill requiring funding must either displace funding going to an exist- ing program, or it must succeed in the scrum for any new revenue the Executive Appropriations Committee allocates to that subcommittee. Other mechanisms exist to fund a bill later in the session, but they almost never succeed. Each appropriations meeting is long, and usually the specific topic committee members are discussing has no direct bearing on what you are fol- lowing. Nonetheless, when you need an appropriation it’s critical to follow all the programs an appropriations com- mittee is considering; you need to know how best to position your requested appropriation. In the case of SB 180, we worked with the chairs of the public education appro- priations subcommittee, Representative Dan McCay and Senator Lyle Hillyard, plus legislative staff to include SB 180’s $2.5 million in the public education base budget. When the Legislature adopted the base budget at the end of the General Session’s second week, our work on SB 180 was essentially finished. We just had to make sure no opposition emerged as the bill came up for passage in its com- mittee and floor votes. The Clock as Enemy: Why HB 409 Failed Because the appropriations processes consume somuch time of somany legisla- tive and agency staff members, some even non-controversial bills don’t get drafted until the third or even the fourth week of the session. That was the case with HB 409 (Representative Brad Last). HB 409 did two rather mundane things. First, it said that the “cap” on a multi- campus charter school applies to all the campuses collectively, rather than on a campus by campus basis. Second, it gave the State Board of Education specific direction on how to protect LRF funding for charter schools who did not enroll above their cap, in the very unlikely event the Legislature is unable to appropriate enough money into the local replacement fund for all charter school students. Although the final bill contained only modest changes to existing statute, the sections of code HB 409 amended were very technical. To make sure the bill didn’t have unintended consequences, we needed specific guidance from the State Board of Education’s finance staff as well as the Legislative Fiscal Analyst. And because they were so intimately involved in crafting the public education budget (fromNovember until the end of February the State Board’s finance staff work in many ways as much for the