{"id":59453,"date":"2020-03-26T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-26T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/house-rejects-supplemental-budget-once-again\/"},"modified":"2020-03-26T05:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T13:00:00","slug":"house-rejects-supplemental-budget-once-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/house-rejects-supplemental-budget-once-again\/","title":{"rendered":"House rejects supplemental budget once again"},"content":{"rendered":"

House members failed to pass the Fiscal Year 20 supplemental budget for the second time in a week Wednesday afternoon. Lawmakers had failed to pass the bill last week with House Republican minority members opposed to the size and scope of the budget.<\/p>\n

The version of the supplemental budget that came back to the House from the Senate was far larger than the one approved by the House in late February.<\/p>\n

“Time is of the essence,” said House Speaker Bryce Edgmon. “We have a major pandemic that we haven’t seen in the state for over a hundred years.”<\/p>\n

But members of the minority were not convinced the supplemental budget was the right place to tackle that issue.<\/p>\n

In February the House voted almost unanimously for a version of the supplemental budget given to the Legislature by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. That budget contained funds for Medicaid repayments and covered the cost incurred by the summer’s firefighting efforts.<\/p>\n

[Senate passes supplemental budget, house works into the evening<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n

But by the time the bill got to the Senate, the outbreak of COVID-19 had become a global pandemic and Senate leadership added emergency funding for that crisis as well as a “reverse sweep” provision. The sweep is an accounting mechanism the state has which empties all state accounts at the end of the fiscal year on June 30.<\/p>\n

Reversing that action takes a vote of three-quarters of both bodies, which is 30 votes in the House. Getting those votes has been a way for minority members to leverage their influence in the House. <\/p>\n

By voting for the reverse sweep in the supplemental budget, minority members would be giving up the leverage before voting on the operating budget.<\/p>\n

Minority members accused the Senate and the House majority of using the COVID-19 crisis as a way of getting them to forfeit their leverage.<\/p>\n

“I don’t understand while we’re pulling it up today. It seems absolutely political,” said House Minority Leader Lance Pruitt.<\/p>\n

Pruitt and other minority members said the bill could have still been sent to the governor for passage, but anything over the $250 million already allocated by the Legislature last year would not be funded and could be placed into other bills.<\/p>\n

“Things are going to be said to the press, people are going to be painted in a certain mindset, people put in a bad light,” Pruitt said. “The bill already passed, it just wasn’t fully funded. It could have already been sent to the governor.”<\/p>\n

The Senate passed an operating budget bill on Monday which is currently under debate under a special Conference Committee. Minority members suggested that bill was a more appropriate place to address COVID-19 crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Things are stalled. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":59454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-59453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59453"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=59453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}