CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - The Wyoming Legislature this week will get down to the nitty-gritty of every budget session: wading through scores of budget amendments in the House and the Senate to come up with each body’s respective vision of how to fund state government for the next two years.
House Speaker Tom Lubnau, R-Gillette, and Senate President Tony Ross, R-Cheyenne, said Friday that both bodies planned to hear the budget bill for the first time on Monday. It will require three readings in each chamber.
By the end of the week, Lubnau and Ross said, both chambers will have agreed on their respective budget proposals and be ready to send them to a conference committee to resolve the differences.
House Bill 1, the general government appropriations bill, calls for spending just over $3.5 billion from state’s General Fund to cover government operations for two years starting this July.
The Legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee generally agreed with recommendations from Gov. Matt Mead to allocate $175 million to counties and local governments while also funding pay raises for most state employees for the first time in four years.
“You always expect 70 budget amendments per reading, just because everybody has to represent their constituents,” Lubnau said. “I don’t know, because of the work that went into this budget, how many will stick. It’s a pretty good budget.”
Also coming up this week, Lubnau said he expects extensive debate in the House when it considers a bill the House Education Committee endorsed Friday that could allow guns in schools.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. John Eklund, R-Cheyenne, would allow school districts around the state to decide whether to let staff and employees at K-12 schools to carry guns on school campuses provided they have concealed-carry permits.
In introducing the proposal last week, Eklund said he believed passing the bill might be “a deterrent for a terrorist or criminal to break into a school or harm our kids. It might be a deterrent to know that there might be guns waiting on the other side of the wall.”
The House voted down another bill that would have allowed anyone with a concealed-carry permit to carry a gun on school or college campuses around the state.
Lubnau said the bill that wouldn’t give individual school boards a choice whether to allow guns didn’t have much hope of passing. “But this one (the Eklund bill) does, particularly if you’re a small, rural school a long way from law enforcement,” he said.
A bill to expand Wyoming’s Medicaid program also could be heard this week or possibly later in the session.
The Senate on Friday voted to introduce a bill sponsored by Rep. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, that would call for Wyoming to accept federal money to expand Medicaid to cover roughly 17,600 more adults in the state. The bill has been assigned to the Senate Labor, Health and Social Services Committee.
The Legislature last year turned down about $50 million in federal funds for Medicaid expansion. Mead and other opponents of the expansion have said they don’t trust federal promises to continue funding if the state agrees to it.
Expansion of Medicaid is integral to the federal Affordable Care Act. Wyoming, under Mead’s leadership, joined with other states in an unsuccessful challenge to the constitutionality of provisions of the law that required people to buy health insurance.
Rothfuss said Friday on the Senate floor that his bill would not only allow the state to avail itself of the federal funding, it would also let the state negotiate its own approach to how to cover the newly enrolled people.
His bill calls for the Legislature to have to vote again in a few years to continue the program, so there shouldn’t be concern about the state getting roped into continuing it if the federal government backs out, Rothfuss said.
Speaking before the Senate vote on Rothfuss’ bill, Ross and Lubnau said they had voted to consider a number of earlier Medicaid-expansion bills to allow the full Legislature to discuss the issue in depth.
But Lubnau said he doesn’t expect any Medicaid-expansion bill ultimately will pass the House. Members of the House won’t consider such a move until they know with certainty what the final rules of the federal program are going to be, he said.
“The level of distrust is so great that they won’t vote for introduction now,” Lubnau said.
Ross said he would welcome a full discussion of the Medicaid-expansion issue. “In my opinion, it’s a significant enough topic that justifies having the debate,” he said.
All bills have to be out of committee on Thursday and have to clear their first full vote in their house of origin by Friday, Ross said. “So next week’s going to be a heavy lift,” he said.
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