Conference committee reviews changes to House Bill 1130 on school construction carve‑outs

The conference committee on House Bill 1130 met to examine amendment language that would change how the state calculates a carve‑out of "sinking and interest" and building‑fund mill levies when reducing in‑lieu payments used in school construction aid. Chairman Richter called the committee to order and the group discussed competing House and Senate amendment versions, fiscal figures cited by sponsors and staff, and requests for district‑level scenarios.

Committee members and staff said the bill's early draft (referred to in the meeting as the 01/2001 version) added sinking‑and‑interest into the formula and initially produced a $12,500,000 fiscal benefit affecting 28 schools. A later amendment adopted in the Senate (described in the meeting as the 02/2002 version) narrowed the carve‑out so the additional state money would be targeted to bonded indebtedness and capital debt; that change was described in the meeting as reducing the impacted schools and producing a $10,500,000 cost for a smaller group of districts. Speaker comments during the meeting tied those differences to whether a district's voter‑approved sinking‑and‑interest (bond) levies or its building fund levies are counted in the percentage used to adjust in‑lieu dollars.

Adam Tesher, School Finance Officer with the Department of Public Instruction, said of the Senate version: "So the way the version is now, if you passed a building fund and no sinking in interest, you'd be eligible for this additional money." Tesher told the committee that part of the discrepancy among numbers discussed by members stems from different ways of defining eligibility — some members were referring only to districts that had passed sinking‑and‑interest levies, while others included districts with voter‑approved building funds. Committee members cited several different counts during discussion: speakers referred to about 60 districts, about 126 districts, and an "additional" figure of about 150 in the course of the exchange; Tesher said he could pull the authoritative counts from state finance data.

Members pressed for more granular data on how the revised formula would change each district's share. Representative Heiner and others asked whether the amendment would create an incentive for districts to adopt or levy building funds to gain additional state aid. Tesher explained the mechanics used in the Senate version: the formula adds a district's building fund and sinking‑and‑interest mills, divides that sum by the district's total mills to compute a percentage, and then applies that percentage as a deduction before the state reduction of in‑lieu funds. "If we're at a hundred total mills and we had 35 between building fund and sinking in interest, we are now taking off that 35% from the top of their total local revenue before we get to the 75% reduction," Tesher said.

Committee members asked staff to produce district‑level scenarios and the specific math behind the Senate fiscal estimate (described in the meeting as about $10.5 million). Chairman Richter said he would schedule a follow‑up once members had the requested data; Tesher said he could retrieve the levy and approval information from the Department's finance database but could not guarantee it before the end of the day. The committee recessed/adjourned at the end of the session with no formal vote on the bill's language recorded in the transcript.

The meeting record shows discussion only; no motion to adopt text or final committee vote on House Bill 1130 was recorded in the provided transcript.