Staff briefs Senate Ways and Means on House Appropriations budget summary and documents

Dylan Dear, assistant director for fiscal affairs at the Kansas Legislative Research Department, briefed the Senate Ways and Means Committee on January 24 on the House Appropriations Committee’s budget position and the new legislative budget summary documents being posted online.

Dear told the committee the House Appropriations position is built on the agency request as the starting point and that many agency “enhancements” and supplementals were deleted by the interim Legislative Budget Committee and recorded in House Bill 2007. “The interim committee recommended that all enhancements and supplementals be deleted,” Dear said, adding that detailed line‑item and fund tables are available on the department’s website.

The budget summary, Dear said, compares the agency request to the Legislative Budget Committee recommendations and the House Appropriations position as of Jan. 24. It lists approved FY 2024 baselines (including amounts in 2024 SB 28 and House Bill 2551), then shows reappropriations, supplementals/enhancements, other adjustments such as fringe‑benefit and group health cost changes, and numbered explanatory footnotes. Dear said special‑revenue and fee‑fund agencies will include additional tables with historical fees where applicable.

Dear highlighted several large adjustments captured in the materials: agencies requested roughly $10.9 billion in state general fund (SGF) for FY2025; the Legislative Budget Committee deleted about $290.4 million of that, and House Appropriations had added back roughly $1.6 million, leaving about $10.6 billion for FY2025 so far. For FY2026, agencies requested about $11.5 billion; the LBC deleted about $1.1 billion (largely in corrections and higher education), and House Appropriations had added back about $3.4 billion, yielding roughly $10.4 billion at the time of the briefing. Dear noted those year‑to‑year movements reflect the removal of one‑time costs in FY2025 and identified large SGF reappropriations that were lapsed in the committee’s recommendation.

Dear also explained that many employer costs such as group health insurance and CAPERS rate increases appear in the “all other adjustments” line if they were not broken out. He said the department has posted performance‑based budgeting documents (nearly 980 pages) and Tableau visualizations and will provide links and printed copies on request.

Senators asked clarifying questions about how salary adjustments and fringe changes are handled in the baseline, the extent to which reappropriations are budgeted but only expended if the session continues, and the effect of a change in legislator compensation on the size of reappropriations. Dear said salary adjustments already approved through last year’s processes had been distributed by the state finance council and added into agencies’ approved levels, and that reappropriations budgeted for extended sessions fall out of the actuals if not expended.

The briefing concluded with Dear asking committee members to review the agency sheets for items of interest — he singled out agriculture (water), commerce and education — and to request follow‑up from the fiscal team as needed. Committee members were given the legal‑sized “all funds” and SGF sheets to take with them.

The materials Dear described (the legislative budget summary and accompanying yellow sheets with gubernatorial recommendations not yet in HB 2007) were presented as the working record for the committee’s line‑by‑line review ahead of further House and Senate action on House Bill 2007.