Joint finance committee adopts FY2025 revenue number, delays FY2026 decision; approves contract inflation and cost-allocation changes as health insurance and a

The Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee adopted a general fund revenue projection of $5,990,000,000 for fiscal year 2025 on a unanimous roll call Thursday and approved routine contract inflation and statewide cost-allocation adjustments, but could not agree on a FY2026 revenue projection or on competing health-insurance funding proposals.

The decisions came during a regular JFAC session that also included technical corrections to the current-year (FY2025) budget package and extended debate on personnel benefit costs that centered on how much to fund the state employee health-insurance plan.

Janet Jessup, a budget and policy analyst with Legislative Services, opened committee business by walking members through a set of technical corrections in a yellow packet of materials, including correcting where broadband reappropriations were recorded and fixing a drafting error that left a $2,000,000 transfer intended for the CAFO Improvement Fund recorded against the Department of Environmental Quality general fund. "The monies in fiscal year 2025 were reappropriated into the Commerce program, not the broadband program," Jessup said, explaining the packet moved amounts between program lines so the broadband costs could be tracked in the broadband program. She also described reclassification of two Department of Health and Welfare lines from trustee-and-benefit-payments to operating expenditures because the monies are paid under contract to third-party vendors.

Revenue projections and votes Senator Woodward moved the Economic Outlook and Revenue Assessment Committee's (ERAC) recommended FY2025 general-fund revenue projection of $5,990,000,000 for setting state agency…