House Ways & Means committee sets priorities, logistics and clerk in first session meeting

Helga, chair of the Ways & Means Committee, opened the committee's organizational meeting on Jan. 9 by naming committee liaisons, outlining logistics for the session and saying the panel will spend the bulk of its time on the state Education Fund.

The committee also confirmed Bridget Barker to serve as the committee clerk by informal voice consent after a nomination from the chair.

The chair framed the committee's main task as fiscal stewardship of K-12 funding and said the panel will follow the Commission on the Future of Public Education's work while conducting its own fiscal modeling and policy review. "We're sitting here in this room with a responsibility to the children of the state, to make sure that we maintain and grow a really strong public education system for all of our kids and for our future," Helga said.

Nut graf: The session was procedural and preparatory: members assigned liaison responsibilities to other committees, set recurring logistics (monthly committee dinners and preferred daily start times), reviewed document and fiscal-note resources on the Joint Fiscal Office (JFO) website, and scheduled a short orientation on the Education…