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Staff outlines program maintenance bills: 10 appropriations grouped by function; maintenance vs. enhancement defined
Summary
Budget staff described how JFAC will group and consider program maintenance appropriations into 10 functional bills, what belongs in program maintenance, and what will be handled in enhancement bills.
Budget staff told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee the planned approach for program maintenance appropriations is to group agencies into 10 functional bills and to treat certain recurring adjustments as "program maintenance" while leaving replacement items and population‑forecast adjustments to enhancement bills.
Keith Bybee, Division Manager of Budget Policy Analysis, said the 10 functional areas reflect practical separations: legislative and statewide elected officials are treated separately from executive branch general government; the Judicial Branch is separated from Public Safety; and public school support and higher‑education agencies remain distinct. Bybee said program maintenance will start from the existing base budget and add the building blocks between benchmarks — notably benefit cost adjustments (including CEC and health insurance), contract inflation, statewide cost allocations and other ongoing items. "The maintenance budgets... will include beginning with the base budget... and everything in between Benchmark 4 and Benchmark 5," he said.
Bybee said enhancement bills will contain items that have historically driven budget growth: replacement requests (regular and IT), population forecast adjustments (formerly called nondiscretionary), medical inflation, annualizations and other increases the committee may wish to treat as discretionary growth. He told members those items are often volatile and can materially change the size of agency budgets, so moving these to enhancement bills gives the Legislature opportunity for additional scrutiny.
The staff presentation included examples of how the decision units roll up to program maintenance totals and noted the committee can later add or subtract items from the program maintenance bills when specific policy or organizational issues arise. Staff also said replacement items for IT will be presented as a separate decision unit from other replacement items to provide clearer visibility into cybersecurity and IT modernization requests.
Bybee and other staff emphasized the schedule and process: members will receive materials and a hearing on the program maintenance adjustments before formal decisions are taken during the committee’s scheduled votes next week.
