Legislative staff outline technical corrections to FY2025 budgets for commerce, DEQ and health programs

Legislative staff on Thursday told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee about three technical corrections for fiscal year 2025 that will be voted on at a later date.

Janet Jessup, a budget and policy analyst with Legislative Services, said the packet distributed to members contains corrections that change only the internal accounting of previously appropriated money and do not alter totals for the state.

"The first correction that you see is in regards to the Department of Commerce," Jessup said. She explained the broadband program created last year was meant to receive certain reappropriated dollars but, through a drafting or placement error, those funds were left in the Commerce program rather than in the newly created broadband program. "Between these two tables, the changes net to 0. We're taking the money out of one program and placing it in the other so that those broadband costs can continue to be tracked," she said.

Jessup described a second drafting error involving a $2,000,000 transfer to the confined animal feeding operation improvement (CAFO) fund. She said the bill language inadvertently identified the source as the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) general fund rather than the state general fund, and the agency ended up covering the transfer by moving internal general-fund dollars out of DEQ’s general-fund line. The corrective action in the packet would restore those DEQ general-fund dollars.

A third correction moves certain Department of Health and Welfare expenditures from the trustee-and-benefit-payments category to operating expenditures. Jessup said the payments are contract payments to third parties and therefore should be recorded as operating rather than trustee-and-benefit payments, but language in the agency’s bill restricted the agency from making that reclassification without legislative approval.

Chairman Groh and members thanked staff for the work preparing the materials; Jessup said the committee will vote on the corrections at a future meeting, and staff and other analysts stood by for questions.

The packet circulated to members, described by staff as the “yellow packet,” includes the precise accounting entries that would be made if the committee approves the changes. Committee members were repeatedly told the corrections are technical and net to zero across the affected budgets.

No formal vote on these corrections occurred during the session covered in the transcript. The committee indicated the items are scheduled for a vote at an upcoming meeting.