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Legislative staff details technical corrections to FY2025 budgets, including broadband and CAFO transfers
Summary
Janet Jessup, Legislative Services, presented three technical corrections to FY2025 budgets affecting Commerce broadband accounting, a DEQ transfer to the CAFO improvement fund, and classification of contract payments in Health and Welfare.
Janet Jessup, a budget and policy analyst with Legislative Services, told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee on the record that staff had identified three technical corrections to fiscal year 2025 appropriations.
The corrections are intended to be ministerial adjustments to how money is categorized and tracked rather than changes in total funding. "These are corrections for fiscal year 2025," Jessup said. She gave the committee a yellow packet that staff had prepared and asked members to review the items before votes expected the following day.
The first correction affects the Department of Commerce. Jessup said the department now has two budget programs: a commerce program and, as of last year, a separate broadband program. "The broadband program was created in order to increase transparency and oversight of spending regarding broadband monies received by the state," she said. Staff said monies reappropriated in FY2025 were placed in the commerce program rather than the broadband program; the change would move that funding into the broadband program. According to Jessup, the two table lines net to zero because money is moved from one program to the other for tracking purposes.
A second correction involves the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and a $2 million transfer to the CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) improvement fund enacted in 2025. Jessup said a drafting error caused the appropriation language to reference the "DEQ general fund" bucket rather than the separate departmental general fund line, which prevented the intended transfer from occurring into the CAFO fund. "The language in the bill was specifically said the DEQ general fund," she told the committee, and staff proposed replacing the affected DEQ general fund monies so the agency is made whole.
The third correction affects two programs in the Department of Health and Welfare: substance abuse treatment and prevention, and physical health services. In both cases, money originally budgeted to the trustee and benefit payments category (used for third-party payments) should be recorded as operating expenditures because the payments are outgoing under contract. While agencies often move dollars between categories under existing law, Jessup said the agency's bill language restricted the Department's authority to reclassify these particular trustee and benefit dollars, so the legislature must approve the change.
Jessup and other Legislative Services staff said they were available for follow-up questions; no formal votes on these corrections were recorded during the presentation. Committee leadership thanked staff for the work reviewing tens of thousands of pages of budget documents.
