Legislative staff streamline budget hearings, post materials to SharePoint and add consolidated fund analysis

Janet Jessup, a budget and policy analyst with the Legislative Services Office, briefed the Joint Finance and Appropriation Committee on Jan. 7 on a restructured budget-hearing format and the legislative budget materials available on SharePoint, highlighting a new consolidated-fund analysis and standardized slides intended to help members assess agencies more quickly.

Jessup said the committee's mornings will be shorter and more focused on the items that matter for appropriation: maintenance budgets, requested enhancements and major supplemental requests. Each agency presentation will include the agency description, organizational structure with full-time position counts and vacancies, a five-year appropriation and expenditure trend, and the consolidated fund analysis showing dedicated-fund balances and restrictions.

Why it matters: The new materials are intended to increase transparency and save committee time. Jessup pointed to searchable SharePoint folders that contain the legislative budget book pages, LSO presentation slides, agency-provided slides and any hearing follow-up materials so members can click directly to the documents and the underlying reports.

Jessup reviewed the standardized slides members will see: an organizational chart with FTP breakdowns, vacancy and five-year averages; a consolidated-fund analysis that shows beginning balances, receipts, expenditures and ending free balances for each dedicated fund the agency manages; a five-year appropriations and expenditures chart and a pie-chart breakout of expense categories for the most recent fiscal year (personnel costs, operating expenditures, capital outlay and trustee & benefit payments).

She explained that the personnel-cost (PC) appropriation includes salaries and employee benefits, and noted agencies often retain salary savings for planned retirements or other timing differences; she cautioned that one-time salary savings are not appropriate to use for ongoing raises. The co-chairs and members discussed using the new vacancy and historical FTP data to assess whether PC savings are structural or temporary.

Jessup demonstrated how SharePoint is organized by PDF page numbers and how members can sort by modified date to find recently added materials. Committee leadership reiterated the expectation that members attend the shortened morning sessions because the analyst presentations in JFAC will be the primary opportunity to hear about agencies the member may not otherwise cover in their work groups.

Ending: Staff will provide a printed quick-reference guide to account categories and a SharePoint navigation guide. Members were told that the presentations will be concise, standardized and linked to the budget book materials so the committee can focus its work during the session.