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Legislative staff present technical corrections to FY2025 appropriations, including broadband and CAFO adjustments
Summary
Legislative services staff presented technical corrections for FY2025 in a ‘yellow packet,’ including fixes for broadband program accounting, a drafting error on a CAFO fund transfer and reclassification of Health and Welfare payments.
Before the committee took statewide decisions, legislative staff told members about technical corrections for fiscal year 2025 contained in a “yellow packet.” Janet Jessup, a budget and policy analyst with Legislative Services, walked the committee through the items and asked for questions before the committee voted on them the following day.
Key corrections described by Jessup and staff included:
- Department of Commerce — Clarify program accounting for broadband funding. The broadband program was established to track broadband spending separately; monies reappropriated into the commerce program in FY2025 should instead be accounted in the broadband program so broadband costs can be tracked as intended. Staff said the change is net‑zero between the two program tables.
- Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and CAFO improvement fund — Fix drafting error that misidentified the source of a $2,000,000 transfer. Jessup said a drafting error named the DEQ general fund as the source of the transfer; as a result, the intended transfer from the general fund to the CAFO improvement fund was not executed as intended in the accounting. The corrective action before the committee would “make the agency whole” by replacing the DEQ general fund monies that were moved to the CAFO fund in error and restore the intended accounting.
- Department of Health and Welfare — Reclassify certain payments from the trustee and benefit payments category to operating expenditures. Staff explained that some amounts recorded as trustee and benefit payments were actually payments to third parties under contract and therefore should be recorded as operating expenditures. The department’s bill included language that restricted moving money out of trustee and benefit payments, so the committee’s corrective action was needed for reclassification.
Jessup and other staff invited questions and noted that the technical corrections are intended to be voted on the following day; committee members thanked staff for their work and noted the heavy editing load that analysts manage during the budget process.
Ending
Staff asked members to review the yellow packet and bring questions back; the committee did not act on the corrections immediately but planned to vote on the corrections the next day.
