The two political parties in the General Assembly have proposed alternative state budgets, but neither moved off first base Tuesday.

House Democrats put numbers – dollar values – on their proposed state budget yesterday, but the actual appropriations bill stayed in the House Budget Subcommittee.

Meanwhile Senate Republicans tried all day to get consensus with their Democratic colleagues to move their version of a budget. That bill also stayed in committee.

The budgets are very similar, but some differences stand out:

Senate Republicans propose deleting a 3 percent bonus for state employees. House Democrats want to restore about half of it – around $500 per employee – as a so-called “stipend.”

The Senate version takes about $8 million which would have been used to acquire land for conservation to help balance the budget.

The House version restores those funds for buying natural areas.

Both chambers have been trying to agree to act on a budget for two weeks.

Lawmakers say the two budgets are more alike than different. Either the House or the Senate could pass one of the proposals by Thursday.

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Under the relaxed procedural rules used in the last week of the General Assembly, the House version could move from Budget Subcommittee to House Finance Committee to the Calendar & Rules Committee in a matter of hours. That would put the budget on the House floor as early as Thursday.

But ten hours after they started, on Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee still hadn’t gotten to “the budget,” that is, the appropriations bill.

Finance Chair Randy McNally tried a joke, and the appropriations bill sponsor, Jim Kyle, played along:

McNally: “I thought we could do it in the last few minutes….”
[laughter]
Kyle: “Well…if you would listen to me, and quit… and………I think we could have this puppy done here, and we’d be gone tomorrow. But there seems to be some obstruction in that area….”

The obstruction is that Senate Republicans and Democrats have continued to spar behind closed doors on exactly what the bill should say when it goes to the Senate floor.

The House is looking at still a different version, although some of the differences are measured in differences of less than $100,000, small percentages in a $30 Billion budget.

If the two chambers approve different versions, the budget would be threshed out in a conference committee.

But in recent years it has been common for complex bills to be worked out by unofficial “conference committees” before the bills are voted on in either chamber. That has been the pattern of the budget so far this year, with House and Senate members conferring behind closed doors to get their differences worked out in advance.

Both the state House and the state Senate are expected to meet Thursday, the first day that a proposed budget could be passed by either of the two chambers.

The House has four more days left for which it can draw a per diem. The Senate has only two.