The Legislative days are long and take their toll on everyone. My granddaughter Ada recently reminded me that sometimes you need to put the little things aside, grab your bear, and get to work!

Last Week both the House and Senate worked on this year’s budget bill. The details of the bill were explained to the members of the House on Monday and Tuesday by those of us assigned to the Appropriations Committee. On Wednesday we considered about 45 Second Reading Amendments, then Thursday was a normal day to allow legislators time to prepare a Third Reading amendment to the budget bill if they felt it was needed. On Friday we considered around 55 Third Reading Amendments and then voted on the bill, which passed. I think the earliest we finished up this week was 8:30 which was on Friday, the rest of the week was between 9:30 and 10:00 in order for us to meet as a committee to consider other bills ready to move forward in the process.

The Senate spent their week considering the same budget bill at the same time we were, which is called a “mirror process”. Now that the same bill has been considered by both the House and the Senate, the Appropriations Committees from both the House and the Senate with meet in a conference to reconcile the differences placed in the bill by the different amendments. Out hope is to have this completed and voted on towards the end of the week. After we agree on the final bill we will submit it to the Governor for his review, and allow him to veto any of the contents of the bill he is not comfortable with, and then the House and the Senate will review the Governor’s vetoes and determine if they should vote to override any of them.

We will start to work the Senate bills this week and one of the most important with be SF119 the Capitol Construction bill, which funds the large capital construction projects in the state. Stay tuned, it could be interesting.