As the House and Senate begin work today on the supplemental budget bill – which emerges from the Joint Appropriations Committee with a $165 million price tag – memos are circulating suggesting that the projected budget surplus for the upcoming year may have to be downsized further.

That certainly puts a damper on the efforts usually made at this time to add pet spending items to the budget bill on the House and Senate floor. It also doesn’t bode well for numerous other bills with price tags – the running total is about $79 million as of this morning – waiting in the wings.

The budget surplus of $259 million was concocted in January by the Consensus Revenue Estimating Group, a team of state officials, projecting revenues from sales and use taxes, severance taxes, and other sources. But the CREG based its estimate on natural gas and oil prices higher than what the market is now producing.

Here are a few areas where the spending debate may heat up:

  • Highway funding. The governor reduced his request for general fund highway money to $50 million in his revised supplemental budget, and the JAC cut it out altogether. Highway money is popular because road-building generates jobs and, well, highways.

  • The payroll for employees at the new prison in Torrington is $20 million. Legislators knew when they funded prison construction that it would be more expensive to keep prisoners here than to pay other states to warehouse them, as Wyoming has done in recent years. But they’re somewhat trapped in this expensive solution – the prison is built, after all, and not likely to be left empty;

  • There were a lot of proposals to provide Wyomingites with property tax relief, and two bills are still alive – one to expand the Homestead Exemption, and another limiting the rise in assessed valuation. The total price tag on the two bills is $64 million – by far the most expensive legislation outside the appropriations bill. While there are certain parts of the state where property taxes have risen sharply, it’s not clear citizens all over the state are clamoring for this relief. Will one or both survive?

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As debate began on the Supplemental Budget bill in the Senate, Sen. Curt Meier (R-LaGrange) noted that it included a reduction of two positions in the Governor’s office, but this would not mean less staff for the executive branch, since these were tribal liaisons for the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes of the Wind River Indian Reservation who were being paid by the state to lobby the state for “more money from us” to the tribes.

Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander) was angered by Meier’s “pejorative” characterization, noting that the liaisons connected tribal and state governments, and that tribal members were Wyoming citizens who were only now starting to get benefits provided to other state citizens.

Meier stood his ground, noting that he was only paraphrasing the Governor’s letter dismissing the positions, which noted that the liaisons advocated for the tribes and spent more time on the reservation than they did in Cheyenne.

Though the expectation is that the liaisons would continue – currently Eddie Wadda represents the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and Gary Collins represents the Northern Arapaho Tribe – there was no confirmation that the tribes would pick up their contracts.