On Tuesday, and today, the full House and Senate each heard dozens of amendments to the $2.9 billion budget. You keep a cheat sheet handy, and run back and forth between chambers. But you’re bound to miss something – the Senate will be working on an amendment to limit funding for school bus travel on one side, while the House is deciding whether to add $200,000 to design a bypass highway between Green River and Rock Springs. Lobbyists, who can be a little more focused than journalists, are hard at work, sometimes even writing the remarks legislators will make when proposing amendments.

There is much at stake in this budget end game. Amendments will be offered over two readings of the bill. Here are just a few of the amendments that could make, or could have made, a real difference somewhere in the state:

  • The Big Horn Middle School needs $3.6 million to complete remediation on a middle school and high school, a project that fell out of favor with the School Facilities Commission, which ranks schools for state funding based on sometimes changing criteria. An amendment would step outside the SFC list to provide that funding. Rep. Matt Teeters was one of several legislators who expressed sympathy but insisted schools needed to play by the same rules, noting that in his district “the school in Lingle has asbestos and they have to carry kids in wheelchairs to the second floor.” The House voted the Big Horn school funding down.
  • Homeowners in Rock Springs on the so-called “Tree Streets” saw cracks appear in 2007 in their walls when the state tried “dynamic compaction”– smashing the ground with huge weights to solidify it against subsidence from abandoned mines. The state says it wants to repay them for damages, but they didn’t like the estimates made by a state-hired civil engineer, so they’ve come back looking for $120,000 to hire a structural engineer, using federal Abandoned Mine Lands (AML) funds. When a bill passed the House but failed on a tie vote in the Senate, Sen. John Hastert (D- Green River) brought it back as a budget amendment. The Senate approved.
  • The Children’s Hospital in Denver sometimes treats seriously ill Wyoming kids, and it’s been in a heated dispute with Wyoming’s Medicaid program over reimbursement. An amendment by Sen. Wayne Johnson (R-Cheyenne) doesn’t mention the hospital by name, it just allows the Governor to take money from the General Fund for “critical care services not otherwise available from in-state providers.” I understood this because the hospital’s distracted lobbyist thrust a copy of their ‘information’ into my hand (usually these go only to legislators, and you have to beg for them). The Senate didn’t bite.
  • Local governments face budget shortfalls and a big decline in state funds – from about $400 million for cities and counties during the boom years, to about $60 million in Gov. Freudenthal’s current budget – and a House amendment would nudge that amount back up just a bit. Noting that the legislature is acting strangely frugal this year, and noting there was about $18 million still on the table (in addition to $93 million that will go into the untouchable budget reserve account), the House voted to add another $10 million to the local government funding for the upcoming biennium.

There’s much more, of course –large stacks of amendments that will keep the solons at work late tonight – but it’s impossible to track it all until the end of the day, when the Legislative Service Office will issue a “goldenrod” sheet showing how much has been spent and how much is left.

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The interesting – and sometimes amusing – debate over whether to buy a new warehouse for the state Liquor Commission led to some fancy parliamentary footwork in the Senate today. The issue is twofold: whether to spend $13million for a larger warehouse while real estate is cheap and the state’s appetite for fine wine is growing; and then whether to make liquor purchasers cover the cost with a special tax on liquor bottles, or pay for it some other way. The argument is that the building will be used for other purposes besides liquor (weights and balances, for instance), and the liquor purchases already provide a strong revenue stream to the government, based on a 17 percent markup at the wholesale warehouse.

Sen. Eli Bebout (R-Riverton) brought an amendment to cancel the purchase altogether, after a visit to the current warehouse, which seemed well run and in good shape.(Bebout was quick to say his visit to the liquid repository did not include doing “anything we shouldn’t have done.”) When Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander) didn’t vote because of a conflict (he has a liquor license at his motel), the amendment passed 15-14, because passage doesn’t require a majority of the full Senate, only of those voting.

But two amendments later, another amendment, brought by Sen. Tony Ross (R-Cheyenne) proposed to buy the building after all, without raising the price of Chardonnay. Ross’ amendment takes the money from the Budget Reserve Account – with supporters arguing that the sale of liquor, of which the state takes a 17 percent cut, would pay the cost back. Once again, Sen. Case demurred, and this amendment passed 15-14, trumping Bebout’s approach.