[Education and Welfare] HB 2011 Report

[DeAnna Noriega]

First of all, HB 2011 isn't a bill that cuts the funding for MO HealthNet
for blind pension recipients and puts it in the higher education budget, but
the bill that funds social services. That is why it is so hard to correct
what Silvey as chair did. He took money from the social services bill and
moved it in to HB 2003, the bill that funds higher education. Usually, there
are committees who work on parts of the budget, like one committee that work
on HB 2011 and HB 2010 where senior services funding is dealt with. The
budget in its entirety is composed of a series of bills each of which deal
with the different departments of government. So, for example, elementary
and secondary education funding is always HB 2002. Higher education is
always HB 2003 and Social services funding is always HB 2011. That is why it
wasn't easy to reverse the damage on the floor of the house. No one as Rep.
Chris Kelly discovered was willing to vote to cut higher education back to
the level proposed by the governor. They didn't want to upset the middle
class families who are wondering how to educate their children. The only
other thing they could do is raise revenue to pay for both, but that is
difficult to do since it is hard to predict how much money can be raised by
voting for a thing in advance and goes counter to the Republican party
platform of smaller government and no new taxes. I think the Speaker of the
house Tilley said he won't accept a budget that cuts higher education from
the senate. So the problem is how to restore the blind pension funding by
finding $28 million from somewhere else. When by state law we must not spend
money we don't have, then obviously, the question is where are these funds
to be drawn from if not the blind pention medicaid money? In a budget as
large as the Missouri budget, one that is still going to fall short of what
is needed, it isn't easy to find money to redirect. The senate can scrap
what was done in the house and propose their own budget with the funds
divided up in a way they think best, but then it would need to go back to a
committee composed of both house and senate members to work out a
compromise. The house says they won't back down on higher education funds so
our best hope is that the senate will figure out how to rebalance the
problem with money from another source or the kind of amendments that Rep
Kelly says he had ready if he could have found the backing to get them
passed as amendments. His answer was tax reform, and he just couldn't get
enough members to side with him to tackle such a complex issue. So, we
aren't trying to get the senate to defeat HB 2011, that is not fund social
services, but to restore the governor's plan for how to spend the money or
make the cuts somewhere else to free up the money to pay for higher
education. Both providing funding for social service programs and educating
our young are important the difficulty is trying to figure out how this can
be done when the revenue we have to spend is not able to meet the expense of
doing this. Our message isn't defeat HB 2011, but restore the $28 Million to
it and find the funds to support higher education from somewhere else or
accept that you simply can't fully fund it as you wish.