Five weeks down, ten to go … maybe. Today marks Day 36 of the 100-day scheduled session. Monday also marks the first day of the first funnel week. By close of business Friday, February 18th, all bills that have not been passed by a full committee as dead for the year (excluding tax and spending bills). 

The only bill that the Legislature is required to debate and get to the Governor early every session is the School Supplemental Aid (SSA) bill that sets funding for the upcoming school year. Late Thursday, the House passed a 2.5% increase in the SSA ($150 million), which the Governor supports. The Senate’s bill has an increase of 2.25% that they will debate early this week. While the Senate’s percentage increase is lower, their proposal devotes more money to paying down the difference between the district cost per pupil and the state cost per pupil.

Floor Work Heats Up the Week of February 21st

Once the funnel is over this week, the Legislature’s focus will shift to floor work as the chambers will move as many bills as they can to the other chamber in preparation for the second funnel deadline on March 18th. This flurry of activity in the weeks surrounding the first funnel should explain to a lot of people outside the building why the Legislature’s budget process doesn’t start to heat up until March every year. With that said though, it’s clear that both chambers are assembling their budget priorities behind the scenes.

Education Funding

The only bill that the Legislature is required to debate and get to the Governor early every session is the School Supplemental Aid (SSA) bill that sets funding for the upcoming school year. Late Thursday, the House passed a 2.5% increase in the SSA ($150 million), which the Governor supports. The Senate’s bill has an increase of 2.25% that they will debate early this week. While the Senate’s percentage increase is lower, their proposal devotes more money to paying down the difference between the district cost per pupil and the state cost per pupil.  

Log Into Zoom

For those of you wishing to virtually attend and speak on bills that are in a Senate subcommittee, you can do so on Zoom. However, you MUST be logged into an account. It doesn’t need to be a paid account, but it must be an account with your information. The reason for this is that the Senate, upon initial availability of Zoom for meetings, had problems with people abusing the system by being logged in anonymously and carrying out activities that didn’t belong in the meeting. 

The House uses the WebEx system for their subcommittees. You can watch their meetings, but you cannot speak about a bill under consideration unless you are physically in the room.

Tax Bills

In the last update, we talked about the similarities and differences between the House, Senate and Governor’s tax bills. Since then, the Senate (SF 2206) and House (HF 2317) both have their bills ready for debate in their respective chamber and we anticipate the House going first this week with consideration of HF 2317. 

The non-partisan Legislative Services Agency (LSA) is responsible for analyzing the fiscal impact of legislation. They did release a fiscal note this week on HF 2317 that you can review HERE. 

LSA has not yet completed an analysis of SF 2206 which is much bigger in scope than the House bill. However, the Iowa League of Cities did an analysis of the effect of the Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) changes in the bill and created a tool that you can review HERE. Since the bill would convert the LOST to a statewide penny and since not all jurisdictions have approved the LOST, that means some counties will see some shifting in the distributions of those revenues. The Legislature is still discussing possible changes to the bill that would alleviate this.

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