April 17, 2014 As I write this on the evening of April 16th there are finally definite signs that the 2014 session is nearing an end. The budget bills are always the final bills to move through the Legislature just prior to adjournment. As of today the standings bill is the only bill left in the House that requires action. The standings bill is the session ending catch-all budget bill; it contains all of the necessary appropriations that don’t fit neatly into the other budget bills and also serves as a vehicle to do any last minute appropriations. So on this Wednesday evening there are only a few House members left here in Des Moines. Members of the Ways and Means committee and a couple of the budget chairs like me are the only members who will be in the House chamber tomorrow. The Senate, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. There are several budget bills awaiting action in the Senate but they are so wrapped up in partisan attacks on the Governor that they aren’t getting the work done that they were elected to do. For the last three weeks the Senate has scheduled meetings of the Oversight Committee in an attempt to find some smoking gun that connects the Governor to the confidential settlement controversy. The Oversight Committee is a joint House-Senate committee led by co-chairs, one from each chamber. The Senate has repeatedly scheduled committee hearings without consulting the House and at times has attempted to schedule Oversight meetings at the same time as House regular committee meetings so that House members of the committee could not attend. After three weeks of trying they have been unable establish any evidence that any of the mistakes that were made went any higher than the head of the department. In the meantime, the work that Iowans elected the Senate to do has languished while they pursued this bit of political theater. If the Senate had stuck to business House members would not be heading home mid-week. We would have the budget bills that are now stalled in the Senate in our chamber going through the procedures necessary to complete the process that would move them to the Governor for his signature. We would also be in the final push to an adjournment which could have occurred this weekend. As it is, we will all return to Des Moines after the Easter weekend which will extend the session another week at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars to Iowa taxpayers. This afternoon, three of the budget bills were sent to conference committee. This means that the House and Senate have not agreed on the spending within the bills so a committee of five members from each chamber is assigned to work out a compromise to bring back to the Legislature. I will co-chair the conference committee for the justice systems budget with my Senate counterpart. The main difference between the House and Senate versions of the justice systems budget is the allocation of funds for the Department of Corrections and the Department of Public Safety. The budget we crafted in the House would allow the addition of 30 new state troopers to the DPS. The budget proposed by the Senate would add only 4 new troopers to DPS and divert over $2.8 million to the DOC and $575,000 to the Attorney General’s office. Reinforcing the Highway Patrol has been a priority of House Republicans since we took the majority four years ago. We have worked long and hard to clean up our state’s
finances and now, with money in reserve, we feel it is time to rebuild some of the damage that occurred in the last half of the last decade. DOC is currently in the process of occupying two new state of the art facilities that will replace obsolete prisons. This should increase efficiency and decrease manpower requirements; therefore we believe that the Highway Patrol is the best place to invest while the DOC operates for a year in their new facilities to determine what their actual needs will be. The conference committee boils down to one on one negotiation between my Senate counterpart and me. We will meet multiple times over the next few days and hopefully work out a compromise that we will take to the full committee for their approval; it will then be forwarded to each chamber for their approval. These negotiations are never easy and always stressful but are an essential step toward determining the most efficient use of the taxpayer’s dollar.
