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Senate leaders trying to work a deal on school finance — Photo by Nolan Hicks, Houston Chronicle

“We’re working on it, but if we had a deal, we would have passed it, so we don’t have a deal yet,” Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, said.

Asked if he expected it to come up in the Senate Wednesday, he said, “We’re going to try to push. It’s essential that we pass some type of school finance reform in order to successfully end this session, so it’s the number one priority right now.”

He wouldn’t give details. To win over any Democrats, you’d have to think it would be more definite than the sun-will-come-out-tomorrow contingency that didn’t appeal to Democrats in the overall budget. That contingency makes extra spending contingent on the economy improving.

On the budget overall, Ogden said, “If you really sit down and look at those side by sides,  the Senate and the House are not that far apart except in public education.”

He said budget negotiators are trying to resolve the things they can agree on while they keep looking for a public education funding solution.

The House passed a $164.5 billion, two-year budget that would cut $23 billion from current spending levels. The Senate version is $172.8 billion.

House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, has said he thinks the House would go along with adding several billion more dollars in key areas to its bare-bones plan through so-called non-tax revenue.

His non-tax revenue legislation keeps getting delayed in the House.

In another key area, Medicaid funding, the Senate measure as amended would fall as much as $4 billion in state general revenue funding of paying for caseloads and associated costs, he said. Because Medicaid is an entitlement program, those costs still would have to be paid, it would just occur in the next fiscal period.

But he added that things could change to whittle that estimate: “Federal law could change. The econmy could improve. One of the things that (HHSC Commissioner) Tom Suehs has just reported to us is that the growth in Medicaid is not as rapid as he had predicted just six months ago. As the ecomy changes, those numbers will change.”

Peggy Fikac
