Lens on the Legislature: Structure of the Appropriations Bill

Last week's article focused on the appropriations process and included a description of the conference committee appointed to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions of SB1. On Tuesday of this week, the Legislative Budget Board (LBB) published a summary of those differences.

This week's focus is on the structure of the bill, so the interested reader won't have to wade through its 900+ pages to find the areas of interest. The links given below for Articles I through VIII take the reader to the respective Tables of Contents in the LBB's Legislative Budgetary Estimates (published in January) because those tables show the agencies that are included within each Article. With an understanding of that structure, the reader can then easily find the sections of interest in the various versions of the bill as it goes through its legislative journey.

The appropriations bill is divided into 13 articles. All state agencies and universities, except those in the legislative branch, fall into one of the first 8 articles as follows:

• Article I: General Government
• Article II: Health and Human Services
• Article III: Education
• Article IV: The Judiciary
• Article V: Public Safety and Criminal Justice
• Article VI: Natural Resources
• Article VII: Business and Economic Development
• Article VIII: Regulatory

Article IX contains general provisions as follows:

• Part 1 is a brief statement of legislative intent.
• Parts 2, 3, and 4 deal with salaries (except for agency heads) and employment policies.
• Part 5 covers travel regulations.
• Part 6 includes general limitations on expenditures, such as last quarter spending, transferring funds between appropriation items, limitations on grants to units of local government, state employment caps, and capital budget requirements.
• Part 7 describes reporting requirements such as annual reports and inventories, required notifications to members of the legislature, and reporting of major contracts.
• Part 8 on Other Appropriation Authority covers matters like acceptance of gifts or federal block grants as well as the sale of surplus property and handling the money from vending machines.
• Parts 9 through12 have specific provisions related respectively to information resources, health, real property and other property (e.g., aircraft, vehicles, interoperability of purchased radios).
• Part 13 collects all of the other provisions that didn't fit into one of the earlier parts.

Article X appropriates funds to the legislature for its own operations, including the operations of legislative agencies. This article tends to be less specific than the others. For instance, no performance measure targets are included for legislative agencies.

Article XI is called "Items for Future Consideration" and is a holding place for certain contingencies. For instance, as the appropriations bill goes through the process, this article will normally contain a list of provisions that say "If this specific bill passes, then a certain amount of money is appropriated to a specific agency." These matters are usually resolved prior to passage of the General Appropriations Act, so often there is no Article IX in the final GAA.

Articles XII and XIII are called the "Savings Clause" and "Emergency Clause" respectively and deal with procedural matters related to the bills effectiveness and severability.

Because the electronic versions of the appropriation bills are about 5MB in size, the LBB has broken them up by articles to make downloading easier. By taking a moment to understand the structure of appropriation bills, the reader will be able to go directly to area of interest without having to download other portions.

A future column in the Lens on the Legislature series will focus on the structure of the appropriations for specific agencies.