House, Senate to vote on state budget today

The House and Senate both attached amendments yesterday that added the allocations within the Revenue Stabilization Act to the bills that create the state's $4.4 billion balanced budget. The House will vote on HB1736 today, which has been engrossed and is the House version of the 2009 Revenue Stabilization Act. The Senate will vote on its identical version of the bill, SB627. The chambers will then exchange bills and vote tomorrow to send the identical bills to the governor. While individual appropriations require a supermajority for passage, the RSA only requires a simple majority for passage.

General Improvement Fund

Also on today's budget calendar, the House and Senate will vote on identical bills to fund $60 million in legislative-side General Improvement Fund projects. Like the RSA, each chamber will vote on identical bills today and exchange them for tomorrow's budget calendar. That way, the House and Senate will have both the state budget and the surplus resolved prior to Thursday, the last scheduled day of the session. The GIF schedule has been on members' desks for the required three days. Here's a link to the House version of the GIF bill, and here's a list of the GIF projects contained within the bill.

Short session

Assuming all goes well and we adjourn the session on Thursday as scheduled, it will have taken us 88 days to take care of the state's business, one of the shortest legislative sessions in recent memory. Last year's session lasted 86 days, which was the shortest since 1991.