JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Earlier this month, Missouri lawmakers cut the deadline close to get a budget to the governor’s desk. There’s growing concern that, because of the rush to meet the constitutional deadline, they will be back later this year to fix the spending plan.

For weeks, the budget was at an impasse in the General Assembly, making it seem like getting a spending plan to the governor’s desk would be impossible by the May 10 deadline. During the final hours, lawmakers approved nearly $52 billion to fund the state for another year, but Gov. Mike Parson, along with others, say this budget is problematic and will need fixing.

“I don’t think there’s any question,” Parson said in an exclusive interview with our Missouri Chief Capitol Bureau Reporter, Emily Manley. “There’s a lot of disingenuous numbers to this whole budget. I think we’re already seeing that very early on. I’ve been around this building for a long time and anytime you’re doing stuff like that, it’s pretty problematic when people don’t have input into the budget process.”

It’s the only constitutional duty lawmakers have during their five-month stay in Jefferson City, but this year brought many challenges to the process, leaving many questions unanswered.

“It’s concerning that we don’t have a budget, in myopinion,n that doesn’t last a full year,” Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, D-Independence, said.

Normally, after each chamber approves their own version of the budget, a bipartisan committee meets to negotiate the differences, but due to the tight deadline, members had to forgo those meetings.

“It is so unfortunate that in a year, especially like this, that you have two men in a backroom making decisions for the entirety of the budget,” House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, D-Springfield, said. “We will have to come back here for a special session to have an emergency supplemental, whether that’s before the end of the year or not; I don’t know.”

Quade is referring to House Budget Chair Rep. Cody Smith, R-Carthage and Senate Appropriations Chair Sen. Lincoln Hough, R-Springfield. The two met multiple times with budget staff from both chambers to iron out the negotiations.

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Politics

“It’s unfortunate because everybody should be representing the budget, not just a few of them who decide to put it together at the last moment,” Parson said. “Both chambers are supposed to have input into it. Both Democrats and Republicans are supposed to discuss it.”

Within the budget, there’s money for a 3.2% pay boost for state employees, plus larger raises for some shift differential workers at prisons, mental health facilities and state veterans’ homes. The spending plan also includes $33 million to help districts raise the minimum teacher pay to $40,000 a year. Another item within the large spending plan gives colleges and universities a 3% funding increase. There is also roughly $730 million in the budget to improve and expand Interstate 44 from Rolla to Joplin.

“My goodness, we didn’t spend enough money? If there’s the idea that we need to spend more money in this state for departments to make their ends meet, that is telling me that we have had a monumental failure in the chief executive’s office,” Sen. Bill Eigel, R-Weldon Spring, said.

Compared to Parson’s request that he sent back to lawmakers back in January, worth nearly $53 billion, lawmakers cut more than a billion dollars from his proposal, with most of the money coming from three departments: health and senior services, mental health and social services.

Besides cuts, lawmakers put in the money for roughly 300 new projects, totaling around $2 billion.

“We’re not going to do that, and I think this was much more a political budget than it was a budget of reality,” Parson said. “We’ll fix it from the governor’s office the best we can and then we’ll make sure we still have money on the bottom line.”

The final $51.7 billion budget that was approved by the General Assembly earlier this month leaves about $1.5 million unspent as a surplus, but Parson’s request asked lawmakers for more.

“It’s pretty easy to walk away and just kind of turn that over to the next General Assembly but that’s the exact thing what government does in Washington, D.C., and we just don’t need to be doing that in Missouri,” Parson said.

This leaves many expecting to come back later this year to fix the problem and be tasked with allocating more money to state agencies.

“Before the departments run out of money, because they will and it’s just a matter if it will be in September by veto session or maybe a little later in the fall,” Rizzo said.

Now that the budget is on Parson’s desk, he has until the end of next month to decide what he likes and what he wants to veto. He said he is expecting to reject many line items in the spending plan.

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