After a contentious floor debate, Missouri senators passed their version of the supplemental state budget Tuesday.
Senators voted 24-6 to approve the bill. Because the Senate made changes to the House version, the measure now returns to the Missouri House. If the House passes it without changes, it will then go to Gov. Mike Kehoe.
The supplemental budget will serve as a stopgap for the current state budget, which ends June 30.
Some of the changes in the Senate version include adjustments to Medicaid match dollars.
"There's been better numbers supplied to us, even since our committee, and we've made an adjustment to match those new dollars after new counts have come out," Senate Appropriations Chair Rusty Black, R-Chillicothe, said.
Additionally, the Senate stripped out nearly $15 million that would have gone toward improving the Missouri Capitol Building.
"We determined on the Senate side to pull that expenditure out of the supplemental budget and discuss that a little bit longer and see if we can get maybe a different figure," Black said.
Remaining in the bill is $86 million in general revenue for St. Louis tornado relief. That's in addition to the $100 million the legislature allocated last year during a special session.
Senators spent several hours discussing the legislation, with Sen. Lincoln Hough, R-Springfield, expressing his dislike of some parts of the bill.
Hough is a former Senate Appropriations Committee chair who was stripped of that chairmanship last year. He contends it was due to his voting against cutting off debate on several key issues.
Hough asked Black about several items in the budget bill that he did not believe belonged, saying new decision items should not appear in supplemental budgets.
"The 14 years that I've been in and out of this building, a supplemental has been treated as the bridge to get between one appropriation authority fiscal year to the next," Hough said.
Two of the items Hough opposed were taken out in a later version of the bill on the floor.
One was $150,000 for Missouri's participation in the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C.
"I can't imagine that for an event that we knew and have known for years is coming, that all of a sudden it's an emergency to spend $150,000 to send a half a dozen people on a field trip to Washington, D.C., for some duration of time," Hough said.
The other removed item was nearly $1 million for the Missouri attorney general's office to establish a solicitor general's office in Chesterfield, including new furniture.
Several senators took issue with that budget item, including Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, D-Kansas City.
"Do we prioritize vital services for our constituents, or are we prioritizing superfluous spends? And I think this is an opportunity for us to have some cost savings here," Nurrenbern said.
The legislation is HB 2014.
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