INDIANAPOLIS - The Indiana House of Representatives on Friday advanced a one-year budget that taps into the state's reserve bank accounts, boosts higher-education spending and offers no money to add space at state prisons.
House Bill 1001 cleared the House along party lines, with all 52 Democrats voting yes and 44 Republicans voting no. Four Republicans missed the unusual Friday session, held on the Legislature's normal day off.
The budget now moves to the state Senate, where majority Republicans are expected to erase or rewrite much of it.
The House budget includes $540 million in federal stimulus money for Medicaid. It also takes $100 million from the state's Rainy Day Fund and another $100 million from the Tuition Reserve Fund. It allows bonding for $700 million in new university building projects that Democrats said would put Hoosiers to work.
Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels has opposed dipping into reserves to fund the budget.
The $14.5 billion House spending plan only covers one year, rather than the usual two-year budget that passes out of the Legislature's every-other-year long sessions.
Democrats said that's because the recession's economic uncertainty means it's impossible to predict how much money the state will have to spend.
If the budget ultimately covers only one year, it would be state government's first one-year budget in more than 30 years.
"We have a budget before us that makes sense," said House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Crawford, D-Indianapolis. "We're creating jobs, we're stimulating the economy."
In addition to a 1 percent higher education spending boost that would benefit the University of Southern Indiana, the House budget reinserted $3.2 million of the $3.5 million in public broadcasting funding that Daniels had proposed cutting, as well as $550,000 for the Young Abe Lincoln stage production at Lincoln State Park in Spencer County.
By contrast to what House Democrats passed Friday, Daniels had proposed a slimmed-down two-year, $28.3 billion budget that protected state reserves. Daniels called for lawmakers to keep K-12 education spending flat, cut state higher education funding by 4 percent and offer new money only to add space to two crowded state prisons.
House minority Republicans warned that no new money for prison expansions could force the state to release inmates early.
"These are tough economic times," said Rep. Eric Turner, R-Marion. "But I can promise you people want to be safe."
But one of the Democrats' top budget writers, Rep. Scott Pelath, D-Michigan City, said the budget shows the priority is education, not prison construction.
House Minority Leader Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, lambasted Democrats for a one-year budget he called a "quick kick."
Bosma stepped in front of the House chamber with a football in hand as he accused Democrats of punting tough decisions for a year, rather than writing the usual two-year budget.
State Rep. Trent Van Haaften, D-Mount Vernon, later borrowed Bosma's football and carried the analogy on in defense of a one-year budget he called the "responsible" thing to do.
"The opponent who is scaring everyone is the economy," Van Haaften said. "You don't roll over and say, 'You've got us beat.' You pin the opponent down."
Most of the House budget was contained in House Bill 1001, but in a break from tradition, Democrats carved K-12 education spending into a second bill, House Bill 1723, and child welfare services into a third, House Bill 1728.
Those bills offer an early rough draft of the state's next budget, which starts with the new fiscal year July 1. But it can't be finalized until the Senate decides on its version and the two sides hammer out their differences in intense conference committee meetings before the Legislature's April 29 adjournment deadline.
"It will eventually be different, but at least it's a beginning," Rep. Dennis Avery said of the budget bill the House advanced Friday.
Avery, the Evansville Democrat who sits on the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee, predicted the Senate would weld together the three bills and extend the budget from one year to the normal two. He said the Senate budget will probably be far closer to the version Daniels proposed in January.