newsminer.com

Remember last year how lawmakers described education funding, the PERS/TRS fix, and revenue sharing as three legs of one stool? The idea was that each component was more or less important depending on where you lived — the PERS/TRS fix would really help urban areas, for instance — so lawmakers looked for ways to balance the benefits in the separate bills, and stopped short of passing one without the others lest lawmakers lose interest once they got the part they liked.

So . . . the three pieces are back this year.

The Senate majority announced earlier this month that it would pass an education funding bill by March 1, which left some lawmakers concerned that the other two components would get wrapped up in end-of-the-session politics.

Sen. Lyman Hoffman, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said Wednesday he wanted to pass the PERS/TRS, revenue sharing bills, and education bills all at together.

“It is my hope to try to get those done in the first half of the session,” he said. (The halfway point is about March 1.)

It’s still a little unclear to me what the plan is. It sounds like lawmakers will scrap the provisions that reduced revenue sharing for communities that benefited a lot from the PERS/TRS fix, but there might be some other balancing mechanism.

Also, the mechanism for revenue sharing is likely to be switched from last year’s bill. Instead of giving communities a fixed percentage of mineral revenues, the program would provide funding based on whether the state had extra money to share.