Topeka ? A single paragraph on the bottom of the 95th page in the state budget could cost Kansas University $3.1 million.

A response to how an award-winning professor teaches a popular course on human sexuality, the paragraph eliminates funding for any university department that buys or shows “obscene” videos in undergraduate classes.

It’s what legislators call a “proviso,” a section of an appropriations bill that starts with the words “provided” or “however, provided” and may extend to several “further provided” clauses.

There are 540 provisos in the 151-page bill containing the $10 billion budget for the next fiscal year. The Legislature has approved the bill, and it awaits action by the governor.

Provisos tell agencies how they can — or cannot — spend the money that legislators appropriate to them. Through the years, legislators have come to rely on them more frequently to make political statements — or to control the executive branch of state government.

“What the Legislature does is spend money and set policy. In the case of an appropriations bill, we do both at the same time,” said Rep. Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

Some legislators have complained in recent years about the growing inclusion of provisos in budget bills. Part of their frustration stems from what they see as the weird political statements some provisos represent.

Last year, for example, the House included a proviso stripping Hesston College in North Newton of $143,000 for scholarships because the private Mennonite school hadn’t flown the American flag in three decades. Supporters later settled for a strongly worded letter to college officials.

This year, France’s opposition to war in Iraq moved the House to pass a proviso barring Kansas’ public pension fund from investing in French companies or companies with operations in France. The proviso did not survive House-Senate negotiations.

“The House, they stick those goofy things in,” said Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Steve Morris, R-Hugoton.

KU under fire

House members see equal goofiness from the Senate, where the proviso on “obscene” videos was added — as a serious proposal from Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, who has also filed a complaint against the KU professor.

Morris dislikes provisos because the most controversial ones seem to be offered during floor debate, meaning they are spared the scrutiny and testimony to which the committee process would subject them.

“It’s a way for an individual to get something in a bill that they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise,” Morris said.

Others see provisos as legislative micromanagement of the agencies that make up the executive branch.

Decades ago, budget bills outnumbered provisos. For the 1904 fiscal year, for example, lawmakers scattered pieces of the state budget through 51 bills, with only 13 provisos.

Seventy years later, the budget for fiscal 1974 was contained in just eight bills but carried 193 provisos. The fiscal 1994 budget had 318 provisos.

Last year, then-Gov. Bill Graves vetoed 11 provisos in a budget cleanup bill, including one blocking further state participation in federal litigation against computer software giant Microsoft and a second one restricting the ability of agencies to furlough employees.

Graves called the second proviso an “unreasonable intrusion” into the executive branch’s business and “micromanaging of the worst kind.”

A ‘check and balance’

But lawmakers like Neufeld and Rep. Rocky Nichols, D-Topeka, the ranking Democratic on the House Appropriations Committee, defend the use of provisos. They say the Legislature already sets policy anyway when it decides how much money to allocate to individual programs.

And many provisos are technical. Neufeld estimates that three-quarters of them deal with accounting issues.

As for other, more substantive provisos, Nichols describes them as a tool for keeping the executive branch accountable.

“They’re a check and balance to make sure that taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted,” he said.

Provisos also help legislators avoid procedural roadblocks. Wagle said she drafted the one on videos in undergraduate sexuality classes because she’d spent so much time gathering information that she missed legislative deadlines for introducing bills.

“I see it as a legitimate process,” Wagle said. “It does release you from ordinary time constraints.”

However provisos are viewed by individual legislators, their use isn’t likely to decrease in years to come.

“The budget has gotten much bigger and much more complicated,” Neufeld said.