57 days: The state Supreme Court has given lawmakers until April 12 to produce a constitutional school finance plan.

MONDAY’ HIGHLIGHTS

• Senate budget writers Monday recommended an $18 million spending increase for higher education institutions, but they didn’t say how the universities should spend the additional money.

That immediately raised the question of whether the regents schools have to give employees a 2.5 percent pay raise or can spend the money in other ways.

Kansas University Chancellor Robert Hemenway said if the Legislature sticks with the funding increase, the pay raise for university workers will be there.

“The assumption has been all along that we could get to the 2.5 percent,” Hemenway said.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has proposed a 2.5 percent pay increase for all state employees.

She recommended that funding for the raise come out of the $18 million proposed increase in regents’ operating grants.

Members of the Senate Ways and Means Committee said the operating grants were meant to give universities latitude in spending, so they recommended the increase but took out any requirement that the increase go to salaries.

• A Senate Committee endorsed legislation restricting sales of tablet-form, over-the-counter cold medicines containing ephedrine. The substance can be an ingredient in making methamphetamine.
• A state audit of $176 million in STAR bonds spent on the Kansas Speedway and Village West projects in Wyandotte County found about $1.5 million in spending not authorized for STAR bond funding, and an additional $28 million that probably went beyond what legislators envisioned for STAR bonds, which use future sales tax revenues to pay for current redevelopment costs.
• Kansas Department of Health and Environment released a study on oral health care of children statewide and concluded improvements were needed.

TODAY’S SCHEDULE

9 a.m.: House Commerce and Labor Committee hearing on bill to prohibit living wage ordinances

Noon: Senate Education Committee hearings on school finance bills

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Due to the relative closeness of the sinkhole to a passenger rail line, my constituents are greatly concerned.”

— Sen. Terry Bruce, R-Hutchinson, after it was announced that a Senate committee will have a hearing Thursday concerning a recently formed sinkhole near southeast Hutchinson.