J.W. Rust and Melissa Glynn of the consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal outline their final recommendations to the House Appropriations Committee.

Topeka ? Efficiency consultants working on contract with the Kansas Legislature issued their final report Monday, urging lawmakers to take prompt action on their top priority recommendations, which range from pursuing revenue collections aggressively, to trimming state employee health care costs and allowing lottery ticket sales through vending machines.

But lawmakers now have to decide which of those recommendations can actually be done, and which ones will face stiff political opposition.

“There’s a little of both in there,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Ron Ryckman Jr., R-Olathe. “There will be a lot of decisions that we will have to make, but we’ll be able to make them with data and make data-informed decisions.”

The full report by the firm Alvarez & Marsal includes 105 recommendations that span across almost every agency and function of state government and could save the state $2 billion over five years if the Legislature adopted all of its recommendations. But of those, the consultants said, 21 show potential for producing immediate cost savings or increased revenue within the next several months.

J.W. Rust and Melissa Glynn of the consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal outline their final recommendations to the House Appropriations Committee.

J.W. Rust, one of the principals with the firm, said that was based on what’s called the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule.

“Eighty percent of the results can be achieved with 20 percent of the effort,” he said.

Some of those top 21 recommendations include:

• Filling vacant positions for collection agents in the Department of Revenue, estimated to generate $48 million in the next fiscal year, and $272.7 million over five years, which lawmakers have already included in a compromise budget bill to be voted on later this week.

• Requiring public school districts that have excess cash carryover in their fund balances to spend down those balances to benchmark levels. Any money beyond the maximum would be deducted from future funding under the recommendation, providing about $40 million next fiscal year and $193 million over five years.

• Increase administrative fees charged to employers to generate about $31 million a year.

• Shifting all state employees into lower-cost, high-deductible health insurance plans, saving about $13.7 million next year, and $59.7 million over five years.

• Allowing lottery ticket sales through vending machines, generating about $6.1 million for the state general fund next year, and $9.6 million a year after that.

• Having all public school districts consolidate their employee health benefits plan under the State Employee Health Plan, saving about $40 million next year, and $360 million over five years.

Sen. Marci Francisco, D-Lawrence, who serves on the Senate Ways and Means Committee, said she thinks the report offers valuable recommendations, but she questioned why the Legislature needed an outside consultant to tell them. The state paid Alvarez & Marsal $2.6 million to conduct the study.

“The idea that we can save money just by having employees who are collecting that revenue for us and auditing processes at their jobs shouldn’t be something that we have to spend a lot of money paying somebody else to tell us,” she said.

Several of the recommendations would require changes in state law, and Ryckman said those topics have already been assigned to various committees and subcommittees to begin studying.

Among those is the proposal to move all school employees into a unified health benefits plan under the State Employee Health Plan. Currently benefits are among the items that districts are required to bargain collectively with local teacher unions.

“That’s obviously something that would take a series of years to be accomplished,” said Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Ty Masterson, R-Andover.

But he said the proposal to shift all other state employees into the high deductible plan may be easier to accomplish.

“I moved myself to that last year and found it to be beneficial to me financially,” he said. “I have a diabetic daughter, so I have yearly defined costs to cover our health care.”

The idea of allowing vending machine sales of lottery tickets has been debated many times in the past. And even though it’s allowed in many other states, social conservatives in the Kansas Legislature have raised concerns about children having access to lottery sales.

Ryckman said he doubts there is much more the Legislature can do with the report in the remaining months of this fiscal year to have an impact on the current budget.

“But it will give us some more flexibility, hopefully, in (fiscal year) 2017,” he said.