Sen. Jim Denning, R-Overland Park, talks with reporters following a Ways and Means Committee meeting in which he offered a plan for balancing the state's budget this year without major spending cuts or a retroactive tax increase.

Topeka ? The Kansas Senate on Monday moved closer to a plan intended to balance the state’s budget for the remaining three and a half months of the current fiscal year without making major spending cuts, and with significantly less borrowing from idle funds than Gov. Sam Brownback and the House proposed.

It does, however, rely on a number of complex accounting moves. The Senate Ways and Means Committee gave tentative approval to the plan Monday, and members said they will wait until Tuesday before voting to advance the bill to the full Senate. The extra time would allow legislative staff to produce spreadsheets showing in more detail how it would affect the state’s overall financial picture going forward.

Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning, R-Overland Park, who serves on the committee, said he will not propose making immediate spending cuts to K-12 education in the final months of this fiscal year, as he and other GOP leaders had proposed earlier in the session.

Sen. Jim Denning, R-Overland Park, talks with reporters following a Ways and Means Committee meeting in which he offered a plan for balancing the state's budget this year without major spending cuts or a retroactive tax increase.

But he acknowledged that there are still some in the Senate who may insist on spending cuts.

“There are some members in the Senate that feel that their constituents want them to attempt to cut before they raise taxes, and somebody may bring that amendment,” he said. “There are lots of stripes in the legislative body.”

Denning’s plan makes a few significant changes to the bill that the House passed last month by an 87-36 margin.

That bill called for delaying a payment into the state pension system at the end of this year, and not repaying at all a payment that was delayed at the end of the last fiscal year. It also called for borrowing $317 million from an idle funds account currently invested in the pension system and repaying that loan over a period of seven years.

Denning’s plan, by contrast, would repay the delayed pension fund payment, but not until sometime in the next fiscal year that begins July 1.

It also would delay only about $150 million of payments that are due this year, but that money would be repaid over a period of 20 years, at the rate of about $15 million each year, which he said would keep the system on track toward being fully funded by 2033.

In addition, Denning’s plan calls for borrowing only as much money from the idle funds account as is needed to leave the state general fund with a $50 million ending balance on June 30. He estimated that at around $100 million instead of the $317 million the House had proposed.

Denning said his plan is based in part on the assumption that lawmakers will pass some kind of major tax legislation this year that will help get the state through the next fiscal year and beyond.

But Democrats on the panel were leery of passing the bill so early, saying they would prefer to act on the tax bill first so lawmakers will know how much revenue they have available going forward.

Topeka Sen. Laura Kelly, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said she was concerned about making a commitment to higher KPERS payments next year before lawmakers address the Kansas Supreme Court’s recent order on school finance or reverse cuts to the state Medicaid program that Brownback ordered last year.

“There are a number of other things that we must fund in (Fiscal Year) 2018, so I’m reluctant to vote in favor of this amendment, at least until we have passed a tax bill and we know whether we can afford it, given all the other expenses that we have,” she said.

If the bill passes out of committee Tuesday, Denning said he would plan on bringing it up for debate by the full Senate on Thursday.

Brownback’s budget director Shawn Sullivan said he couldn’t say whether the administration would accept the plan before seeing a more detailed analysis of it.