The secretary of the Kansas Senate on Monday officially delivered the final budget bill to Gov. Sam Brownback, thus starting the 10-day clock for the governor to sign the bill and make any line-item vetoes of provisions he doesn’t like.

The 10-day clock expires on Thursday, May 19.

Most observers think it’s highly unlikely Brownback would veto the bill in its entirety, despite questions that it violates the Kansas Constitution’s requirement that the Legislature provide “for raising sufficient revenue to defray the current expenses of the state for two years.” Instead, it assumes Brownback will have to sweep money out of the highway fund and make significant cuts in general fund spending in order to balance the budget.

But the bill is also full of legislative “provisos” that direct the governor to where he can and can’t make some of those cuts, and that’s where it’s possible he could use his line-item veto authority. Those include:

• Higher Education: The one stirring the most controversy currently concerns how he would allocate cuts to the state’s six universities, using a formula that would make Kansas University and Kansas State University shoulder a bigger share of the $17.7 million in cuts. That would mean an extra $1 million out of each school’s funding for next year, on top of the cuts they are already scheduled to take: $4 million for KU and $3 million for K-State.

KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little and K-State Interim President Gen. Richard Myers launched a public relations campaign last week, mobilizing their alumni to contact the governor and urge him to veto that provision. The Kansas Board of Regents has also weighed in on that issue, saying that constitutionally, they should be in charge of supervising how money is allocated among the universities, not the Legislature.

• K-12 education: The budget also includes a “hold harmless” provision for K-12 education, saying that public schools are to be spared from any future allotment cuts that occur in the next fiscal year.

Administration officials have said they’re not overly happy with that idea because it only means other areas of the budget — namely higher education and Medicaid, to name the next two biggest pots of money — would have to take proportionately larger cuts.

• State hospitals: Brownback has suggested that it may be time for Kansas to get out of the business of owning and operating state mental hospitals, and he has actively called for exploring the possibility of either outsourcing or privatizing the operations of state hospitals in Osawatomie and Larned.

Both hospitals suffer from chronic under-staffing, due in large part to the low wages offered for positions there. At Osawatomie, the problem is compounded by the abundance of higher-paying health care jobs in the nearby Kansas City market, while at Larned the state suffers from the same problem other employers face: recruiting people to move to a small western Kansas town that is hundreds of miles away from the nearest big city.

Lawmakers inserted language into the budget bill that, on the one hand, makes the task of privatizing a little easier by providing that any new superintendent, physician or other staff hired at those institutions will unclassified, thereby removing them from civil service protection and making it easier to change their job duties and descriptions.

But on the other hand, they also inserted language that prohibits the governor from executing an agreement to outsource or privatize either hospital without approval by the full Legislature.

• Docking State Office Building: An issue that’s probably of little importance to most people outside Topeka, but one that has stirred an amazing amount of controversy.

The 12-story building just west of the Statehouse is recognizable by its flat shape and bluish-tinted windows. Built in the mid-1950s, it reflects the architectural trends of its time, which put a premium on low-cost, no-frills design. First known as the Kansas State Office Building, it was renamed in 1987 — fittingly, some have said — to honor a former governor whose motto was “austere but adequate government.”

In addition to wanting the state out of the hospital business, another of Brownback’s initiatives has been trying to get out of the real estate-owning business. Many of the agencies located in the Docking building have been moved to leased office space elsewhere, and the administration has called for demolishing Docking.

But the Legislature so far has not gone along, mainly due to the unexpectedly high cost of relocating the building’s “power plant,” a facility that pipes heating and air conditioning to all the other buildings in the Capitol Area Complex. Last year, the administration tried to get around that, signing a lease-purchase contract to move the power plant and putting up the Landon State Office Building east of the Capitol as collateral.

That created a firestorm of controversy, and the administration was eventually forced to cancel that contract.

The new budget bill now includes language that deletes any previous funding for its demolition and prohibits any state agency from using any funds to demolish the building or relocate the power plant without prior approval by the full Legislature.

• KPERS payment: Finally, the bill grants one of Brownback’s requests, to continue delaying a $92.6 million payment into the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System, which was due April 15, through the next fiscal year. But it also provides that any excess tobacco settlement funds the state receives, and any general tax revenues it receives above official estimates, be used to repay that money, with 8 percent annual interest.

Some have suggested that would zero out any potential ending balance for the state’s general fund until the payment is repaid in full, which could take as long as 10 years.