photo by: Mike Yoder

The KU campus is pictured Friday, Feburary 6, 2015.

Topeka ? Public colleges and universities in Kansas could see at least some of the money that former Gov. Sam Brownback cut from their budgets in 2016 restored in their base funding next year.

Both the House and Senate budget committees on Wednesday voted to recommend restoring part of the $24 million that the Kansas Board of Regents had sought this year.

The Senate Ways and Means Committee voted to restore 75 percent of that money, starting in the fiscal year that begins July 1, while the House voted to restore only half that amount.

During debate, Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, argued for restoring only half the money as a way of phasing in a full restoration.

“I think phasing in the money can be helpful,” she said. “I know they’ve asked for it all now. But I think it’s much more economical and much more prudent to phase in the money.”

“I think that’s an interesting comment about phasing in the additional money, because we sure didn’t phase in their decreases,” replied Sen. Vicki Schmidt, R-Topeka. “We decreased them all at once over one year.”

Schmidt’s motion for a 75 percent restoration narrowly passed the committee by a vote of 7-6.

Brownback ordered the cuts in May 2016 as part of a $97 million package of allotment cuts he ordered to balance the budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 of that year.

For higher education, they totaled about $30.7 million, including $6.7 million to the University of Kansas’ Lawrence campus, plus $3.5 million for the KU Medical Center campus in Kansas City, Kan.

On average, they amounted to about 4 percent of each school’s general state aid, although KU, Kansas State University and Wichita State University took proportionately larger cuts, based on the idea that those schools have more access to federal grants and other revenue streams that the smaller schools cannot access.

In 2017, lawmakers restored some of those cuts to the larger schools. But the total higher education budget remains about $24 million lower than it was in 2016.

In the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Sydney Carlin, D-Manhattan, tried to push for restoring the entire $24 million in the upcoming fiscal year. That would have included $3.9 million for the KU Lawrence campus and $3.5 million for the Medical Center.

“Our universities, our Regents, all of our higher education have been patient and they’ve understood the situation we’ve been in with our budget,” she said during committee debate. “There’s some money here, and there’s no reason for them to have to sustain those cuts any longer.”

Carlin’s motion, however, failed in the committee on an unrecorded vote of 8-12.

Both panels worked throughout the day Wednesday crafting final budget bills for the full Legislature to consider when it returns Thursday for the start of a nine-day wrap-up session.

Each committee began with a 42-page memo listing all of the items that need to be addressed in that final bill, along with budget amendments being requested by Gov. Jeff Colyer.

The largest of those was a $109 million increase, covering both the current and next fiscal years, to pay for mandatory cost increases associated with Medicaid and child welfare services, which both committees endorsed.