Kansas lawmakers left the Statehouse Thursday for a four-day Memorial Day weekend with a lot of work still waiting to be done — and with money to keep the legislative session going quickly running out.

Lawmakers had budgeted for a 100-day session this year, and Thursday marked the 101st day. They’ve been working, though, with skeletal staff since early May, which probably saved some money. But Thomas Day, who heads the Legislature’s Administrative Services Department, has said there is only enough money in the legislative budget to continue paying legislators their daily salary for a few more days.

Because neither chamber will be in session for more than two consecutive days, the four days they’re out do not count as “legislative days,” and lawmakers will not be paid for them.

That raises the prospect of lawmakers either having to work without pay, and with no clerical staff at all, even for the key committees, or having to pass a supplemental spending bill for themselves so they can finish the job of passing a school finance plan and a budget, both of which will require tax increases to fund.

It appeared on Thursday, however, that the logjam that has been holding back progress is finally starting to break. That’s when the House gave final passage to a new school finance plan that would phase in over two years a $280 million increase in annual education spending, with much of that new money targeting the lowest-performing students.

Critics of that plan say they don’t believe it is nearly enough to satisfy the Kansas Supreme Court’s definition of adequate funding. But optimists in the House and Senate are hoping it’s enough of a good faith effort to convince the court not to follow through on its threat to close schools on July 1, although the court could order additional funding in the out years while keeping jurisdiction of the case.

Quietly, though, some lobbyists and lawmakers have been saying that Democrats and moderate Republicans may have overplayed their hand on school finance. By insisting on passing an education bill first, before they would even consider any tax bill, they ended up getting a much smaller funding bill than they had hoped for. And now it appears likely they’ll get a smaller tax bill as well.

The tax debate

In February, both chambers passed a tax bill that would have rolled back many of the income tax cuts that Republican Gov. Sam Brownback championed in 2012. An override attempt passed the House but failed in the Senate.

Soon after, the Kansas Supreme Court handed down its decision in the school finance case, Gannon v. Kansas, striking down current school funding as inadequate and giving lawmakers until June 30 to pass a constitutional funding mechanism.

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate said that decision changed the entire landscape, prompting them to insist on addressing school funding before anything else. Others, however, said the outcome of that case was never in doubt, and the March 2 decision should have surprised nobody.

House Taxation Committee Chairman Steven Johnson, R-Assaria, said that passage of the school finance bill now gives lawmakers an idea of how large of a tax package will be needed to fund state government for the next two years, and he’ll start working with the Senate in a conference committee to come up with another plan.

Senate back to work

The Senate, which has been pretty quiet for the past week, plans to debate its own school funding plan when senators return from the Memorial Day weekend. That plan — which was recently stripped of Sen. Jim Denning’s controversial proposal to fund it through a tax on utility bills — calls for only about $240 million in new spending, phased in over two years. But it would establish a new, per-pupil funding formula similar to the one in the House bill.

The Senate also is expected to debate concealed-carry in the coming week. After learning that the cost of securing just the four state psychiatric hospitals could run as high as $25 million for the next two years, the Senate Ways and Means Committee advanced a bill last week to permanently exempt state and municipally owned hospitals, health care clinics, community mental health centers, nursing homes and other health care facilities from the law that would otherwise require them to allow people to carry concealed firearms starting July 1.

That would also exempt the University of Kansas hospital in Kansas City, Kan., as well as St. Francis Health Center in Topeka, which the KU Hospital Authority is about to acquire, in partnership with Nashville-based Ardent Health Systems.

It would not, however, exempt public college and university campuses from the concealed-carry mandate.

Two-year budget

The only other issue that must be resolved before lawmakers adjourn is typically the biggest issue of any legislative session: passage of a budget.

So far this session, the Senate is the only chamber that has even debated and voted on a budget plan, and that was a preliminary budget outline prepared before the officials revenue estimates were updated in mid-April. Since then, the House and Senate budget committees have put together their “omnibus” budget plans, but neither chamber has yet put those bills on the debate calendar.

One option, which would save time but would likely anger many legislators, is for the House and Senate to go directly into conference negotiations on a budget. That’s allowed under the fairly lax rules of the Legislature because the issue of a two-year budget has passed out of one chamber and has been considered in committee by the other.

That would mean the full House and Senate would only have the opportunity to vote straight up-or-down on a budget plan negotiated by six people, three from the House and three from the Senate, with no opportunity to offer amendments.