JEFFERSON CITY • Gov. Jay Nixon and state legislative leaders have agreed to put several million dollars of the state’s anticipated budget surplus toward improvements at the state mental hospital, the Capitol and state parks.
Nixon, a Democrat, announced the plan Thursday morning following the release of April revenue figures that show the collections are ahead of expectations this year.
“As we continue to monitor these positive trends, strategic investment in key assets, such as our state parks, is a fiscally prudent approach to moving our state forward,” Nixon said in a statement.
But a deal already had been brokered with legislative leaders behind the scenes.
Just hours later, the Republican-controlled House approve legislation containing the funding. House Speaker Tim Jones, R-Eureka, and Senate President Pro Tem Tom Dempsey, R-St. Charles, told reporters that the Senate also is on board.
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“These are one-time expenditures for things on the books that everybody would like to accomplish,” Jones said.
Missouri’s year-to-date net general revenue collections are up 11.2 percent compared to 2012, according to state budget director Linda Luebbering. Net collections for last month were 27.4 percent higher than April 2012. Officials estimate that the state is on track to collect nearly $500 million more in state revenue this year than they had expected.
House Budget Chair Rick Stream, R-Kirkwood, said the governor worked with House and Senate leaders on a plan to spend about a quarter of that to make repairs and improvements that have been put off for several years. The rest will be held in the state reserve fund.
In the proposal sent to reporters Thursday morning, Nixon called for $13 million to go toward the planning and design of a new state psychiatric hospital in Fulton, $28 million for structural repairs to the Capitol and $45 million for improvements at Missouri State Parks to stimulate tourism.
Working on the plan through the day, lawmakers tweaked those figures, but Stream said the governor supports the changes they made.
The House bill calls for $50 million for window replacement and other structural repairs at the Capitol, $20 million for the state parks, $13 million for the Fulton hospital and$38 million to build a new state office building for the Missouri Department of Transportation on the site of the old state prison in Jefferson City — a project not mentioned in Nixon's original plan.
The Senate is expected to work on the proposal next week.
Several lawmakers have noted this session the need to replace Missouri’s aging psychiatric hospital in Fulton, which is the oldest public mental health facility west of the Mississippi River.
Rep. Jeanie Riddle, R-Mokane, said the hospital, which is in her district, is in “horrific” shape.
“That facility was started in the 1850s,” she said.
Plans from the state Department of Mental Health call for a new 300-bed facility to replace it, but the project’s price tag has been estimated at $200 million.
Dempsey said the money in the capital improvement bill is an investment into getting the project underway.
“It would allow the design work to go forward,” he said.
On the funding for state parks, Stream noted that lawmakers pared back the governor’s initial suggestion but said the House version of the bill would still be significant enough to address bigger issues at the parks.
“We felt we could get a start on some of the more serious repairs,” he said.
Nixon made his pitch for the improvement projects during his January State of the State speech. Jones said the governor's office approached him this week to work on a deal toward using some of the budget surplus to address them.
A separate bond proposal that includes money for the state hospital and parks, as well as funding for building upgrades at Missouri colleges and other projects, appears unlikely to pass with two weeks left in the session. The House gave first approval to the bond bill on Thursday. It still needs another vote in the House and Senate approval, and then it would go on a ballot for voters to decide.
Jones said funding certain projects with surplus money will allow lawmakers to shrink their $1.2 billion bond proposal before trying to get it through next year’s session.
“This allows us to appropriate money now that we do not have to borrow,” he said.
House leaders had earlier been cool to the suggestion that the state spend some of its surplus.
Jones and Stream said last week that they planned to hold the budget to the revenue estimate adopted in December, despite the increased collections.
“My feeling is, we need to put that money in the bank so that we can either use it for emergencies down the road or unintended consequences of some legislation that might have passed or if we want to give the money back to the citizens in tax cuts,” Stream said.
On Thursday, he and Jones said they consider the capital improvements proposal an issue separate from the budget because it would be a one-time expense.
Rep. Chris Kelly, a Democrat from Columbia who chaired the Budget Committee during a previous stint in the Legislature in the 1990s and had also urged against budgeting the surplus, agreed.
“I think this is a sensible and prudent way to proceed with one-time money,” he said.
(Capital improvements funding legislation is House Bill 19, and the bond bill is House Joint Resolution 14.)
Elizabeth Crisp covers Missouri politics and state government for the Post-Dispatch. Follow her on Twitter at @elizabethcrisp.
