Budget process a tale of two divergent plans.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

SALEM - House and Senate leaders have gone their separate ways all session - a pattern that could mark their adjournment, too, as one chamber is pushing to wrap things up by Friday, while the other plans to keep working apace.

House Majority Leader Wayne Scott, R-Canby, said Tuesday that his Republican-controlled chamber is on pace to conclude its work - with the monumental exception of completing a state budget - by the week's end. If that happens, the chamber would go dormant until a deal gets struck on spending for 2005-07.

"We, the House, should be completed on Friday, assuming everything goes along smoothly," he said, adding that any glitches or delays could push his chamber's adjournment off until next week.

But the Democrat-led Senate has no such plans. Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, said his chamber would continue to whittle away at the budget while also continuing to pass policy-related legislation.

"I just plan to do what we've always done in session, which is just keep working until you finally get the budget done," he said. "When the House goes out, it goes out. I'm not going to get caught up in that conversation."

In a formal acknowledgement that the Legislature won't have a final budget in place for the Friday start of the new biennium, the House is poised today to pass to the governor's desk a "continuing resolution" that will avoid a shutdown of state agencies in July.

After weeks of stalemate on the Legislature's sole constitutional mandate - passage of a balanced budget for 2005-07 - both sides say their pace en route to a final deal is quickening.

Of the roughly 100 budget bills pending, the House and Senate have agreed on about 64 of them. For the first time, the two chambers' budget chiefs, Scott and Sen. Kurt Schrader, D-Canby, are meeting nearly every day this week to negotiate over their spending differences.

Both said they are encouraged at their progress and at the prospects for a final agreement.

Still, the same differences that led the House in early May to pull out of the Joint Ways & Means Committee remain unresolved as adjournment draws near.

The Ways & Means panel is comprised of members from both chambers who traditionally work out spending decisions before bills go to the full chambers.

With the panel's demise, the House and Senate are drawing up separate spending blueprints.

In areas where one chamber can accept the others' spending plans, bills are on track to speed from one to the other and on to the governor's desk.

But in most of the key areas of the budget - education, public safety, health care and natural resources - agreements between the Senate Democrats and House Republicans have yet to be forged.

The House and Senate agreed months ago it would spend $12.393 billion on discretionary programs, but the chambers have yet to work out a deal on how those dollars will be divvied up.

It's becoming increasingly likely that the two chambers will end up dealing with these issues in the same way they would have had House Speaker Karen Minnis not broken up Ways & Means: in a committee of House and Senate negotiators. The difference is that this session, it would be in a conference committee, after the House and Senate have formally signaled their differences by rejecting one another's spending bills.

The sides agree that is the most probable means of ending the budget standoff and the session, but the House and Senate are planning markedly different routes to get there.

The House's strategy is to adjourn as soon as it can, possibly Friday or early next week, Scott said.

Oregon's constitution forbids one chamber from adjourning for more than three business days at a time without the permission of the other chamber, so the House would bring in the bare minimum of 40 members required for a quorum every three days until House and Senate negotiators struck a deal on the budget.

Once that occurred, he said, it would probably take about a week to process bills and vote them on to the governor for his signature.

Should the House go dark until a budget deal is reached, it would effectively leave for dead any bills that haven't been worked out by both chambers.

Former House Speaker Lynn Lundquist said that would prove frustrating to many rank-and-file lawmakers and lobbyists, including himself.

Lundquist, executive director of the Oregon Business Association, said the House's push to adjourn by week's end has caught him and others off guard, since they expected to have several more days or weeks beyond Friday to work out amendments or smooth over political hang-ups that have stalled their bills.

"I did not think this week was D-Day, if you will, for non-budget bills," said Lundquist, who has been pushing for a bill to expand Oregon's education stability fund.

Lundquist said the wild card in the House GOP's strategy is the role that rank-and-file members and pressure groups would play in convincing them that their bills were too important for House members to go home without first passing.

The House's minority Democrats disagree with the strategy, said caucus spokesman Lonn Hocklin.

"Our leadership is outraged that the House Republicans would pack things up and go home with so much work undone," he said.

But Lundquist, himself a Republican, said he wasn't sensing the same resolve to keep working on non-budget issues - among the majority Republicans.

"I'm sensing that they're not pushing back very hard," he said.

BUDGET ISSUES

Among the budget hangups that the Democratic Senate and the Republican House must resolve before they can close the session:

K-12 education: The Senate wants to spend $50 million more than the House, the biggest budget gap between the two chambers.

Higher education: The House wants to spend $6 million more than the Senate, with more money in undergraduate education and slightly higher tuition increases than the Senate. The House would increase tuition by 3.25 percent in the first year and 3.5 percent in year two. The Senate would increase tuition by 3 percent each year.

Natural resources: Differences are more ideological than fiscal in several areas. Example: the Senate backs spending $750,000 to operate the Pesticide Use Reporting System; the House budget does not fund this program, which some farmers and the pesticide industry opposes

Public safety: Both chambers recently agreed to fund prison construction in Madras. But the House would open the Central Oregon lockup at the end of 2006; the Senate would delay the opening until late 2007.