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A pared down public education budget passed one more hurdle in the Utah Senate Monday.
Lawmakers unanimously signed off on a base budget for schools that is $63 million lighter. The bill now moves to the House for further slicing and dicing.
The funding bill — SB1 — is 98 percent of current funding levels after lawmakers asked education managers to cut 2 percent in a budgeting exercise.
Some lawmakers say the budget "stress test" was designed to highlight priorities and inefficiencies before starting the process of dividing up roughly $600 million in surplus revenue.
Logan Republican Sen. Lyle Hillyard said lawmakers now will work to reinvest the cut funding as well as $58 million in one-time and ongoing revenues to address enrollment growth.
Describing the base budgets approved Monday as a "cut," Hillyard said, would be like determining the winner of the Super Bowl at halftime.
"This is not the end-all," he said. "It's the foundation."
"We believe we'll be able to return with a final budget at the end of the session, which will repurpose the funds that have been temporarily taken from this budget," said Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, the sponsor of the budget bill.
Others said state workers have enough stress without budget games.
"I'm concerned about the fact that we've undertaken this 2-percent stress test exercise in a way that has caused not so much stress-testing, but stress-inducing and anxiety-inducing feelings on the part of many individuals in the State of Utah — individuals who are relying on these programs, whether they be in public ed, social services or higher ed," said House minority leader Brian King, a Salt Lake City Democrat.
And some outside of Utah's State Capitol have questioned lawmakers' budgeting exercise, which was pitched to educators as hypothetical before it was turned into legislation.
Sharon Gallagher-Fishbaugh, president of the Utah Education Association, described this year's budgeting process as "extremely disconcerting," like asking schools to forego their gas bill in order to keep the lights on.
"There's already enough stress in the system," she said. "We don't need more stress."
Hillyard said legislators are expecting revenue projections on Feb. 18 that will show how much funding they can add back.
He expects about $200 million in additional funding — beyond some increases that have already been spoken for in education and pay. Legislative committees will sort through about $1 billion in requests for additional spending.
Tribune reporters Lee Davidson and Robert Gehrke contributed to this story.