Before leaving on Thursday, the Missouri Senate took up and passed all of the appropriation bills including adopting the House position on transit assistance funding. This included $500,000 in general revenue and $1,710,875 in state transportation funds for a total of $2,210,875 in funding. This is an increase of $1,150,000 over last year’s appropriation.
Since the House and Senate passed the same amounts of funding for transit assistance in their respective versions of the bill, this item will not be an issue in conference.
In addition during the appropriation process there was funding put into HB 2004 to fund a line item referred to as “Move Missouri Forward”. It is a cost share program for communities to fund local projects. The Senate amended the language to specifically include multimodal among the projects which could be considered for funding.
The House funded Move Missouri Forward with $30,000,000 from the Surplus Revenue Fund while the Senate elected to fund it with $20,000,000 in general revenue funds. The funding source will be part of the discussion and negotiation during conference committee on HB 2004. The conference committee will be comprised of five members of each chamber to resolve the differences between the two versions of the bills.