With the House in a rare Sunday evening voting session, budget bills slowly started making their way through that chamber as legislators are hopeful of getting a budget done by week’s end.

However, one question is still nagging members of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives: Where will the revenue come from to support the budget plan?

When noting the Senate has said it has done its job in sending budget bills over to the House before recessing and going on six-hour call last week, members of both parties of the House asked where the money is to support the $30.8 billion spending plan currently in their chamber.

“We have two tax code bills sitting over in the Senate, so if they were serious about sending everything over they would have loaded the taxes to pay for their funding and send it over,” said Rep. Seth Grove (R-York). “The fact that the two House tax code bills are still sitting in Senate Finance Committee, I would have to say you’ve got to pay for what you spend.”

The House Republican caucus seemed to emerge from a several hours-long internal meeting Saturday afternoon with bad news for fans of the five-party budget framework agreed to just before Thanksgiving.

Following what appeared to be a complicated discussion, rank-and-file members told reporters that the caucus has agreed to run a pared-down $30.2 billion budget bill that no longer includes the governor’s increases in public education and also no longer includes GOP priorities of pension and liquor reform.

That bill is slated for a Sunday vote in the House Appropriations Committee.

“It’s far pared-down,” said Rep. Seth Grove (R-York). “No sales tax, sales tax expansion, PIT, that kind of stuff.”

He said the decision to drop pension and liquor reform was made after the realization the governor would not support the concepts without his desired increases in revenue, but he did not say whether or not the proposal would fly with Senate Republicans or the governor.

A group of Republican lawmakers from the House and the Senate sounded the alarm Thursday on what they believe is a lack of transparency in how money is being spent by the Wolf administration during the protracted state budget impasse.

Including federal dollars, Rep. Seth Grove (R-York) said the Wolf administration has spent $30.4 billion in the period between July 1 and October 31.

A report authored by Rep. Grove and Representatives Chris Dush (R-Jefferson) and Jim Christiana (R-Beaver) was released with recommendations about how to bring more transparency to the way dollars are spent and calling on the auditor general to take a look at the issue.

“What we discovered in this report is the administration used prior year funds without any oversight from the legislature or transparency to the public to fund Harrisburg first,” Rep. Grove said.

While its use for additional school funds has unanimously been given the green light twice by Republicans in the House and the Senate, some in the GOP are seeing the twice-vetoed Education Code bills passed by the legislature as the perfect opportunity to revisit the use of the new basic education funding formula.

The new formula was developed after the bipartisan Basic Education Funding Commission held a number of hearings across the state before delivering their report with new funding recommendations in June.

While the Wolf administration was skeptical of the new formula’s usage for the 2015-2016 fiscal year, stating they wished to bring school districts back to pre-Corbett funding levels before using the formula to drive out new dollars, Republicans insisted on using the funding formula for funds that went above-and-beyond last year’s amounts.

A similar use of the new funding formula was seen in the Education Code bill passed along with the vetoed stop-gap funding measures in September.

While initially sources within the House Republican Caucus told The PLS Reporter that members were using the time during the budget impasse to learn more about how the use of the new formula would affect their particular districts, some members have gone so far as to call for a review of certain elements of the new formula and hold off on its usage until such time as the formula can be reconsidered.

Groups and officials representing Pennsylvania public school interests called on lawmakers and the governor to support legislation that would significantly reform PlanCON, the process by which school districts are reimbursed for construction projects.

“[PlanCON] consists of eleven laborious, paperwork intensive, bureaucratic, archaic, and out-of-date paperwork submissions,” said Jay Himes of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials. “Taken altogether, it is simply a train wreck when it comes to the state budget and its ability to fund the commitment the Commonwealth should have made for schools to get reimbursed.”

He said the current PlanCON process and the lack of funding resulting in less-than-expected reimbursements for construction projects has led to cuts in programs and personnel as well as increases to property taxes.

Speakers noted many of PlanCON’s provisions—which have their origin in the 1970s—still remain in effect today.