The House blinked on Wednesday and decided to save their fight over background check funds for the Department of Public Safety for another day, and another budget.

Senate Bill 15-159 got unanimous support Wednesday from the House and is now on its way to the governor’s desk.

As introduced, SB 159 was to provide $3 million in additional funding for the Department of Public Safety for the remainder of the 2014-15 fiscal year, which ends on June 30. That money would fund additional training for law enforcement on cold-case homicides and AMBER alerts; funding for the state’s toxicology lab, to handle DUI/DWAI blood samples; and money to process rape test kits.

The bill was controversial before it had even left the Joint Budget Committee. The committee tied on its vote to also grant a department request for $369,000 to handle a backlog of background checks for concealed handgun permits. So that was left out of the bill as it went through the Senate.

House Democrats decided last month to put that funding into the bill and sent it back to the Senate. In an unusual move, JBC Chair Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, asked the Senate to adhere to its position, rather than the standard request to send it to a conference committee to resolve differences between the two versions. And that led to a two-week stalemate with the House.

Would they also adhere, effectively killing the bill? Or would they back off and let the bill go to the governor without the background check funding?

On Wednesday, Rep. Millie Hamner, D-Frisco, the JBC’s ranking Democrat, asked the House to recede from its position and re-pass the bill. “We’re disappointed,” Hamner said, that the request for the background check funds didn’t get Senate approval, but “at the same time we’re not willing to put the rest of the bill at jeopardy.”

In a mid-session meeting with reporters after Wednesday morning’s action, Speaker of the House Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, D-Boulder, denied that the Democrats had blinked. “I see us as being the adults in the room,” she said. “There was very little alternative.”

Hullinghorst told reporters that the Senate vote to adhere had been “rash,” but that the Senate leadership was “contrite” about adherence and would try to avoid that in the future. “I think we made some progress and will make more because of this particular situation” for the next supplemental, SB 161, on the undocumented driver’s license funding for the Department of Revenue Supplemental, Hullinghorst said.

As a result of the standoff, Hullinghorst said they reached good resolution with the Senate on how to go forward and that they now have a “procedural understanding.” She also raised the possibility that the background check funding could come back as part of the funding for the Department of Public Safety in the 2015-16 Long Appropriations Bill.

A conference committee was appointed Wednesday to resolve the driver’s license issue on the House and Senate versions of SB 161; conferees, as is usual, are the members of the Joint Budget Committee, which has so far tied in its votes on the license funding portion of the bill.

— Marianne@coloradostatesman.com