Lawmakers tasked with reconciling the House and Senate versions of the $27 billion budget long bill on Wednesday made fast work of the job, pushing aside the most glaring political additions to the bill made over the last two weeks of floor debate.

The group restored some of the money cut by the Senate for clean air programs and removed a controversial amendment banning state colleges and universities from purchasing fetal tissue for research.

The committee, made up of the six members of the Joint Budget Committee, unanimously approved the new reconciled budget. The members are Sens. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, Kevin Grantham, R-Canon City, Pat Steadman, D-Denver, and Reps. Millie Hamner, D-Dillon, Dave Young, D-Greeley, and Bob Rankin, R-Carbondale.

Republicans opposed to the Obama Administration carbon-cutting Clean Power Plan had sought to strip funding from the state’s air quality division. Senate majority Republicans stripped out about $370,000 and 2.4 full-time employee positions. But the conference committee voted 6-0 to restore more than half the amount, cutting just $111,652. That’s the figure budget committee member Rep. Bob Rankin, R-Carbondale, said was the newest and best estimate at how much it would cost to implement the plan without losing any employees. It’s very close to an estimate sent by the health and environment department to Senate Republicans in March. Asked by Republican lawmakers how much money the division was spending to draw up plans to meet the Obama administration emissions targets, staffers reported they had spent $111,651.92. But Republican lawmakers felt the department was holding back and threatened to withhold the entire $8.5 million air quality division budget.

The conference committee members also unanimously voted to remove from the budget the fetal tissue sales ban proposed by Sens. Tim Neville, R-Littleton, and Laura Woods, R-Arvada.

Gov. John Hickenlooper in the fall presented a draft budget based on revenue projections that proposed $190 million in tax refunds mandated by the Taxpayer Bill of Rights but that also proposed slashing $373 million for state programs, much of it from health care workers and state universities. The refunding and budget cutting is part of the “paradox” of Colorado’s state budgeting process, which is ruled by conflicting constitutional amendments, including the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. In what many in the Capitol were calling miraculous work done by the budget committee members, the state will manage to deliver no cuts to state colleges. The state will however cut some $73 million for hospitals. The budget year begins July 1st.

The bill now goes to the Senate and the House for approval before being sent to the governor to sign.

— Ramsey@coloradostatesman.com