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House and Senate leaders have made significant policy decisions, unveiling them during the fifth conference committee hearing on the Monday evening at the Capitol.

Sen. David Ige and Rep. Sylvia Luke, who chair the Legislature’s money committees, announced funding levels for education and information technology initiatives as well as a contingency plan for automatic federal budget cuts. They also agreed on how many vacant positions would be cut as part of a broader effort to make the state budget more transparent.

The decisions keep the committee on track to finish the operating side of the state’s roughly $24 billion two-year budget by Tuesday night. It would then head to the full House and Senate for final approval before session ends May 2.

The House and Senate had different views on what to do this year in terms of funding vacant positions. Both sides wanted to “true up” the budget, but differed on when and how to go about it.

The House budget eliminated almost 1,000 vacant positions to save roughly $55 million. The Senate version of the budget restored funding for these positions after department heads complained that they rely on that money to pay for other things.

After much discussion with department heads, Luke and Ige agreed to cut 200 vacant positions for a savings of roughly $8 million. Luke called it a good step forward.

“I think what Chair Ige and I accomplished today was changing the behavior of the various departments, being more responsive and accountable for these different vacancy positions,” Luke said after the hearing.

Ige said it’s time for departments to stop managing their budgets by holding positions vacant until they accumulate whatever they need to pay for whatever they want.

“On a going forward basis we want to ensure that the budgets are more transparent, that if there are costs like overtime or other kinds of items that it really should be budgeted explicitly rather than be budgeted as positions,” he said.

Lawmakers seem inclined to help at least some of the departments make the transition too.

For example, the chairs agreed to cut vacant positions within the Department of Public Safety while adding $2.6 million over the next two years to fund overtime costs. They also allocated money to pay the department’s high electric costs that it had been paying through vacant positions.

Transforming the State’s Information Technology Infrastructure

Gov. Neil Abercrombie had asked for almost $60 million each of the next two years to fund his information technology initiative.

The Senate had agreed to fund roughly 85 percent of this, but the House version of the budget provided hardly any money.

Ige and Luke settled on $33 million in operating funds, which they say will be enough to launch some of the key components and modernize the tax system.

“We believe it’s sufficient to advance the cause for IT transformation and we’ll see how far they can get,” Ige said.

Laptops … For Some Students

Abercrombie wants laptops or iPads in the hands of every student in Hawaii. He asked the Legislature to approve more than $7.1 million in 2014 and $22.2 million in 2015 for the Department of Education’s digital curriculum for Common Core State Standards.

The conference committee wants to ease into this initiative to see how it works before allocating all the requested money.

Ige and Luke agreed on $8.22 million in funding for the first year and no money in the second year. They said it would be prudent for the state to start with a pilot program in three complex areas — Kau on the Big Island, and Nanakuli and Pearl City on Oahu.

Sequestration, Union Contracts

Lawmakers decided to only put $15 million of the $25 million the administration requested as a contingency fund for the automatic federal budget cuts.

Luke said only six states are taking any type of precaution like this and Hawaii is one of them. She said lawmakers are also looking at forming an interim House-Senate committee to track the impacts of sequestration.

The House and Senate versions of the budget that were approved last month had included the full $25 million request.

Ige and Luke agreed to fund $107 million over a five-year period to pay for two new contract agreements.

UPW has two units that together represent 14,000 public employees. In addition to the nurses, the union’s members include 8,000 non-supervisory employees in blue-collar positions.

One of the big unknowns remaining in the budget talks is how much money lawmakers will agree to put toward Abercrombie’s early childhood education initiative, his top legislative priority.

Luke said the committee may go ahead and approve a budget and let the committee chairs continue work on key bills to start a publicly funded preschool program. She said the money for the program would just be reflected in the state financial plan that lawmakers are working on concurrently with the budget.

The conference committee will continue its work on the state budget, as well as the judiciary and Office of Hawaiian Affairs budgets, starting at 7 p.m. Tuesday.