Utah Commissioner of Higher Education Rich Kendell was all smiles Thursday after hearing that lawmakers favor USHE's "conservative" budget request — at least for now.

The Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee voted 9-5 to spend at least $36.5 million in state money on USHE ongoing needs, which include being able to pay the fuel and light bills at nine public institutions.

If nothing else, Kendell sees the vote as a message for the Executive Appropriations Committee.

"It was a statement to say, 'We want to have an impact on the appropriations process,' " Kendell said.

It's probable, he added, that the committee will come back in a meeting Monday and continue their own prioritization process.

Then it will come down to finding $7 million for compensation, $15 million for fuel and power and $3.5 million for nursing and engineering initiatives, which are among the regents' top priorities for funding. Lawmakers struggled in the meeting with the potential impact of funding one priority and not the other.

Sen. Ron Allen, D-Stansbury Park, said his committee has been discussing for days what to him seem like "reasonable" requests as laid out by the State Board of Regents, which oversees public higher education.

The signal Rep. Gregory Hughes, R-Draper, is worried other lawmakers will see is that the higher education committee didn't do its "homework" by simply adopting the regents' budget.

Hughes, along with both committee chairmen, voted against Allen's motion. For Allen, the motion was symbolic of an "overall approach" to take with public higher education, which in recent years has seen huge budget cuts while enrollment, along with tuition, keeps going up.

The committee was unanimous, however, in adopting the regents' base budget requests of $904.3 million for USHE, $45.3 million for the Utah College of Applied Technology, $19.6 million for the Utah Education Network and $730,000 for the Utah Medical Education Council. Over one-third of USHE's fiscal year 2006 budget will come from tuition revenues.

Like USHE, UCAT and UEN also have additional requests that lawmakers still must pick and choose from for funding approval.

The fiscal shadow still looming over higher education is how much state money will go toward roads. One legislator recently told Kendell, "This is the year of roads."

"It's not the year of roads, it's the decade of roads," Kendell told the committee.

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com