The Arkansas General Assembly failed to pass an appropriations bill for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission on Thursday, the last day of the fiscal session, leaving the agency’s funding up in the air.

This means that at the start of of the new fiscal year on July 1, the Game and Fish Commission will have no spending power and will not be able to pay its employees’ salaries unless the governor and the General Assembly take action before then.

Senate Bill 21, if passed into law, would have allowed for spending just over $177 million and maintaining 644 employees.

The dispute over the spending bill hinged on the salary cap for the director of the Game and Fish Commission, Austin Booth. Booth currently makes $152,638 annually and the unamended Senate Bill 21 would have raised that to $190,000.

The House rejected Senate Bill 21 by a vote of 62-21. Appropriations bills need approval from three quarters of the 100-member House to pass.

The Senate initially passed Senate Bill 21, with the $190,000 cap, without opposition on May 1 but expunged that vote on Thursday in order to amend it after it was voted down in the House.

The amended version of Senate Bill 21, which the Senate passed on Thursday without any “no” votes, raised Booth’s salary cap to $157,216.

By then, though, the House had already adjourned. This is apparently the first time the General Assembly has failed to pass an appropriations bill by the end of a fiscal session since it began holding them in 2008.

“This is not that they’re not going to have the money, they just can’t spend it” without an appropriations bill, said Rep. Lane Jean, R-Magnolia, House chair for the Joint Budget Committee, before the House vote.

Jean cited a letter from the Game and Fish Commission which said that, even if the cap was raised higher, the director’s salary wouldn’t be raised above $170,437. “I think that’s a couple of thousand lower than the lowest-paid secretary,” Jean said.

He urged his colleagues to approve the bill, saying he was doing so partly because “Fundamentally… I am against the suspension of rules” in order to speed up the process of amending the bill and bringing it back before both chambers before the end of the session.

“The question is, what are we going to do in the special session that’s going to be any better than what we’re doing right here,” he said.

The cost of holding a special session, several lawmakers said, would be $100,000.

Speaking against the bill, Rep. Robin Lundstrum, R-Elm Springs, put some of the blame for the delay on Game and Fish.

“All the other directors and agencies, they managed to get all their stuff done and in in a timely fashion,” she said. “We are holding up a whole budget for all these other people that have to get salaries too, come July 1st, for one person, and it could have been handled earlier.”

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Lundstrum said passing the bill could set a precedent for agencies to do the same again in the future. She voted “present.”

The Senate voted Thursday to remain in session indefinitely. The General Assembly could have extended the session by 15 days with a three-quarters vote in both chambers.

Jean said after the House vote, though, that he didn’t think that another vote would have any effect on the outcome and that he expects Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders to authorize a special session in June to pass appropriations for Game and Fish, several media outlets reported.

House Speaker Mark Hester, R-Cave Springs, said Thursday that it might be “helpful to step away for a bit and regroup,” according to reports.

This article originally appeared on Fort Smith Times Record: Arkansas legislature: Fiscal session ends without fish and game budget