(KAIR)--The 2015 Kansas Legislative session has come to a close after a record setting 113 days. The extra time was needed in order for lawmakers to send a balanced budget proposal to Governor Sam Brownback.

State Representative Jerry Henry says a lot of work went into preparing the nearly $15 billion budget, with reductions in funding making the job even more difficult. “There were a lot of cuts that were made to the budget...the big one was the school block grant, didn't really cut money there, but it makes it level, or flat funded...and that's the big one. The school funding for K-12 takes up fifty percent of our budget, so that is a big part of the budget when you work on that. A lot of the other areas were flat funded . I can't even think of any part of the budget that got too much of an increase, so we are pretty much all flat funded at this point. Now the Governor, in the final tax package, still has to make $50 million in cuts.”

The Cummings Democrat adds that Brownback has not indicated where he will make those cuts, and he isn't sure where they can be made...”if you have education and then medicaid...half of the people in our nursing homes in the state of Kansas are paid for by medicaid...if you put school and medicaid together, it's eighty percent of our budget, so there is not too much after that if you leave those two alone...he will have a hard time finding finding that 50 million and not hit someone that is going to make some suffering going on.”

Henry says that he also has some concerns on the sales tax and cigarette tax increases included in the budget. He says “unfortunately, now that our sales tax is one of the highest in the nation...that makes it very difficult. I voted against all the tax packages because being...on a neighboring state border, we look at it, Missouri has seventeen cents on a pack of cigarettes, we are now at a $1.50, so it's going to put some of our businesses at a tremendous competitive disadvantage.”

Henry says that the proposed budget is only a short term fix and will only effect the fiscal year starting on July 1st. He expects more discussion on the budget will take place once lawmakers reconvene in January, but did not rule out the possibility of meetings taking place as early as fall of this year.