Gov. Steve Sisolak delivered his proposed $8.68 billion budget proposal to lawmakers on Monday, but a key component of the budget won’t come up for months — the cost of state worker collective bargaining.

Though it didn’t come up during his State of the State speech Tuesday, Sisolak and state lawmakers are facing a unique wrinkle heading into the 2021 Legislature, where for the first time wide swaths of state employees will be allowed to collectively bargain for benefits, work conditions and other contract considerations.

But the collective bargaining process operates on a different track than the normal budget process, meaning that a potential price tag on allowing state worker collective bargaining could come as late as mid-March.

During a Wednesday meeting of the legislative budget subcommittee, state Department of Administration Director Laura Freed said the agency was still in the process of negotiating with the seven bargaining units (represented by four employee unions) who had organized to collectively bargain with their employer — the state.

“I am unfortunately not at liberty to discuss the bargaining sessions, but I can say that the state is in different places with different unions,” Freed said. “In some cases, we are very close to finishing bargaining on all non-economic sections of bargaining agreements, and in other cases, less so.”

Gaining collective bargaining rights for state workers was a major goal and accomplishment of the state’s organized labor movement, which poured millions of dollars in campaign contributions to help Sisolak get elected governor in 2018 — the first Democrat to hold the position in more than two decades.

Local government employees were afforded collective bargaining rights in 1969, and since the 1970s there have been multiple legislative attempts to extend those same rights to state employees — though past bills in 1991 and 2009 extending those rights to state workers were vetoed by the governor at the time.

Under much negotiation and some significant amendments — including the ability of the governor to effectively veto any negotiated salary demands, retirement contributions or health insurance changes — lawmakers passed the state worker collective bargaining bill, SB135, on a party-line vote near the end of the 2019 session.

The bill set up a process for 11 different types of state employees, grouped by general type of employment, to form an employee union, select bargaining representatives, file for recognition with the state-run Government Employee-Management Relations Board and ultimately begin bargaining and hashing out employment contracts with the state.

But the implementation of the bill operates on a different track than the normal budget process, where the governor submits his proposed budget ahead of the legislative session, and lawmakers then spending 120 days digging into the details and making any tweaks.

Under the timeline established in SB135, the state worker bargaining units and the state itself (as the employer) started bargaining last November, with a deadline set for March 1 before an impasse is declared and negotiations move to an arbitration process.

The arbitrator is then supposed to come to a decision by March 15, and then the governor is supposed to submit budget amendment bills for any changes that will require legislatively approved appropriations (such as changes to salary, or a need to add more full-time positions).

But Freed said that the deadlines laid out in law were “not super clear and the subject of much discussion,” especially as the state enters its first round of collective bargaining with employees. She said that currently employed arbitrators have an “heavy” caseload already, meaning a quick turnaround on making a decision could take longer than that March 15 deadline.

“I wish I could commit to something for you, especially knowing how differently the negotiations are proceeding with each group,” she said. “But we are very mindful, I will say, how the collective bargaining timeframe intersects with the budget review timeframe.”

That means that any collective bargaining provisions or agreed-to concessions that require actual state dollars will require a budget amendment sometime between March and May (ahead of the Economic Forum’s May meeting and final tax revenue projection), according to a timeline for anticipated anticipation.

According to the recently adopted 120-day legislative calendar, lawmakers will begin the budget closing process by March 30. A budget amendment requiring a substantial appropriation filed after that date could cause procedural or budgetary issues for lawmakers already on a tight time schedule to complete their work.

As a point of comparison, a 3 percent pay raise for state workers across the board cost about $76 million.

To be clear, bargaining provisions that don’t require legislative appropriations could be approved sooner; that approval is up to the Board of Examiners (composed of the governor and other top elected officials) to give final approval. Plus, the governor can always set salaries and wages regardless of negotiations, thanks to the provisions in SB135.

Republican Sen. Ben Kieckhefer said during the meeting that time was of the essence in finishing the negotiations and sending any potential bill to the Legislature, noting that “economic considerations” could even come in the form of additional employees to meet a new caseload standard, for example.

“The importance is getting this stuff done sooner rather than later, so that the correct branch of government has authority over expenditures,” he said.