So, now that a House/Senate conference committee has finished its work on Senate Bill 1, the state budget for the next two years, what is the bottomline on “diversions” of gas tax and vehicle fee money?

$67 million. In a $16 billion two-year TxDOT budget.

More on that in a minute. But for those of you unfamiliar with the lingo, a diversion in this context is the allocation of money in the state highway fund to uses other than building or maintaining roads. In the current budget, the one that ends Aug. 31, there was $1.56 billion diverted to other state needs.

This time, under the agreed-upon SB 1 that will go before the House and Senate for final approval this week, there will be $1.19 billion of diversions. That’s a difference of $367 million. So, what about that other $300 million?

That’s where it gets a little complicated.

In the current budget, the Legislature allocated another $300 million of general state revenue to TxDOT. That money was meant to support the borrowing of another $2.9 billion under a highway debt program authorized by voters in 2003’s Proposition 14. That $300 million, however, is not in the next budget for TxDOT.

So it’s a matter of one hand giving TxDOT $367 million while the other hand takes away $300 million. After those two transactions, the net is $67 million.

That’s a far cry from a promise made last summer in a letter from Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and then-House Speaker Tom Craddick to make substantial progress on ending a $1.26 billion diversion of road money to the Texas Department of Public Safety. The proposed (and likely) budget cuts that DPS diversion by $108 million, or about 8.6 percent.

At that rate, the DPS diversion would end by 2035.

There’s another side to all this, of course. The promise, Senate Finance chairman Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, has pointed out was made before the financial crisis that began in September. State revenue is way down since then, and the Legislature has to balance the needs of all of state government. And Ogden also notes several hundred million dollars that used to go to the state general fund, revenue generated by several vehicle fees now goes to pay debt on $6.4 billion borrowed under the Texas Mobility Fund.

That could be considered a “diversion” from the general fund, Ogden said in an interview earlier this session.

Regardless of the arguments, however, the possible result could be that TxDOT scales back on plans to borrow that $2.9 billion under Proposition 14, and thus delays or cancels plans on a number of projects that local officials had been told would be done in the next year or two. The Texas Transportation Commission has already hinted as such, and could offer specifics in its meeting this week.

“They want to get that out there before we leave town,” state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, who would support taking a much bigger bite of that DPS diversion. “That would be the news.”