The fight over crafting the state's next budget ended Wednesday, when the Legislature passed an $11.5 billion two-year plan that Gov. John Lynch promptly vowed to sign. But the fight over how - and whether - the budget represents an increase in state spending has just begun, and will likely continue through next year's elections.

Senate Minority Leader Peter Bragdon, who says this budget represents a 6.6 percent increase in state spending, scopes out the factions - among them, his Republican colleagues on the House side, who claim the budget is 7.7 bigger than the last one.

"There's the negative 1 percent crowd," said Bragdon, a Milford Republican. "There's the positive 6 percent crowd. And there might be another crowd I'm not sure about."

Lynch, a Democrat, says we should call it even.

"It's a budget that basically has flat spending biennium to biennium," he told reporters last week.

The question clearly isn't cut-and-dried.

The nonpartisan New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies ran the numbers and found that total spending in the new budget - including federal dollars - grew 11.5 percent, while "general fund" state spending either shrank or grew about 1 percent, though those numbers don't account for some big accounting changes this year.

The best estimate of the general fund growth, concludes center director Steve Norton, is that it's up about 5.2 in the next two-year budget - a number, he notes, far below the 13.2 percent average increase in two-year budgets for the past 20 years. Norton says "it's an increase, but not an increase at the rate that it's grown in the past."

What makes figuring this out so hard?

In every budget cycle, the number-crunching depends on what numbers you crunch. Do you count the money the state spends on education "adequacy" grants to schools? Do you count federal dollars, which are up about 25 percent because of stimulus money? Or do you count just the money the state raises and spends through the "general fund" to run most of the government?

Even if you count just the general fund - as most New Hampshire policy-watchers do - this year's budgeting has been harder than average.

Lawmakers who crafted the budget changed the accounting for the state's liquor stores, for some Department of Safety fees and for the school building aid that the state sends to cities and towns, moving all three streams from the general fund into different accounts.

"We're still spending the money, but it's not in the general fund," Bragdon said. "It's like if you have a separate bank account and decide your going to pay your food bills from the separate bank account from now on," he said.

All of those changes add up to moving roughly $200 million that was counted in the last general-fund total and not in this one, even though the state is still collecting and spending the money.

Bringing those changes back in line is what gets Norton to 5.2 percent, Bragdon to 6.6 percent and conservative analyst Charlie Arlinghaus to 6.3 percent.

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