By Betsy Z. Russell

BOISE – Four big issues were supposed to dominate this year’s Idaho legislative session: Health care, education, transportation and taxes.

But when the gavel fell last week on the stormy 80-day session, nothing had been passed to address Idaho’s health coverage gap, though three bills were introduced and the Senate had its first-ever floor debate over Medicaid expansion.

Education was a bright point, with broad support for a substantial boost in the public schools budget and the third step in Idaho’s five-year plan to improve its schools and boost teacher pay.

Both transportation and taxes were addressed in fits and starts as the session progressed, with both finally leading to late-session showdowns and last-minute passage of major legislation that Gov. Butch Otter – who now has both proposals on his desk – had made clear from the start he didn’t support.

If Otter vetoes the bill to remove Idaho’s 6 percent sales tax from groceries – which he’s hinted he may do – this year’s session would end with no tax relief, despite avowals from both Otter and lawmakers that they wanted tax relief in a year when the state’s coffers were flush.

And if he rejects the hard-fought transportation funding package, which includes $300 million in bonding, Otter would be backing away from a long-expressed desire to address a huge backlog in transportation spending he’s pushed for since his first term.

When Senate President Pro-Tem Brent Hill, R-Rexburg, headed a Senate delegation to the governor on the session’s final day to inform Otter that the Senate was ready to adjourn for the year, Hill reported back, “He said he has his work cut out for him now.”

Among the last-minute casualties of GOP infighting at the end of the session was Otter’s proposal for a $115 million unemployment insurance tax rate cut for Idaho employers over the next three years. House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, R-Star, insisted on tacking an income tax cut bill onto the measure; the amended bill than failed in the Senate, meaning neither proposal passed.

“It’s certainly an uneven performance,” said Jim Weatherby, Boise State University emeritus professor and a longtime observer of Idaho politics.

For much of the session, he noted, “a great distraction” was the challenges to leadership by a small group of hard-right GOP dissidents in the House, who succeeded in slowing the pace of House business and several times bringing it to a halt.

House Speaker Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, said he thinks the House overcame the issues.

“I’ve been here 17 years and I’ve seen bomb throwers come and go, and the ones that stayed have learned that’s not the best tactic to employ when you want to build consensus,” Bedke said. “I hope that everyone leaves this 2017 session a better legislator.”

“After a while, we all settled down and learned to be about the people’s business and not pressing a personal agenda,” Bedke said. “As that transition happened, we started getting back to a more even keel.”

The Senate avoided the histrionics. Said Senate Majority Leader Bart Davis, “I was proud of my Senate.”

Another area of the Legislature that worked surprisingly smoothly this year was the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, the 20-member joint committee that writes the state budget. With half of its members new to the panel, co-chairs Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, and Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, instituted a new, more detailed and less flashy budget hearing process, and assigned working groups of several lawmakers – often from both parties and both houses – to craft each agency budget bill.

The result was a state budget that came in slightly below Gov. Butch Otter’s proposal, with numerous lawmakers satisfied that they’d dug into the details and come up with reasonable and frugal ways to meet the state’s needs.

Bedke noted that while lawmakers started the year with a surplus, they approved significant investments, from the transportation bill to the education budget to a $35 million construction program at university campuses across the state. Also approved was a $90 million bonding plan that shouldn’t end up costing the state anything, for a cooperative project with the Idaho National Laboratory and the state’s universities to establish new cybersecurity and computer research centers in Idaho Falls.

“I think we did convert a lot of our surplus, the good times here, into investments in things that are going to pay dividends,” Bedke said. “Let the citizens go grow the economy. We’ve positioned the infrastructure here to be less of an impediment.”

However, between the grocery tax repeal, which will cost the state general fund $79 million a year, and the new diversion from the general fund to roads, which takes another $15 million, the state’s coffers will be $94 million a year poorer in the future. And if lawmakers had also enacted the House’s proposed income tax cuts, another $28 million to $52 million would have been added on top of that, raising questions about the state’s ability to meet its commitments in future years to the school improvement plan.

“They balanced the budget – they always want credit for balancing the budget for the upcoming fiscal year,” Weatherby said. “But they leave major fiscal issues, beginning in 2018.”

And for now, lawmakers have dropped those issues squarely in the governor’s lap.

Interim panels set

Legislative interim committees for the coming year have been named; all are continuations from previous years, with one exception: the Commercial Vehicle Annual Registration Fee Study Committee. That panel, called for in a highway funding bill that passed in 2015, will look into the how Idaho’s charging fees on big trucks, which several studies show aren’t paying their share for road maintenance in the state.

The other interim committees that were approved will examine the public school funding formula; the state’s foster care system; state employee health insurance benefits; and use of administrative hearing officers. Ongoing panels that will continue are the Criminal Justice Reinvestment Oversight Committee; the Idaho Council on Indian Affairs; and the Natural Resources Interim Committee.

Things they didn’t do…

In addition to the health coverage gap, the Legislature left numerous issues hanging this year. Among them: Liquor license reform, on which major legislation was introduced but didn’t advance; and faith healing, on which controversial legislation was proposed but died in the Senate.

Other proposals drew lots of attention early on, but quietly died, including a proposal to ban sanctuary cities, even though Idaho has none; legislation targeting Shariah law, which didn’t get a hearing; and an attack on tribal gaming, which died in committee. A proposal to limit early voting dates also died in committee.

And some they did…

Bipartisan legislation to reform civil asset reform practices passed both houses, as did a new set of regulations on Idaho’s fledgling oil and gas industry. Lawmakers also adjusted several state laws that faced court challenges, on abortion and liquor; and stopped a shift in Idaho’s court system toward a “loser-pays” rule for attorney fees in civil cases by writing the state’s longstanding court rules on fees into state law.