Turnover Hurts N. Idaho Clout In Legislature Powerful Committee Chairs Selected By Seniority, Something Panhandle Lacks

North Idaho will be left out of managing legislation in the next session of the Legislature.

There is not a single committee chairman in the House from the northern part of the state. And Gary Schroeder of Moscow, the Senate Education chairman, is the only one in that chamber.

Rep. Donna Jones, the new chairwoman of the House Revenue and Taxation Committee, comes from Payette, just 60 miles northwest of Boise. The rest in the House are from the Ada-Canyon County area, the Magic Valley or eastern Idaho.

In the Idaho Legislature, committee chairmen are all-powerful. They decide what goes on the agenda for discussion and it is rare that a bill opposed by a chairman becomes law.

The full House or Senate can vote on the floor to pull a bill out of committee, but that has only happened a handful of times the last two decades.

Most committee chairman assignments are based on seniority, although the House is trying to get away from that tradition.

That means Canyon County, a Republican stronghold where the voters send the same people back to the Legislature year after year, has far more than its share of committee chairmanships. Of the non-freshmen from Canyon County, only Rep. Bill Deal of Nampa isn’t a chairman.

Canyon County provides seven of the 24 chairmen in the Legislature, including five of the 14 in the House.

In contrast, it might be years before anybody becomes a chairman from Kootenai County, where the voters regularly replace legislators.

“Most of the representatives from northern Idaho are relatively new in the Legislature,” said House Speaker Michael Simpson. “That’s just a pattern. If those people stay in the Legislature, eventually they will become chairmen.”

Besides, Simpson notes, for the first time there are four legislators, two Republicans and two Democrats, from North Idaho on the powerful Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which decides how to spend the money.

Simpson isn’t worried about the fact that lawmakers from Canyon County hold a disproportionate share of the committee chairmanships.

“Those individuals just have been re-elected by their districts. I don’t think you will see all of those people staying in the Legislature that much longer. Some of them will retire,” he said.

The House will continue to discuss whether seniority should be the basis for awarding chairmanships. The Senate seems set on preserving the status quo.

Republican Reps. Mark Stubbs of Twin Falls and David Callister of Boise have been prodding lawmakers to change the system. They contend that when Idaho’s term limit law starts retiring lawmakers in 2002 or 2004, many who are freshmen now will have to get out before they have a chance to become chairmen.

That’s why the House has six new chairmen for the upcoming session. Simpson got three committee chairmen to voluntarily surrender their assignments to take seats on House Appropriations.

He said he asked a couple of other chairmen to make the same move but they declined.

“The discussion by Stubbs helped fuel this,” Simpson said. “If anything, it may have made some of those chairmen realize that maybe they didn’t need to be chairmen. To be on JFAC (the budget committee) would be good, too.”

“Obviously, it allow us to do something with the committee chairs that will put to rest some of the unrest among the other members.”