Batt’s Budget On The Ball After All? Legislators Finding Governor May Be The Capitol Optimist

For all the grousing last week over the austere 1996-1997 state budget Republican Gov. Phil Batt unveiled, there appears to be little likelihood the Legislature’s GOP supermajority will engineer any significant improvements.

In fact, based on the assessment of the House and Senate special economic outlook committee, the conservative governor may be the optimist in the Statehouse.

The major beefs with the Batt budget are on public and higher education support. But prisons, health care for the poor, water quality and water rights are making demands on the state’s cash that cannot be ignored. He said he gave what was left to schools, but it is a paltry amount compared to even the allotment in this year’s budget.

The governor calls it returning government spending to the levels of successful businesses. His critics contend it ignores the demands Idaho’s rapidly growing population has placed on state government and is the result of last year’s $42 million state-financed property tax cut.

Batt surprised a number of lawmakers when he outlined a spending blueprint that was based on general tax revenues increasing by 5.9 percent. It was described as a cautious forecast that recognized Idaho’s slowing economic expansion.

Budget Director Dean Van Engelen called it a growth rate that a majority of other states would kill for, but it is dramatically below the double-digit and near-double-digit percentage growth that Democrat Cecil Andrus enjoyed during his final three years in office.

Before Batt imposed a $26 million reduction in state spending last summer, it had been three years since lawmakers were forced to cope with tax collections that failed to meet the projections they based their spending decisions on.

And while accommodating the cash deficit did not pose major insurmountable problems in the early 1990s, many lawmakers still serving were around then for that headache. And the Legislature’s senior members recall the very tough spending - or non-spending - decisions they had to make during the near-depression of the early- and mid-1980s.

Those experiences and the caution private industry economists and analysts urged prompted the House-Senate panel to take an even more conservative view than Batt.