Lawmakers Earn B-Minus Grade

The 1996 Legislature will go down in history as the one that ended Idaho’s 79-year-old workers’ compensation exemption for agriculture.

That bill alone makes the session that ended Friday successful. But it wasn’t all. The Legislature held the line on taxes, passed welfare reform and addressed North Idaho’s problems with growth and floods.

Legislators deserve a B-minus grade for their work - some of which remains incomplete.

They didn’t, for example, address possible state funding for school building needs. They didn’t provide more property tax relief. They quickly dismissed an innovative plan that would have rebuilt U.S. Highway 95 for an additional 3 cents in gasoline tax.

Almost all credit for ending the workers’ comp exemption goes to Gov. Phil Batt, an onion farmer who lobbied the farmer-dominated Legislature hard. He was aided by the heart-wrenching case of an uninsured young migrant who lost both arms and part of a leg in a farm accident this winter. The Legislature had resisted ending the exemption seven times before.

Surprisingly, the Legislature also noticed North Idaho this year.

Legislators granted Kootenai and other counties the authority to impose impact fees. Unfortunately, they also authorized Kootenai County to levy a local-option sales tax. But 60 percent of voters would have to approve, and county officials will have a hard time selling a higher sales tax.

In addition, legislators designated the first $6 million of a 4-cent gasoline-tax increase for repairing flood-damaged roads, ended live dog racing, finally approved legislation allowing counties to change their form of government, beat back a try by Batt to lift the 3 percent property tax cap in counties hit by flooding and strengthened counties’ authority to regulate annoying personal watercraft.

But the Legislature didn’t address several inequitable situations in North Idaho.

It didn’t correct unfair distribution formulas for sales and liquor taxes, which have cost Kootenai County millions of dollars in revenue. It didn’t give the Kootenai Tribe of Boundary County a sales-tax exemption, like Idaho’s four other tribes have. It didn’t remove North Idaho College and College of Southern Idaho from dependence on property taxes.

Still, the Legislature paid extra attention to the Northern colonies this year. That should keep talk of secession at bay for another year.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria/For the editorial board