Budget Support Dries Up For State’s Biggest Industry Finance Committee Holds Line On UI Agricultural Research

The traditional generosity toward Idaho’s number one industry dried up on Wednesday as budget writers held Republican Gov. Phil Batt’s skimpy line for financing agricultural research and extension services.

The Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee rejected an attempt to exceed the new governor’s barebones spending proposal for the arm of the University of Idaho.

The panel acted after administration analysts said the agency was expected to have more than $800,000 in unused cash from this year that it can apply to operations in the new budget year.

“The governor made it clear he does not see us going any higher,” said Senate Finance Chairman Atwell Parry, R-Melba.

Typically, agricultural research and extension services attract even more money than the administration recommends because of the heavy legislative influence of rural interests.

And in a less-than-subtle display of continuing resentment, the committee also voted to eliminate two jobs in the court system. The Supreme Court created one after the panel refused to authorize it a year ago.

“I’m really concerned about the direction we’re heading in our relationship with the Supreme Court,” Sen. Stan Hawkins, R-Ucon, told his colleagues. “The precedent of them going forward when we eliminated it last year is a bad precedent.”

But the House-Senate committee did take another step toward fulfilling Batt’s pledge to stimulate the economies of the state’s depressed Indian reservations.

It unanimously added nearly $54,000 to the Commerce Department budget for tribal economic development that Director James Hawkins said would involve his entire agency. Hawkins said that key areas of opportunity for the five tribes are in international markets and tourism.

Two months ago, the committee approved $25,000 to determine the feasibility of using the Nez Perce Reservation as the site for a center that would produce biological agents to control weeds and insects.

The decisions came as budget writers began moving more quickly through the final half of Batt’s $1.35 billion general tax budget for 1996. With the most controversial aspects behind it - aid to public and higher education - and a multimilliondollar cache to underwrite a handful of pet projects, the committee headed toward completing its work early next month.

Lawmakers have been at odds with the courts since last summer when a special committee looking for a way to reduce the cost of the Snake River Basin Water Rights Adjudication scheduled a meeting with adjudication Judge Daniel Hurlbutt. They were stood up.

The legislators were told that Hurlbutt, based in Twin Falls, had been called out of town. But one member ran into the judge at a local fast food restaurant later that day.

The resentment escalated last fall when Hurlbutt voided the laws passed in the closing days of the 1994 session to streamline the adjudication. Hurlbutt ruled that the Legislature had no business tinkering with the process after it had begun.

One of the jobs eliminated by the panel on Tuesday was a deputy attorney general assigned to the adjudication. Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, said there appeared to be little use for the job since it is based in Boise when the adjudication is being run from Twin Falls and since cash to finance the entire operation has all but dried up.

The other job, which grated on budget writers even more, was set up by the Supreme Court to coordinate a campaign aimed at settling disputes outside courtrooms. The court took that action even though budget writers rejected its request for the position last winter.

“We have a certain obligation, yes,” Rep. Hod Pomeroy, R-Boise, told the committee. “But I don’t think we should be surprised or shocked when they make their own decisions on important matters. This is a separate branch of government.”

But critics maintained that the court system had been using mediation before the coordinator’s job was created, and it could do the same now.