Lawmakers Run Out Of Money, End Session Once Batt’s Property Tax Cut Passed, Legislators Had No Extra Funds To Haggle Over

Idaho lawmakers met their goal of a 68-day legislative session on Friday, tying up a handful of loose ends before adjourning a relatively calm 1995 session by midafternoon.

“We came in, did our work, and went home,” Senate President Pro Tem Jerry Twiggs said.

Twiggs and House Speaker Michael Simpson, a fellow Blackfoot Republican, engineered the shortest session in a decade by cajoling lawmakers to adopt GOP Gov. Phil Batt’s $40 million statefinanced property tax reduction in the first month.

The debate continues on just how much property tax relief that cut will bring the average Idahoan, but it dictated how lawmakers fulfilled their only other major responsibility - drafting a 1996 state budget. With available cash slashed by that $40 million, the House and Senate had essentially no choice other than the governor’s bare-bones general tax spending blueprint.

“When we passed the tax bill, that pretty much got us out of town now,” Simpson said. “Had we not done that and left that $40 million on the table, we’d be here another two weeks haggling over how to spend it.”

The last time lawmakers adjourned in less than 70 days was 1985 - the 66-day session highlighted by legislative passage of the right-to-work bill that was ratified by voters the next year.

“It was an extremely productive session,” said the governor, whose success rate was extremely high despite a relatively lame legislative lobbying effort. “They accomplished my goals almost in their entirety. … I would rate it among the best in many years.”

The final bill clearing the House before it adjourned at 12:40 p.m. was creation of a $1 million Constitutional Defense Council. It was a Republican leadership bill supported by Batt that Simpson and Twiggs both argued would reinforce the state’s hand in fighting federal incursion into states’ rights.

Critics complained without result that the cash could have been better used for public or higher education in view of how tight the state budget was.

The House also sent Batt legislation releasing $5 million from the Transportation Department reserve for state highway repairs. On Wednesday, Batt vetoed diversion of that cash to local road repair, essentially calling it a raid on already inadequate state highway funds.

The Senate adjourned about two hours later, making its final action passage of legislation aimed at getting businesses to voluntarily find environmental problems and correct them. The concept died earlier in the week under the threat of a Batt veto but was arrived when the governor’s objections were met.

Earlier, leaders won final approval of yet another study on the way Idaho runs its higher education system. This one - the fifth in the past 20 years - is budgeted for $100,000, but supporters indicated it probably would cost less.

Advocates conceded that the Legislature has refused to act on the recommendations of any of the other studies because of political pressures. Those recommendations generally involved unifying the existing system of the University of Idaho, Idaho State University and Boise State University, each with its own staunch constituency.

But Republican Sen. Mary Hartung of Payette said Batt’s interest in revamping the way higher education is run may mean the time is ripe for pulling together the best information from those past reports, updating it and taking one last look at the system.

“We want our institutions working together,” she said.

As senators dispatched the final pieces of Batt’s $1.35 billion operating budget and his $52 million public works program that includes a $33 million prison expansion, they also created a special Bingo Advisory Board in a bid to end strife between charitable bingo operators and the state Lottery Commission, which regulates the games.

Like so many other formerly controversial proposals, the Bingo Advisory Board measure was a compromise. It gives the Lottery Commission authority to set prize amounts in two years. Until then it doubles the maximum prize offering per bingo session to $10,000 and increases the maximum single-game prize from $1,250 to $1,500.