Prisons Top Batt’s Unfinished Business Governor To Give Last State Of The State Address Today
Gov. Phil Batt will detail the challenges and achievements of the past three years and will underscore what he sees as unfinished business when he delivers his final State of the State address today.
“I have some important things that are still on my plate,” Batt said as he finished up a speech likely to last an hour.
At or near the top of the list will be his recommendations as a one-man committee on alternatives to prison to rein in a skyrocketing corrections budget and check the explosion of state inmates.
He told a youth government group last summer that he would like to see his legacy as governor include solving the prison problem so more cash could be funneled to public education and other state programs.
After several months of investigation, the governor proposed eliminating imprisonment for bouncing small checks and driving without a license, giving the parole board more flexibility in releasing eligible inmates, reducing by a third the time inmates spend in the boot camp program and replacing imprisonment with higher fines for some relatively minor thefts.
Batt said that combination would clear several hundred inmates out of the prison system and save up to $10 million.
He said further inroads could be made by hiring more probation and parole officers to give judges and the parole board more confidence in the likely success of parolees and by creating a so-called drug court with expensive treatment programs for convicts with drug or alcohol problems.
But that, too, costs money, and Batt has said he will let lawmakers decide whether to spend it.
On other matters, the governor will let loose his ire at Union Pacific Railroad and its inability to meet Idaho shipping demands last fall. Batt will endorse an increase in truck weights which the railroad has been fighting for years.
“He decided Idaho cannot be held hostage by one mode of transportation, that being the railroad,” spokesman Lindsay Nothern said.
Meanwhile, after believing he had no choice last fall but to fire his appointee to head the State Insurance Fund over a major computer snafu, Batt says it is time to take the agency that provides workers’ compensation coverage for most Idaho employers out of politics.
And the governor intends to underscore the state’s shift to high technology, to which he tried to give some focus several years ago when he ordered state agencies to use compatible computer equipment.
But Batt, retiring after just one term, has been mum about the fiasco that his Gaming Study Committee turned out to be, and he likely will continue to have nothing to say about the legal dispute over electronic gambling machines in reservation casinos.