Legislature opens with key issues, tests

BOISE – A governor’s legacy and the political future of 105 legislators hang in the balance, as Idaho’s Legislature convenes its annual session this week to face tough challenges on school funding, prison growth, property tax relief and more.

“I think it could be a landmark session, really,” said Rep. George Sayler, D-Coeur d’Alene.

This is the final legislative session – and final chance to cement a legacy – for Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, who’s finishing up his second four-year term and has already said he won’t seek re-election. Kempthorne likely will push hard for his initiatives to reform Medicaid, establish a statewide community college system and see his ambitious highway-construction plan through – all part of how history will judge this governor.

At the same time, every seat in the Idaho Legislature is up for election this year, with the filing period for the primary election opening in March – just as lawmakers will be trying to wrap up their work.

Lawmakers are facing strong public pressure to provide property tax relief, particularly for homeowners in the state’s fastest-growing areas. “That’s the No. 1 issue up here,” said Rep. George Eskridge, R-Dover.

Added Sen. John Goedde, R-Coeur d’Alene, “If we leave Boise without some kind of property tax relief, we may not be worried too much about running for re-election.”

Voters who will decide this year whether to keep lawmakers in office will get to see them in action on an array of key issues, such as fixing schools, paying state employees and coping with growing health care costs. Here’s some of what’s in store.

School construction. The Idaho Supreme Court laid this problem at the feet of the Legislature last month, after 15 years of litigation, and ordered lawmakers to come up with a new way to pay for schoolhouses – rather than leaving the job to local property taxpayers. One fix long backed by Kempthorne is lowering the supermajority needed to pass school bonds from two-thirds to 60 percent, but that takes a constitutional amendment – requiring two-thirds votes in each house of the Legislature plus a majority vote of the people. The justices also made it clear that lawmakers must come up with other funding for school construction – even with a lower supermajority, school bonds are funded by property taxes. With a $214 million surplus in the state’s general fund budget, it’s now the Legislature’s call and the governor’s – with the court watching closely.

Roads. Kempthorne squeezed the Legislature harder than ever before last session to force it to go along with his ambitious $1.2 billion “Connecting Idaho” plan, which will do 30 years’ worth of highway construction in the next 10 years, paid for by borrowing against future federal highway allocations. But just in the past month, an embarrassing snafu set the project back, when both an unsuccessful bidder and federal authorities objected to the initial award of the major contract to oversee the project – saying improper political considerations may have steered the contract to a local firm. The governor and the Transportation Department are working to resolve the contract problem and restore credibility so Idaho can proceed with the program, which requires legislative approval this session for the first round of bonding. Goedde, who long has pushed for upgrading U.S. Highway 95 to better connect northern and southern Idaho, said he views the bonding program as a “tremendous tool” and said, “I’m holding my breath.”

Education. Kempthorne has dropped hints that he’ll propose a new, statewide community college system in Idaho, which now has only two community colleges – and low numbers of its high school graduates going on to any form of higher education. Yet, North Idaho College and College of Southern Idaho area residents, who long have paid extra property taxes to support their local colleges, are wary of the rest of the state getting the same thing, free of property taxes – and whether there’s any payback for their history of support, if this is to become a state-funded function.

“We need to find a way to create equitable funding for community colleges,” Sayler said.

Rep. Frank Henderson, R-Post Falls, favors more professional-technical education statewide, possibly through an expanded community college system. “That would be a wonderful finale for Governor Kempthorne’s service as governor, because the benefits of education will last forever,” he said.

Other major education issues to be settled this year include funding for public schools, which could be threatened or entirely revamped under various property tax relief proposals; the plight of the state’s colleges and universities, especially the University of Idaho, which have been suffering cutbacks and setbacks; and a proposal from the state Board of Education to toughen Idaho’s required high school curriculum to include far more math and science.

Taxes. An interim legislative committee that held a dozen public hearings around the state is calling for major property tax changes, including increasing the homeowner’s exemption and shifting millions in school funding off the property tax.

Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, who co-chaired the interim committee, said, “People are very uneasy. … They want something fixed.” However, Kempthorne has warned that he won’t approve any use of the state’s budget surplus for recurring, annual expenses – such as permanent property tax relief – because of the possibility that the surplus is just a one-time windfall.

Health care. Kempthorne wants to remake Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health coverage for the poor and disabled, both to stem fast-rising costs and to create a system that works better. His plan would split Medicaid into three separate programs for three populations – healthy children and adults, the disabled, and the elderly. Doing that would require a blanket waiver from an array of federal rules and regulations, which is being sought.

Behind the effort is a startling budget reality: If current trends hold, Medicaid spending in Idaho will eclipse public school spending by the year 2021 – and public school spending long has been the state’s top budget priority, taking up nearly half the general fund budget. “If we were to get this Medicaid reform started on the right road, that’s certainly a legacy,” said Sen. Dick Compton, R-Coeur d’Alene, the Senate Health and Welfare chairman.

Other pressing health care issues will include continued efforts to address the high numbers of Idahoans with no health coverage, and the fact that Idaho is now one of just a handful of states with no requirement that private insurers cover mental illness.

Public safety. Idaho’s sex offender laws are getting close scrutiny from lawmakers after several horrifying cases in the past year, and those laws are virtually guaranteed to get tighter. As many as a dozen state legislators are working on bills to strengthen the laws, such as Rep. Jim Clark, R-Hayden Lake, who wants more monitoring and longer sentences for those who are designated as “violent sexual predators,” and Goedde, who’s working on legislation to add more levels of sex offenders and restrict where they can live. Clark said, “The idea … is to make Idaho one of the toughest places in the union for violent sexual predators to live.”

Idaho prisons are overflowing, and the state is housing more than 300 of its inmates out of state, at a cost of $6 million a year. State Correction Director Tom Beauclair has warned lawmakers that Idaho needs to build three new prisons at a cost of nearly $160 million, but many are reluctant to spend the money.

“Maybe with this latest crunch, we’ll finally get at sentencing reform and treatment of substance abuse … as a more effective use of our dollar than building concrete cells,” said Keough, who is vice-chair of the joint budget committee.

There’s more.

“Many legislators say it’s time to grant raises to state employees, after giving them a total of only 2 percent in the last four years, while their pay has fallen far below market wages.

“Minimal day care regulations aimed at curbing the worst abuses will be proposed by a bipartisan group of North Idaho lawmakers this year – Sayler and Sen. Joyce Broadsword, R-Sagle – after failing last year by one vote in a House committee.

“Three North Idaho lawmakers, Rep. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur d’Alene, Henderson and Compton, are pushing for legislation to allow creation of an aquifer protection district, to protect water quality in the Spokane Valley/Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer.

“The loophole for bowling alleys in Idaho’s anti-smoking law is in the crosshairs.

“Many lawmakers are lining up behind plans to further restrict the ability of government to condemn private land.

“There’s going to be no lack of stuff to keep us busy,” Compton said.

Said Broadsword, “I’m anxious to get down there and dig in.”