Corrections budget up sharply; higher ed grows by single digits

BOISE – Lawmakers set budgets for higher education and prisons on Friday, and while universities got a 4 percent boost and community college funding was increased 6 percent, those increases were dwarfed by the 17 percent increase in corrections costs.

“The Corrections Department is doing the best job they can given the flow of inmates we’re giving them,” said Sen. Elliot Werk, D-Boise. “The reality is that our prison system has become our treatment system for mental health and substance abuse. The Corrections Department can’t control that flow in inmates, but we can control that.”

He called for more community treatment options. “Unless we do that, we’re going to see just a continual escalation of these costs. We’re not going to be able to bear that much longer.”

The budget set by the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee for the Department of Corrections for next year totals nearly $140 million in general funds, up from $119.5 million this year. That doesn’t count several million approved earlier to raise prison guard wages that have lagged far behind market.

Despite concerns about how correction costs drain funds from important programs like higher education, nearly every piece of the corrections budget passed JFAC unanimously.

Committee Co-Chair Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, called it a “have-to.”

Multiple bills are advancing through the Legislature to increase prison terms for offenses ranging from sex crimes to drunken driving to drug use by pregnant women. If those bills result in additional prison costs, future budgets will have to increase to reflect them.

Meanwhile, the budget for the state’s four-year colleges and universities was set at $238.8 million in general funds, up from $228.9 million this year.

The budget includes a resolution to a long fight between the state’s universities over “funding equity” – a concern that the University of Idaho was seen as getting more state money comparatively, when the other schools were growing faster in student populations.

The successful budget, a bipartisan plan proposed by Senate Finance Chair Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, and Werk, includes a $3.9 million equity payment – $2.2 million to Boise State University and $1.7 million to Idaho State University.

As a result, all three university presidents and the state Board of Education are signing an agreement the equity fight has been resolved.

Werk credited UI President Tim White with prompting the resolution, which he called “a real step forward for our college and university system. It’s a banner day.”

This year, unlike recent years, lawmakers have a surplus of tax revenues to spend, which allows a solution more palatable than the last attempt at addressing equity. In 2005, the state Board of Education took $196,800 away from the University of Idaho and gave it to BSU, ISU and Lewis-Clark State College – at a time when UI was struggling with its own budget cuts.

Idaho’s two community colleges will get nearly a 6 percent budget boost next year, under the budget the JFAC approved on Friday.

Cameron proposed a budget that includes occupancy costs for North Idaho College’s new Health & Sciences Building and the College of Southern Idaho’s Fine Arts Center expansion. That item alone gives the two colleges a total of $661,800 more in state funds next year, which Gov. Dirk Kempthorne hadn’t included in his recommended budget.

Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries, said, “I think it’s good that we’re doing this. I know they came to the state and said if you build ‘em, we’ll take care of ‘em, but we started down the road of doing this for the others, and I think it’s a good idea.”

Werk pointed out that of a group of new buildings funded on college campuses through a bonding program in the past few years, the BSU West building is now the only one that hasn’t received a state allocation for occupancy costs. The occupancy costs for the community colleges include maintenance, custodial work and utilities.

The overall state budget set for the two community colleges is $21.75 million next year in general funds, up from $20.8 million this year.

The budget bills still need approval from both houses and the governor’s signature to become law, but budget bills rarely are changed once they’re written by the joint committee.