Budget boosts funding for basin commission
BOISE – Idaho would kick in more for the Coeur d’Alene Basin Commission next year under a plan approved by legislative budget writers Monday.
The Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee agreed to add funding for the commission’s executive director – whose salary previously was paid with federal funds that now are gone – and to pay for a year of contracted services from technical experts advising counties on the basin cleanup.
State Department of Environmental Quality Director Toni Hardesty called the commission unique in the way it’s approaching Superfund cleanup.
“As far as I know, it’s the only one in the nation that operates this way, where it is more of a collaborative approach,” she said. Without new funding from the state for the commission’s executive director, she said, “the funding for that position would go away. … It has proved to be very valuable. It is a process that benefits Idaho.”
The JFAC vote on the basin issues in the environmental quality budget came the same day that Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries, successfully pushed legislation through the House to add a representative of Silver Valley cities to the commission. Currently, voting members on the commission include three local county commissioners and representatives of the DEQ, the Environmental Protection Agency, the state of Washington and the Coeur d’Alene Tribe.
The change would give the commission an even number of members, so Harwood’s bill, HB 656a, specifies that tie votes would fail.
“When we built this in 2000, we neglected to put in the cities,” he told the House. “And whatever the basin commission does, it affects the cities right there within the box.”
HB 656a passed the House on a nearly unanimous vote and now heads to the Senate. It specifies one additional voting commission member to represent Kellogg, Mullan, Osburn, Smelterville, Pinehurst, Wallace and Wardner.
The existing commission law already gives veto power on the commission to the three county commissioners, if they’re unanimous, as well as to the DEQ, the EPA and the tribe.
Harwood also led a move in the joint budget committee to fund both the commission’s executive director, at a cost of $96,100 a year, and a year’s worth of contracting – for $60,000 in state funds – with the “technical leadership group.”
Harwood told fellow budget committee members, “The state and the federal and the tribe all come with their professional technical staff. The counties have volunteer technical staff. One is a science professor from Berkeley; we have a couple engineers that are on that, geologists, hydrologists. … They’re really getting burned out. They want some money.”
The inclusion of that additional $60,000 pushed the budget bill approved by JFAC slightly above Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s recommendation for funding the DEQ next year. The budget bill totals $53.1 million in general funds, a 2 percent increase from this year’s level, and includes five new employees.
It also includes funding for a permanent staff person for the Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake Commission, an item Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, pushed to include. The lakes commission would get $66,300 in general funds.