Reps treat lobbyists to night out

BOISE – Each year, three North Idaho state representatives – Reps. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur d’Alene, Frank Henderson, R-Post Falls, and Eric Anderson, R-Priest Lake – take the lobbyists out to dinner on the reps’ own personal dime. Last week, the annual dinner drew about 35 lobbyists, Nonini said.

“It’s the fourth year we’ve done that. House leadership was there,” he said. The group enjoyed Basque food at Leku Ona restaurant in downtown Boise, and “we all put it on our personal credit cards,” Nonini said. “We just kinda turn the tables on ’em, instead of them buying us dinner, we buy them dinner.”

Nonini didn’t volunteer this account; he was asked about it by Eye on Boise. “It’s just a good time to get everyone together,” he explained. “They’re supportive of us and they’re good, when there’s an issue out there that you want to talk about. … It’s just a thing we’ve done the last four years to show our appreciation for their willingness to help us understand issues.”

Recession hit Idaho harder, faster

State Labor Director Roger Madsen told lawmakers this week, “The recession hit Idaho harder and faster” than other states. “After posting the lowest unemployment rate in the nation in 2007 … no state has seen as large a percentage increase in its unemployment rate as Idaho,” he said.

There are now 30,000 more Idaho workers out of a job than a year ago, Madsen reported, for a total of about 50,000, a record. All 44 Idaho counties have higher unemployment than a year ago, and phone calls to state unemployment offices have doubled since Labor Day. Since the end of 2007, 37 of Idaho’s 44 counties have seen their unemployment rates double.

The result has been a boom in unemployment benefit payouts. Those payouts, while no substitute for actual jobs, have had “a positive economic effect, certainly upon the families involved,” Madsen told lawmakers. Idaho’s unemployment benefit payouts have soared to the point that borrowing from federal funds will be necessary, he said. Meanwhile, budget cuts have eliminated 15 percent of the Labor Department’s work force. “We are attempting to cope with our biggest workload in history,” Madsen told legislative budget writers.

Asked by lawmakers about January unemployment rates, Madsen said figures aren’t expected to come out until Feb. 27 because of federal benchmarking this month. “We expect ’em to go above 7 percent soon,” he said. “The layoffs have continued.”

‘If you need to whack a mule’

Rep. Lenore Hardy Barrett, R-Challis, had this to say as she pitched a memorial about wolf delisting to the House Resources Committee: “If you need to whack a mule across the head with a two-by-four to get his attention, and all you have in your tiny, tiny toolbox is a foam-rubber shoe insert, the mule probably won’t get the message.” That message, she said, is that Idaho is “fed up with … federal foot-dragging.”

Her proposed joint memorial, a nonbinding message that lawmakers would send to Congress, the president and the Interior secretary, asks the feds to get wolf delisting back on track. “Idaho has dotted all of its i’s, crossed all its t’s and jumped through every hoop conceived by the mind of man,” Barrett declared. Lawmakers on the panel voted unanimously to introduce the measure – after the colorful longtime eastern Idaho legislator threatened to fire a pencil or toss a shoe at them if they didn’t.

‘We currently have no choice’

Idaho Transportation Department Director Pam Lowe says a state audit is right that deteriorating roads should be fixed long before they’ve gotten so bad, rather than following the so-called “worst-first” approach to road maintenance. But, she said, “Because of the lack of transportation revenue, we currently have no choice. … We can’t let ’em turn to rubble.”

Her comments came as lawmakers held a three-hour hearing on the Idaho Transportation Department budget, during which they had plenty of questions.

Why the numbers were different

When Gov. Butch Otter’s transportation bills were introduced last week, the numbers in the bills didn’t match up to his description of the program. For the first year, it appeared the package would raise only $42.9 million instead of $47 million, and in the fifth year, $171 million instead of $174 million.

Clete Edmunson, Otter’s transportation adviser, cleared up the mystery: There was still another bill coming. The discrepancies were in the vehicle registration fees. When the whole package was separated out from one giant 160-plus-page bill to five separate ones, a piece about license plates was pulled out, but didn’t get put back into one of the five bills. A sixth bill, imposing a $20 fee on personalized or specialty plates to raise an additional $4 million a year, was introduced this week.

Said Edmunson, “So that’s the difference.”