Bill to change by one word: Change

BOISE – Here’s a sign of the times: A bill in the works in the Legislature makes a one-word change in the law regarding annual adjustments in the homeowner’s exemption from property tax. The reason for the change?

As House Tax Chairman Dennis Lake, R-Blackfoot, explained to the House this week, “Back in the heady days of 2005, the assumption was made that home values will always go up.” So the law tying the amount of the homeowner’s exemption to the Idaho Housing Index said that changes will match “the annual increase in the Idaho housing price index.” The one-word bill, HB 4, proposed by the state Tax Commission, changes the word “increase” to “change.” That way, if values go down, the exemption, too, would go down.

HB 4 won unanimous passage in the House and headed to the Senate.

NIC hires a lobbyist

When North Idaho College Vice President John Martin was in Boise this week, along with a bevy of NIC officials and several trustees, including board Chairwoman Christie Wood and trustees Judy Meyer and Ron Vieselmeyer, there was a new member of NIC’s delegation to visit lawmakers: Teresa Molitor, a lobbyist with Centra Consulting. In past years, the college has joined with the local Chamber of Commerce or city on lobbying the Legislature, but this year, it decided to bring on its own lobbyist.

“We just felt that we needed to do a better job of making sure all the legislators, and not just our 15 from North Idaho, know our story,” Martin said. NIC signed a six-month contract with Centra for $12,000, payable at $2,000 a month that started Nov. 15.

Idaho’s three universities all have high-profile lobbyists: Special assistant to the president Marty Peterson handles the duties for the University of Idaho; former state Rep. Kent Kunz is director of government relations for Idaho State University; and former House Speaker Bruce Newcomb is director of government relations for Boise State University.

Neither Lewis-Clark State College nor the College of Southern Idaho, NIC’s counterpart, has a lobbyist. But CSI is a two-hour drive from Boise, and can more easily send someone up for legislative proceedings when needed. Rolly Jurgens, vice president for administrative services at NIC, noted, “We’re 400 miles away. … We joke once in a while from Coeur d’Alene that we’re in a different country from Boise.”

Dumped in Ways and Means

Already, three bills introduced this session have been assigned to the Ways and Means Committee in the House, a panel controlled by leadership that rarely meets, and hasn’t met yet. The bills, HB 2, HB 17, and HB 25, are all personal bills. HB 2 was introduced by Rep. Branden Durst, D-Boise, to expand local-option tax authority. HB 17 was introduced by Reps. George Eskridge, R-Dover, and Eric Anderson, R-Priest Lake, to limit increases in property tax valuations to 3 percent a year, a concept the two have long pushed. HB 25 was introduced by Rep. Steven Thayn, R-Emmett, to pay parents to not send their kids to public kindergarten.

House Speaker Lawerence Denney, R-Midvale, said, “Well, my advice to them early on was to take them to a regular committee, and they decided that they would rather have them printed as personal bills, so I sent them to Ways and Means,” where the measures are unlikely to get a hearing. “If a bill has the backing to get printed (by a regular legislative committee), you know, it has a fair chance of success, but if you can’t get it printed in one of the germane committees, then it’s probably something that we don’t need to be wasting our time on this year,” Denney said. He added, “Each one of them, I’ve warned them before they were printed that that’s probably what would happen to them.”

Eskridge was disappointed by the move, saying he had more than 20 co-sponsors, but Senate Tax Chairman Dennis Lake wouldn’t give him a hearing to consider introduction and printing in his committee. “At least by sending it as a personal bill, I knew it would get printed,” Eskridge said. “I’m even more disappointed that the speaker characterizes it as a ‘waste of time.’ … This is a big issue in my district.”

There’s no Ways and Means Committee in the Senate, where measures introduced as personal bills have sometimes made it all the way through the process and become law. Two dozen personal bills have been introduced so far.

Committees have ‘extraordinary power’

Boise State University political scientist Gary Moncrief says the hurdles of introducing bills in the Idaho Legislature are pretty much unique to Idaho. In most states, any legislator can easily introduce a bill.

“No other state legislature operates in quite this manner, and only Connecticut does anything at all like it,” Moncrief wrote this week in a blog post. “It means committees in Idaho are given extraordinary power. The advantage is that the committees are able to get rid of some proposals that probably weren’t going to pass anyway. In a legislature that averages almost 700 bill introductions but only about 80 days in session a year, that’s probably a good thing; it keeps the legislature from wasting time on legislation that is dead-on-arrival. The downside of this system is that some issues just don’t get heard.”

The professor said a few years ago, he tracked the percentage of bills in the Idaho Legislature that passed. Fifty to 60 percent of regular bills passed, but only 5 to 10 percent of personal bills.