Party-line vote on first school budget motion

The first piece of the schools budget is the motion for the administrators division; it just passed on a straight party-line vote, 15-4. JFAC Co-Chair Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, proposed the budget, which includes a 6.5 percent pay cut for administrators. Rep. Wendy Jaquet, D-Ketchum, spoke against the move, and said one of her local school districts is struggling to replace its superintendent. “Our districts across the state have been working very, very hard to keep their costs down,” Jaquet said. Bell responded, “This motion has nothing to do with the value and the worth of the administrators. There isn’t an administrator out there that at the expense of the teaching staff … would want to accept full salary and then have the cuts go someplace else. It’s all about the economy.”

Rep. Shirley Ringo, D-Moscow, said, “This Legislature, I think, has unduly restricted itself by not being willing to consider other options.” She didn’t specify, but earlier she spoke out for raising state revenues, from a possible tax surcharge to hiring more tax auditors to collect already-due taxes, to avoid such deep cuts. “Look at these budgets and know how they’re going to affect particularly our rural schools,” Ringo said.

Sen. Jim Hammond, R-Post Falls, said, “I’m not comfortable with this budget either. I don’t like it. But I truly don’t see an alternative. As I return home each weekend and I talk to those businesses who have already laid off 30, 40 percent of their staff and are trying to stay alive, they beg me, ‘Don’t tax me any more, don’t raise my taxes, don’t raise the taxes of those employees that I still am able to employ. … So please don’t throw at me that we haven’t considered that alternative - we have. And we will stifle business growth and we will lengthen this recession by doing that. In terms of what we’re doing, nobody’s comfortable with it, but we will make it through.”