Milling around, milling around…

The House was scheduled to come back into session at 1:30, and the Senate at 2, but it’s now past 2:30 Boise time and neither has. In the House, folks are milling around, while members of leadership are in and out of meetings behind closed doors. “I hate this part of it,” said Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, who stepped back into the House chamber after consulting via phone with her husband and his doctor at an appointment she’d hoped to attend. “Twenty-nine years, and it’s always the same.”

The House is supposed to go into its amending order when it convenes. There’s one bill there now, SB 1195, the unemployment insurance tax cut bill, which was sent there by the Rev & Tax Committee to have a 1/10 of 1 percent income tax rate cut, adding up to $27.9 million, added to it. Another bill was introduced in Ways & Means coupling those two items, but it’s been held at the desk and never advanced.

The other question is whether the House might amend SB 1206, the transportation bill that the Senate narrowly passed this morning after much debate. There’s no answer to that yet.

And the House still has to receive SB 1206, send it to the House Transportation Committee, hold a hearing, and then, based on the result, take it up on the floor. In addition, the House calendar still has four items on it: HB 328, the budget for the state Department of Administration for next year; SCR 105, the $90 million bonding measure for construction of new Idaho Cybercore Integration Center and the Idaho Collaborative Computing Center at the Idaho National Laboratory; HB 190a, the adult post-secondary completion scholarship; and SB 1141, providing $52 million in emergency road repairs to cope with the damage caused by the harsh winter.