Notes From The Floor

Save Dollars & Lives

As our congress members and US senators explain why a public option and real health care reform is bad, let's be clear, if they do not do it now, the changes we need certainly won't happen on the state level.

Firstly, the US does not have a health care "system" yet to reform. No safety net for the average family. We have a system of care, Medicare, for the elderly, and Medicaid, a state system for people with disabilities and partly for the extremely poor. To be frank, there is no "system" of care for most Americans. We Idahoans are left to fend for ourselves in a sea of sparsely regulated private insurance companies who can deny claims, refuse to insure us, drop our coverage if we get sick, or price us out at any time for virtually any reason.

Note that, in Idaho, insurance companies use "discretionary clauses" or catch-all exceptions in insurance contracts to obscure what conditions, procedures, medications or treatments they might not cover. These are very broad statements giving companies legal room to deny care or payment. Only recently has the Idaho Department of Insurance actually begun to regulate some of these. Director Deal should be encouraged in his efforts. He's got a long way to go.

But to create a system of health care we still desperately need national reform. Eliminating discretionary clauses only helps those who actually have insurance. Those with bare-bones, catastrophic policies or high-deductible coverage will likely never use their policies until crisis strikes and they realize their lifetime maximums and fine print limitations will bankrupt or send them to the County’s Indigent Program anyway. Remember, we as tax payers, pay for this crisis care, through increased taxes and higher hospital bills. Paying for a system of preventative care and real national care could eliminate this tax burden and hospital cost escalator for all of us.

Congressman Minnick says he won't vote for a public option unless it's got cost-containment measures. Let's be serious. If you understand health care, you know that ensuring that everyone has decent access to health care, including preventative care, is itself a cost containment measure. A public option would offer roughly 50 million Americans a chance to go to the doctor rather than the emergency room for care. It would prevent costly cancers and conditions like diabetes and other ailments from becoming expensive medical crises.

Forcing all Idahoans to buy private insurance is not adequate. Such an approach would only make insurance companies more powerful and break small businesses and uninsured families.

Both Minnick and Simpson talk of eliminating "defensive procedures." More effective would be eliminating procedure-based reimbursement entirely. Doctors should be paid a generous salary to provide care. They should never feel compelled to pay off expensive equipment with unnecessary tests and scans. Critically, a public option could be designed to help provide communities with state-of-the-art medical equipment to be shared by providers in a local area.

Electronic Health Records are an important part of cost containment. Together with fine changes in liability law (so doctors trust each other’s tests) having a patient’s history and medications at each doctor’s fingertips, will eliminating duplicative testing and examination. The Obama Administration actually included fifteen million in the stimulus package for Idaho providers to convert to EHR.

As a legislator who serves on three committees which could have been advancing a system of health for every single Idahoan, I promise you change will not happen as long as insurance industry lobbyists continue to run health care and these committees, convincing law makers to kill every bit of industry accountability or transparency proposed.

For the past year, I've asked Democrats and Republicans, rural and urban people around the state whether they trust government or insurance companies more. That's a tough question in libertarian, anti-government Idaho. But people simply don’t trust the insurance industry. Every person in Idaho, with few exceptions has a story of how private insurance has harmed them, a friend or family member. And what of the fifty million who are uninsured or have very poor or inadequate insurance? Health Care in the US could not be more expensive. We have the most expensive and ineffective "system" in the world. People are ready for some predictability in health care, not more promises to be broken by companies with infinite legal funds and a long line of attorneys just waiting to explain why that illness, essential procedure or medication "is just not covered."

Simpson, Minnick, Risch and Crapo, this matters. Idaho’s businesses, families and budgets are drowning in this private insurer quagmire. We state law makers can't fix health care for Idahoans. You have to. It's now or never and not a debate that's just begun.

Messing With Elections

Imagine a school bond or sewer bond election where all the candidates for public office were on the ballot at the same time and weighed in on these issues. Imagine the elections for all these things were held on the same day at the same time and the various conservative, moderate, and democratic candidates took sides and aligned themselves with passage or failure of bonds to build schools, jails or waste treatment plants. Imagine supplemental levies, to allow schools to meet short budgets also became more partisan. Votes on local option taxes for construction of jails. Imagine that sewer elections, school boards, mosquito abatement funding, small taxes for auditoriums, all became part of the same ballot.

Unquestionably it would be easier to go on one day and vote for all of it at once, school board, school bond, supplemental levy, sewers, pest management, library issues etc... But as our system stands now, I rarely manage to ferret out every judicial, county and statewide race that will be on the ballot each primary and general election, much less every one of the various issues that will be decided annually by an election somewhere in my tiny part of the county.

If we held all elections for all the tiny jurisdictions and tiny local issues on two dates, I have no doubt that, even as a voter who works hard to be informed, I will walk into the polling booth and face a myriad of issues I know nothing about, but for which my vote may truly be the deciding ballot cast. I might even be tempted to vote on gut instinct, knowing nothing about the details of a proposal or the candidates and offices at stake. Like anyone, I will do my best, but I will not be an informed voter and in many cases my vote will be cast quite randomly.

Is it a great service to democracy that we have tiny obscure elections held on random seeming dates, where a handful of people show up to vote? I know that there have been some of these I have thought to attend, but in the end did not feel passionately enough one way or another to go to the trouble to participate. I think it is safe to say that I was happy to leave these decisions to those more closely connected to the issues, those more directly impacted.

It is important to note here that the borders of all the counties, school districts, mosquito districts, auditorium districts, urban renewal districts, transit districts, fire districts, water districts and more (the list is really long) overlap in often very complex ways. To hold an election for all these districts at once or even for a few of them at once can mean that ten people living within a quarter mile of each other may get ten very different ballots and have an entirely different set of issues to decide once inside the voting booth.

Imagine all those districts, boards, candidates competing for your attention at the same time. Half of what you might hear by radio, TV, bill board or e-mail might not even be on your personal ballot. Delivering a sample ballot to you so that you knew what would be on your ballot on election day would require as much work for the County elections office as would making sure that you got the right ballot when you came in to actually vote on election day to vote.

All this might be OK, or even really positive if every County had the software, electronic GIS maps, address level boarders drawn for every little district to make figuring out who would vote in each election on election day doable. Sadly Idaho doesn't have such technology or detailed electronic mapping. In fact our neighboring states don't "consolidate" elections in this way either, so it would be a leap of faith to say we would be ready to do this by 2012. But we might be. I don't know. But I do know that yesterday an election consolidation bill passed the Senate, having already passed the House. I can appreciate parts of it but fear how candidates will weigh in on these issues that will now be decided in May and November when partisan races are run. Schools can hold elections on two other dates, for four dates total, which is good. But the cost is more than $4 million, that's enough to have reduced cuts to state employees by more than an entire percentage point, saved hundreds of jobs, or to have ensured that state services to someo of those in need did not decline when many Idahoans needed them most.

In a year when we are cutting budgets so deeply, to bow to pressure from House Republican leaders to undertake such a costly task, one that could wait a year or two, is fiscally haphazard. Even worse, we have obligated funding this project in the years ahead when it will have to compete with other budget needs and when it is uncertain that our economy will be fully recovered.

It is ironic too that this is yet another costly computer system project. Technology projects have pulled in tens of millions of dollars from Idaho's budgets and stimulus funds this year, while we have cut services to people with disabilities, substance abuse treatment and school funding.

Election consolodation is not an idea we are exploring. It is legislation the legislature passed yesterday. All seven Democrats voted against it. It was a proposal House leadership has wanted to pass for years. A way for conservatives in the Republican party to have more control over local issues decided by autonomous local bodies. I am sad to think of some of becoming twisted by association with one party or faction rather than surviving on their own merrits. Be we shall see. I hope this grand and expensive experiment in government is successful, worthwhile and, most of all, nothing to fear.

Traveling in Sheep Clothing

Carol and I got a puppy from the Caldwell pound, a husky mix, white, seven months old. I slept in the living room with her last night while she settled in. She has kennel cough so we are walking her at night and in the early morning so she doesn't touch noses with all the other dogs which she so very much wants to meet. With bird flu mixing with swine flu and all of us mixing in airports, schools and at concerts from here to the tip of the nation to the south of us, it is hard not to feel for Bighorn Sheep in their canyons across southern and central Idaho. They meet a wooly domestic sheep and wet noses touch and its all over, potentially for entire herds of what is left of the bighorns. Viruses and bacteria hitch hike from one of us to the next across the globe. DNA mixing and then multiplying until the microbes run out of habitat, like bighorns coming up over the canyon rim when rafters set up camps below and the jet boats roar. And so under a bill we just passed out of the Senate, someone will load up the roaming bighorns who touched noses with the wooly sheep and send them off in trucks elsewhere, perhaps to infect a different herd than their own. The wooly sheep, with their own germs, stay, migrate out of the hills in the winter to pick up more disease and come back in the spring. And here in the statehouse, more than anywhere, we all shake hands, touch noses, move on.

Gauntlet

While here the Senate quietly debated the Governor and Department of Administration's budgets, across the marble hall, on a party line vote, with every single Republican in the House of Representatives voting no, the bill to undo deep cuts to state employee pay just went down. A vote like that says one thing. Republican leadership, Moyle, Bedke and Roberts have decided how their caucuses will vote. I say this because hurting state employees with a 5% funding reduction that includes a fixed 3% pay cut is NOT a partisan issue. Is it?

We are about to go into the 14th order where we amend or change bills. The 14th order is a time on the Senate floor where great mischief can be done. Elliot Werk and our Democratic Caucus is plotting now to "radiator cap" S1055 to turn it into a local option authority bill. And we rally can do that. In this order of business you can actually take any bill and turn it into a completely different bill...

Sadly, John McGee says he won't vote for local option unless Democrats vote for tax increases for roads. I'm sorry to see John will be an obstacle to Local Option when we have so few chances to move forward anything to finally fund public transportation in Idaho.

The Gauntlet is now down.
Today things should get lively and the end should start to really unfold.

Not About Salad Bars

Salad bars. That's the metaphor being used for seniors being assessed charges for services in assisted living centers. Senator Hill likes iceberg lettuce and dressing. That's it. He doesn't want beets and cauliflower.

H146 changes the way assisted living facilities charge elderly and disabled residents. Assisted living services for the elderly and disabled are not optional services, they are frequently critical medical services residents have no choice whether to or whether not to accept. If you live on a fixed income isn't some level of predictability important? Wasn't the previous tiered rate structure letting providers make as much as they do in other states?

Under this bill residents get a plate for roughly $2,500, a plate, no salad. A room to rent, no services. If they want salad or dressing they have to pay more. I'm sure most assisted living centers would give them lettuce with the plate, maybe dressing. Maybe not. Maybe some facilities will decide to charge for every leaf of lettuce and every gram of dressing. The bill doesn't say they can't. We will trust that accountability to a rules making process and an oversight board which I think assisted living facilities have so far ignored.

And if you know you can not afford more than a little lettuce or dressing, will you maybe then go without care you need even though it is critical to you health? Physical therapy, oxygen, travel assistance. If you are struggling with recovery or health issues, might a provider easily tuck a bunch of caviar under your cauliflower and charge you even though you never wanted it and knew you could not afford it?

And here I play with a really broken metaphor. I'll stop. The bill passed at something like two to 33. Those of us who opposed it were criticized for cruelly scaring seniors.

Roads or Schools

Over one billion in stimulus dollars is flowing into Idaho over the next months. It is divided up into several different parts that can only be spent as directed.

--$90 million is dedicated to education (but schools are still being cut deeply because the money is mostly being kept in reserve.)

--$180 million in stimulus is specifically for roads and transportation.

--$400 million is provided for healthcare but healthcare is still being cut because we will pull back our $400 million in state healthcare dollars and spend it on other parts of the budget.

--$44 million in stimulus has been saved to the end. It is money that the Governor can choose to spend on anything he wants.

On the Joint Finance Committee yesterday we made a series of motions to spend the Governor's $44 million in flexible stimulus funds. In a fiscally and economically prudent motion which is bound to anger the Governor, Wednesday we broke the glass on these funds and used what is now about $7.2 million of the $44 million to restore part of the huge state employee pay cut.

The remaining millions could have restored a statewide vaccination program we cut from Health District budgets, it could have restored therapy hours for people facing mental health issues, restored services to people with disabilities, paid for school field trips we are eliminating statewide, put back huge cuts in teacher pay the Education Chairs are making, paid for teacher aids for teachers with huge classes of students, kept the lights and heat on in some districts or even put back an early teacher retirement program Tom Luna is eliminating.....

But no. We sat in the temporary Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee room, here in the old cement and marble Courthouse and, after Shirley Ringo and I moved to send $19 million to schools, the motion failed on a party line vote and that last of the flexible stimulus money was spent on roads.

Good News

Sometimes good things do happen. This year it is pretty rare but a few good things did happen in the past few days.

1) This morning we reduced the cut to funding for state employees from the deep 5% cut to only a 3% cut with no mandatory pay reduction. For the record, Senator Cameron and Senator Keough are my heroes for today. It is extremely worth noting that the proposal that passed did not put budgets at risk should the economy worsen because it used just over $6 million of the governor's $44 million in flexible stimulus funds which he again insisted that he wants to use mostly on roads. (To be clear that's on top of the other tens of millions in stimulus he got from the feds specifically for roads.) The House Republican caucus is clamped down hard. Not a single House Republican voted for the proposal. I wonder what they tell their districts when they go home? Yes, I voted as party leadership told me even when I thought it was wrong?

2) Yesterday the Senate Commerce Committee which is a frequent bane of my existence for its very great deference to insurance industry lobbyists wishes, that committee did something good and on a 5 to 4 vote actually killed a bill I disliked. The bill would have allowed the State Insurance Fund to skate from under a judgment of the Supreme Court. The sponsor, Senator Goedde, it turned out, is a member of the State insurance Fund Board, and was a named defendant in the Supreme Court case.

3) Senator Kelly, after years of work on ethics issues, passed a bill to require some disclosure of personal finances for candidates for public office in Idaho. Yep you might know a little bit in advance about the many conflicts we may have in voting on legislation in Idaho. As to a preview of my own disclosure, I'm pretty sure I don't own single share of stock or have investments in anything anywhere. I'm hoping someday I might make enough to have something to disclose but for now I'm going to be really boring.

In The Words of Teachers

Boise High Auditorium is cavernous. It is like an old opera house, with a big balcony, hundreds of lower seats, and a large, deep stage. Almost 40 Senators and Representatives sat on that stage under bright lights in the dim hall. We sat in a big semi circle behind tables set with table cloths and silent microphones. Dean Cameron, Chair of our Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee, gave a long and very incomplete rational as to why we cut the public school education budget by 7%, cut teacher pay, froze pay advancement and eliminated much of the state's reimbursement for educational field trips and busing. Tom Luna was cut off from going on longer on the same subject by a bell operated by three women stationed in front of the stage. I am guessing they will long remember getting to ding this Superintendent of Public Instruction into silence.

After the introductions, teachers from all over the state stepped to the microphone one after another to tell stories of what it is and has been like in their classrooms these past years. They described their students or trying to pay their bills. Together the 30 or so of them gave the most amazing State of the Schools I've ever heard.

--One male teacher described his school without walls, how for years they saved up to buy walls to make actual classrooms. He said that was before the budget cuts.

--A local teacher, the only one from Boise, described her work with at risk teens. She was inspiring. You could feel how much she cares, how talented she is with these kids. She was just laid off.

--One woman teaching in a school near the Wyoming boarder said she pays over $1,500 to buy classroom supplies for her kids. Otherwise they have to write letters explaining why they need them. She has tried to save them the embarrassment. She could make $20,000 more dollars a year more, an hour away in Wyoming.

--A teacher who has been teaching for decades and still works 11 hours a day, told a talented scholarship student to get certified in Washington not Idaho because the pay and the teaching conditions are better.

--One teacher described teaching for 19 years, feeling undervalued and underapprecaited. She said we could spend dollars when the kids are young and it's easier, or when they are older and it is intolerable. Schools or prisons. Our choice. Clearly young and energetic, she said she has had it, and may not teach again in Idaho.

--Others reminded us that we are 41st in the nation for teacher pay and have the 4th highest class sizes in the U.S.

--One teacher said she does not need Tom Luna's expensive programs and technology, his reading and math "initiatives," she knows how to teach.

--Some described being parents as well as teachers and worrying or even moving to keep their kids out of some of the more underfunded districts. They talked about crowded classrooms.

--Some described schools where art and science and civics has been cut and what might spark some kids to stay in school or be inspired to learn is lost.

--One powerful speaker challenged us as lawmakers to come to her class room and watch her teach.

On that stage, squirming in the hard chairs, lawmakers sometimes looked uncomfortable. Split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans for once, it felt odd that not a single member of Republican House or Senate leadership was there, not the Chairs of the education committees John Goedde or Bob Nonini, yet all six members of Democratic leadership for the House and Senate were there. The only one allowed to speak was Dean Cameron. He was tasked to speak for all of those whose hands are dirty with this mess we have made of so many schools. And he conveniently neglected to mention the $44 million in discretionary stimulus dollars that Governor Otter has and wants to spend on roads and sewers, over and above the stimulus dollars Idaho was given specifically to spend on roads. Otter can spend that $44 million on anything.

No we didn't have to do this to teachers or schools or kids or to State employees. Someone chose this course. Dean, you can stand and say we had no other options, but you know better. We do not have to cut schools when we've already starved them to the bone.

Bad Mussels & Betsy's Ugly Tie

Today on our first bill we had a long delay on the pea and lentil commission while several members of Republican leadership slowed things down so Senator Cameron could get back to the floor to vote. Senator Davis described how much Senator Cameron appreciated peas and lentils and the lentil commission. Senator Stegner extolled the virtues of lentils, their fiber and flavor and protein. The delay was effective enough to get Senator Cameron on record as voting Aye with the rest of us.

We met early today at 9:30 and so blazed through many bills. Two I was the floor sponsor for, meaning I was assigned or offered to take the bill in committee and to present and argue for it to the full Senate. I also asked questions about the $5 Kayak/Rubber Raft Mussel Tax bill as well. I wish I had voted no. Someone voted no. I don't know who. I know that the mussels are a threat and that rubber rafts COULD conceivably carry the young mussels, but it is hugely unlikely, especially as I remembered how few boats ever leave the state to be infested where the dangerous invasive mussels actually live. I voted yes, tugged along in the long roll of yes votes.

The bill was not an ideal solution for raising money to pay for education, enforcement and inspections of the motorized boats that are most likely to carry mussels. However Betsy Russell has donned an ugly tie, so the end is near and I suspect we are getting to the point where more and more imperfect legislation will be set before us, rushed with the force of time and the daily cost of our staying here in this building. What $30,000 a day did I recall?

Breaking Our Schools

I'm trying to understand the ideal school in the mind of Tom Luna, Butch Otter, John Goedde or Bob Nonini. These men are the four most powerful education policy makers in the state of Idaho, none have ever been public school teachers and I'm pretty sure that at least four of them don't even believe in traditional public schools. But what they believe we should have instead of our current system of free public education mystifies me.

Tom Luna has advocated for vouchers so that more kids can attend private schools. He must feel private schools do a good job. I've taught in private schools and public schools. I can tell you a key difference. Some of the best private schools in the state tend to have far smaller class sizes and more money for field trips and travel to ensure kids get hands-on experience so that they can finally figure out how all those words in their text books apply to the real world. Yet here we are this year with proposals that specifically cut field trips out of public school budgets and slash funding so far that many districts, already struggling, will have no choice but to lay teachers off and increase class sizes just to keep the lights on and the buses running.

This morning we met in the attic again before JFAC. The staff passed around color coded packets of paper representing three different proposals for funding public schools. There was the depressing-enough pink proposal from Democrats Wendy Jaquet and Shirley Ringo, who tried to do as little damage as possible given the budget situation. Then there was the "wisteria" purple proposal which tried to make a 5% personnel cost reduction for schools on top of stealing an extra $20 million in state dollars to use for other projects besides education. A yellow (code name "daisy") packet was supposed to represent the compromise which in itself was a grim mimic of Tom Luna's budget proposals including a two year phase out of early retirement and a massive cut in transportation for Boise schools.

There was no winning with this budget and this set of motions. But the votes fell entirely on party lines. Republicans had made a back room deal to actually put forward only one set of motions, including stealing the extra $20 million from schools to use on other projects, and failing to challenge Governor Otter on the $44 million in discretionary stimulus funds he wants to spend on roads and sewers. When the 4 to 16 votes were all called, it was clear that our current education leaders have a very sinister plan for our schools.

John Goedde has been recorded as saying, in essence, that public schools have failed. Bob Nonini has put forward some of the most anti-teacher, anti-public school legislation our state has seen. Butch Otter is sitting on $44 million in stimulus he could use to keep schools from laying off teachers and dooming kids to classrooms stuffed to the gills, frustrated and clamoring for help from single exhausted teacher. But he won't.

If there were ever an argument for saying that Republicans are not fit to lead our state on education, this year is it. After a decade of living so close to the bone that there is nothing left to cut, these cuts we are making this year could really leave a generation forever set back in its progress toward learning, its skills and enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge, its access to teachers who value what they do for work and, for decades, have given everything they've got to make sure kids learn in spite of the condition of our schools. This year, with the incredibly ugly set of priorities our four Republican education leaders have displayed, I can only believe they hope to finally once and for all break our public schools.

Bad Motions

I got in trouble for wearing a band aid on my forehead yesterday during floor debate. Perhaps it was recognized as political statement on behalf of fellow teachers rather than as a real sterile dressing designed to protect a wound.

Today we came to the attic of the old courthouse where the Joint Finance Committee meets at 7 am on budget setting mornings. We gather with coffee or orange juice around several big folding tables where the heat rises. Typically we share our “motions” or give each other a bit of fair warning as to where each of us proposes that a budget should be set. How many employees will we give an agency? How much for rent and utilities? Any replacement items, new computers, cars, servers? And what money are we cutting? Where will funds they do get come from? From the federal government, a dedicated fee, a grant or from the big $2.4 billion state tax bucket called the general fund?

This morning we had to make a decision we have been putting off while the world adjusted to what the more than one billion in stimulus funding will mean. We had to decide how much to cut state employee pay. There were seven motions or proposals. In the heat of the attic in this big old cement and stone building anything seemed possible. As we passed out the motion sheets in that room that used to be part of the county jail, the options seemed to contract.

By the time we got to our committee room in front of the cameras our choices were down to three. Three bad motions made on the table in that comparatively cold and empty room. All three motions proposed to cut state employee costs by 5%. The worst one of these passed. It cut every state employee’s pay by 3% and then mandated 2% more in employee cost be cut through furloughs, keeping positions vacant and if necessary through layoffs.

The House members were lock step for this motion and its 3% salary reduction and 5% net cut in personnel funding. Why in any rational way they would want that, I do not know. We could have given more room for agencies to use furloughs more or vacant positions. We could have used dedicated funds or stimulus funds to keep it at 4% or even 3% total personnel cuts. But leadership in the House has been twisting arms for weeks. I’m not sure what any state employee ever did to them or if it is just that those particular Republican leaders need to keep hating government, even when government is our tax dollars, people’s jobs, people’s lives.

So I feel awful. I tried to make a motion that was only so slightly better than the motion that we did pass. It was a band-aid for a gaping wound.  Our Democratic votes are band-aids on gaping wounds in a state government run by people too often angry at living in a nation increasingly blue and progressive. We serve here at the mercy of a political party increasingly hateful toward cities, astoundingly favorable to big industry tax breaks and deregulation at the expense of the families, farms and small businesses upon which our economy and unique existence as a state depends.

Some days, while I love my colleagues as individuals, the politics get so sad and ugly that I feel like a twig in a big red river flowing ever more quickly toward the edge of the earth.

Role of Government

One of the pages is playing the bag pipes. Legislators are clapping and foot tapping outside the Senate chambers. Many JFAC Senate members have been up with budget staff trying to understand how we ended up with a 5% state employee reduction after all the work we have done to blend stimulus dollars into the budget and keep us from laying off people state wide. But the governor seems to be saying that since so many state workers are in Boise, he'd rather spend the money on highways. The House leadership has buckled down on their members to try to cut deeper into all parts of what the state does. The old starve the beast mentality, as if childhood health care, teachers in class rooms and people making sure that our drinking water does not get contaminated are some evil entity because they are paid for with tax dollars. This is the work of the state which we as tax payers pay our taxes for. We expect this of state government because we don't want a country in which the very wealthy get the kobe beef education, water and health care and the rest of us get the grizzled, greasy, big mac patty version. We know our state and nation are stronger if our people are well educated and have the skills they need to use their ingenuity to advance our economy and care for their families. We know crisis is expensive, that letting something simple go untreated because you can't afford care, means more cost for government and taxpayers down the line.

So we clap and the bag pipes play while the battles go on behind the scenes.

What is the role of government? How much can we cut before efficiency becomes inadequacy? How much costly crisis do we create when we underfund basic essentials and when let class sizes grow?

Bicycles on Highways

Pleeeeez Mr. Hammond and Mr. Governor, do you really think that all the people forced to ride bicycles because they can't afford or can't drive a car live in the North End? What do you think people in Middleton or Shoshone or Post Falls do when they don't have the money for gas or car repairs? Does it really help these people that you still propose to raise registration fees to as much as $120 after spending every penny of the stimulus you can, borrowing hundreds of millions through GARVEE and raising gas taxes to build more roads.

Mr. Governor your people talk about bike lanes like they are a luxury item. Have you ever tried to ride to work on a rural highway, especially one where the transportation department has eliminated bike lanes and further narrowed shoulders at your request. I grew up in Custer County and I am not talking about he North End of Boise, I am talking about trying to figure out how Idahoans get to work when they don't have a working car.

It might be OK if you'd dedicated some funding to making sure there was some bus or van or some public transit in every community, but you and people like Mike Moyle say public transit doesn't work. What do you mean? Doesn't work for you because you can't imagine leaving the comfort of your giant new pick up truck to ride a bus? What if you had no choice?

What choices to Idahoans have left? Walk, bike, hitch hike? What about kids in rural communities? They walk and bike along state highways everyday. Are bike paths a luxury for them? How many kids and adults in Idaho die on highways every year because they have no safe place to walk or ride? I  bet someone knows.

All for Roads and Roads for All

Headed into the Joint Finance Committee where arms have been twisted so the Governor can cut State Employee funding by 5%. Every dollar he can funnel into the world of concrete and asphalt is going there. As if the road construction industry's boom alone will revive the economy while we lay off state workers, make them take deep furloughs, cut teachers and teacher's aids, grow class sizes and weaken our ability as a state to serve people when they need it most. An economy needs small businesses and I'm wondering where we are working to help them. Little home energy efficiency companies, tech companies who scan documents and do data entry will boom, but not because Governor Otter wanted them to. The strings in the stimulus are accountability measures. Congress tried to make us prepare a bit to avert an energy crisis, be more efficient and independent finally as a nation in healthcare and energy. But this governor wants to tax us more for roads, borrow more for roads, spend all the stimulus he can on roads while his Superindendent of Public Instruction cuts deeper and deeper into Schools with every passing day.

Economic Quandaries

The Senate chamber is empty but for Senator Dick Sagness next to me and the voice of secretaries in the back rooms. Outside, spring froze and is again thawing.

It is Friday. The place emptied early. JFAC this morning was about the economy. How can anything not be. Or maybe for sanity we should all find something that is not. It is an oppressive force in here but more so as people around the state try to plan for next month or next year.

There is a danger in that hesitancy to plan. If we are employed and so save our wages and pay off debt, the businesses around us suffer. We don't go down to Jim's appliances to replace the refrigerator that is turning the milk sour, or decide to suffer with the clothes dryer that takes four hours to dry a pair of jeans. We wait, not knowing if we will have a job to pay off that credit card bill.

But in the long run, our savings, or more critically our lack of credit card debt, makes our families more stable. We pay less in interest and fees. This is very hard on Jim's Appliances. But if it and other businesses do OK with the help of those who are still spending, if the employed go to local shops where their dollars circulate better in the local economy, then when the clouds break a bit and we breathe again, less debt hanging over us, a bit of saving to buy that refrigerator with, the economy will rise with all that "pent up demand." We will all benefit as families across the nation end all that "waiting as long as we possibly can to buy what we really need to buy."

For those traditional economists who say we need to personally borrow more so we can spend more now. I say that will only perpetuate a problem at the root of our economic woes. Americans are smarter than that. We recognize that we can't keep running up personal debt at this rate and not fall off an edge some day. The minimum wage can not stay as out of whack with the cost of living as it has been.

Yes, millions are without jobs, hanging on by that thread of little unemployment checks. They may be lucky to pay for food and rent and doctor bills, and are not going to be the ones buying new refrigerators or saving money. But roughly ninety percent of American workers still have jobs. We will make this economy suffer while we save and pay down debts, but when we are ready, this revived middle class may again become a middle class that sets to work to fill and even create new jobs in manufacturing, energy efficiency and alternative power generation.

I sit at my desk in the empty Senate and I know this is an economic quandary of epic magnitude. Who will suffer and pay for the rearrangement of our economy? Will it be families spurred simply to borrow more to buy more things? Or will it be the box stores and restaurant chains we abandon for corner groceries and little diners? The banks and mortgage brokers? Importers of foreign made goods? The credit card companies? Someone will pay. Things will change. If our determination is to hunker down and support the little shops and growers and appliance stores right around us, then local places may not be the ones to go under. We may see a trend away from generic downtowns where the food and shopping is so nearly identical that one might be in New York, LA, San Francisco, Boise or Chicago and not even know it. We may see the rebirth of an era where cities have character and people take pride in what local people make and sell.

That could happen. But it depends on what we do.

Regardless, huge things are happening around us. Banks may go under. More stocks could fall to nothing. But eventually we all do have to replace the hot water heater, the furnace or the car. If we save or at least owe less, we may feel we can do more than that. Maybe we will even save enough to put dollars back into banks, some will start new businesses. The ground will thaw. As a nation we have huge resources, huge ingenuity. Millions work very hard and if we pay them enough to live on and ensure they don't fall behind every time they need a doctor; if we take the weight of providing health insurance off the shoulders of business and families, we will endure. I'd place a bet even, that if we do these things, pay off some personal debt, buy more locally, fix our health care system, invest as a nation in manufacturing and energy, we will thrive.

Crazy Highways

Here's what's crazy: By my best reckoning Idaho is getting over $15 million it could have spent on public transportation statewide. It can only buy infrastructure with this money, nothing but buses, bus stops, material stuff like that. No drivers, no gas, no operating costs to pay drivers to make the buses go anywhere if we buy them.

At the same time the Speaker of the House (I'm sure with a bit of strategic help from Mike Moyle and his leadership team because Lawence Denny is the man, but he is not the arm twisting type) the Speaker has said no hearing on any local option authority legislation. No hearing to let voters in local communities around the state decide if they would like to tax themselves to fund something urgent that we as a state legislature just won't give them money for.

The most glaring example would be public transportation. No state dollars go there. No local funding source exists because local governments are not allowed to ask voters what they want to fund and how they want to fund it. The state dictates that. So since Mike Moyle, a single man from Star, elected to a powerful position by an increasingly conservative Republican caucus, since he is still not a fan of public transportation, the entire state has no way of funding public transportation operations.

So, no matter how long the people of Nampa wait in traffic, no matter how long it takes some days to get from Boise to Star or Eagle, if we have no money to operate a bus with fuel and a driver, we can not use the stimulus to solve the problem of Nampa to Boise buses running at capacity, or a bus system so poor it does not even run after dark, in early mornings or on weekends. Who can depend on a system like that? Who can afford to miss the bus to work or a job interview when the next one does not come for an hour or so?

So, instead of using the stimulus to allow little cities around Idaho to fund new van pools or real bus systems; instead of putting more buses on that corridor between Ada and Canyon counties we will instead replace old buses and then go on as we were, infinitely widening freeways and overpasses between Nampa and Boise. We will spend billions on that stretch of highway because a few powerful people don't personally like or believe in public transit. We will waste millions infinitely and futally trying to unclogg a clogged stretch of freeway, money that could be spent to fix rural roads from Soda Springs to Sandpoint.

I would think my rural colleagues would be more annoyed about that.

Gifts and Promises

Last week the Potato Commission sent a box of potatoes to the House and Senate for each of us. A Technical training center from Cassia County gave us a beautiful laser- and router-carved wooden paper weight with our names carved into the side and an Idaho Quarter set in the top. At a lunch for the anniversary of the Idaho National Lab we were given a thumb drive and sticky note holder along with a mini nuclear waste barrel that functions as a squishy stress reliever/forearm exerciser.

We get gifts as legislators. I usually feel funny enough about them or the expectation of a promise or vote that I give them away to interns or statehouse staff. We did vote last week to pass a memorial commending the Idaho National Lab on its anniversary. I voted for it because it seemed to reflect the lab in a genuine rather than a wishful way. It was a good memorial. I'd vote for it even if I'd not been offered the nuclear waste barrel/stress reliever/forearm exerciser gift.

The anniversary lunch where we got the Lab's gifts was a blur of slides and very brief admirals and contractors speaking in front of a big back curtain. Normally these folks at the INL focus public presentations on the great promise of Nuclear Power and their mission to build the next generation of nuclear power plants. Anymore they seem to go to great lengths to avoid talking about all the radioactive waste buried and stored out there in the desert of South Eastern Idaho.

But at lunch, in celebrating that nuclear reactor technology was first tested and developed here in Idaho, celebrating our role in nuclear weapons production and nuclear waste storage, the lab did focus on waste and on the thousands of people who have labored for decades under often dangerous conditions to try and clean up what is one of the largest nuclear waste dumps in the nation.

I've met many people who worked out there at "the site" over the years. Most recently a fire fighter who I worry about after having heard what he has breathed and how he no longer fears that odd feeling of heat and gamma rays radiating off of spent fuel and high level waste.

I will be a big proponent of nuclear power when we do finally solve the issue of waste. We will need to figure out how to neutralize it, not just recycle part of it. We can't keep leaving the most highly radioactive remains to burn somewhere in a mountain or building or pool of water for decades, centuries or millennia. I hope our government continues to invest money in solving the puzzle of how to render radioactive materials harmless. I even hope our lab gets that job and does it well.

But to talk of building new nuclear power plants before that task is done is beyond my comprehension. To talk about how this energy is clean or carbon free when in truth it is mined, refined, processed, transported, reprocessed, stored, cooled, monitored, repackaged and labored-over using decades of fossil fuels, that makes no sense. We still have no idea what to do besides piling more radioactive waste next to every nuclear power plant we build in every city or town from New York to California. To revive the industry means billion in profits for a few and a gift of consequences for the rest of us.

Nuclear waste is a gift our state still keeps getting. Most Idahoans don't know it but the nuclear navy's nuclear submarines still send all their radioactive "spent fuel" waste here to Idaho. Dangerous materials so radioactively hot that they are literally deadly to behold. Three Mile Island has waste buried out there in the soil over our aquifer. Decades of taking other state's nuclear weapons waste have left the soil so hot in places that even now it catches on fire sometimes. Workers in big tents use robots and cranes to dig it up out of the soil and put it in barrels to become New Mexico's problem.

If we want more gifts, we will believe the industry when they promise us it is a clean and safe form of energy now. They say they have solved the issue of the waste by recycling part of it. But ask them where it all goes. All of it. Ask what precisely we are left with afterward and is this something Idaho wants or is it something we're hoping someday to pass guiltily on to some other state or community with our own hollow promises and wishful thinking.

That's another gift I will decline. I will leave that one, like I left the mini squishy stress reliever/nuclear waste barrel on the INL luncheon table.

Beer and Wine

When we get a phone call from a constituent to the Legislative information desk, someone sends us a little yellow piece of paper with the brief massage typed out and a return address where we can call or write back. Last week the yellow phone call slips started flowing, a constant stream of "Don't tax my beer and wine" messages rippling out from the alcohol distributors, to the bars and restaurants to the patrons, riled like colonists at a tea party.

I understand. No one likes to pay more for anything, especially in hard economic times. But I ask, would we rather pay more through some other part of state government to build more prisons, pay for more emergency care from car accidents, more child protection and domestic violence shelters -- all because we do not offer nearly the treatment we should to prevent or end alcoholism and substance abuse in the state of Idaho?

I promise we will all just pay more if we don't someday create a dedicated funding source for treatment. And I'm talking about treatment, not about advertising or bill boards here. We will all watch people in our communities suffer year after year because we didn't help this year, because we didn't see the larger issue here.

I don't like the temperance argument. Moderation is what most people use in their approach to beer and wine. But if those of us who do drink beer and wine are not asked to pay for treatment, then who should pay? If we could tax Meth, believe me, we as a legislature would. We can't. Not Meth or Heroin or Cocaine or any of it. But when someone's family member is addicted and they can not afford an expensive treatment center, where will they go? Who will pay?

Let me say this, I don't know about you, but I would have paid. I would have stepped up and shelled out the seven cents a glass of wine or bottle of beer, and I would have paid so that finally the state of Idaho has a chance to fund real drug treatment as we never have before.

But here on the afternoon of this cloudy spring day, when the Senate floor is subdued and people file in and out on their way to and from committees, it is too late. The beer and wine tax went down, five to thirteen in the House Revenue and Taxation Committee this morning.

Risch and Crapo and Debt

Senator Jim Risch is speaking to us now about his experience in Washington DC. He is spending a very long time talking about his seniority. I suspect after so long in the executive branch here in Idaho, he is less accustomed to being somewhere near the bottom of a pecking order. His words suggest some tension with his more senior Senator Mike Crapo with whom he says votes on every bill and amendment.

Risch and Crapo both in speaking to this body, sternly remind us that the current borrowing is mortgaging our childrens' future and sending American dollars to China. Senator Crapo certainly has done a bit of that borrowing in his ten years in the Senate... let's say ten trillion in borrowing? But according to Senator Risch, this borrowing is different because a Democratic President is borrowing to help people afford health care, to make us less reliant on high cost oil and to keep states from raising taxes and or going bankrupt.

The real irony is in Risch's statement about how freeing up credit will fix our economic crisis.

Is not our problem in part that families and small businesses are too deep in debt already? Wages are so low and the cost of fuel, housing, daycare and insurance so high that people can not meet basic needs with out borrowing to fix the broken refrigerator, the car or to buy groceries or pay a doctor bill.

More lending good Senators? To really fix our economy, I think we have more fundamental issues to address.

Food on a Table

Sometimes a day unravels. Sometimes it just starts with a conversation you can not believe your committee is having. Fifty thousand Idahoans unemployed. A nation trying to keep states from going bankrupt. Laying off state employees. Hundreds of businesses folding up and blowing away.

I remember how former legislator and Joint Finance Committee member, Margaret Henbest looked in here in the statehouse hallways sometimes. It was a warning to anyone asking anything of her. I used to think she was just a bit high strung and should chill out a bit. I feel that look in myself somewhere now on days like this.

People's lives are affected by our actions so clearly in years like this. What we fund and what we cut. Who loses a job. What business closes because no one can afford to buy what they sell. There is weight to this year that is unusual. More gravity and uncertainty. What we thought could be a short session, may lengthen as forces between the Governor's office and Republican leadership debate whether and what of the stimulus to take. Their delay helps no one.

These dollars are dollars paid to and to be owed by Idahoans to the Federal Government, regardless whether we send the whole check back to Washington. Some of the money headed our way may not rescue us from ressession but will keep states like ours from raising taxes for roads or to keep schools open next year. Some will help insulate us from further crisis. It is not the recovery package I would have crafted but it is the one we have in front of us. The indecision and posturing does not help one single business stay open or one single family put food on the table.

State Employee Pay Cuts

It is not yet six am. I am dressed and ready to head to the Statehouse. Yesterday we were told the early morning Joint Finance Committee meetings will start. We will have a pre meeting to work out "motions" or proposals for how much money we decide we will really have to spend for state government in the last half of 2009 and the start of 2010. That's medical care, prisons, drug treatment and water quality protection and especially thousands and thousands of people who's job it is to do this work of the state, from teaching our kids to guarding our prisons, safeguarding social security numbers to making sure that feed lots don't contaminate well water.

In a tiny room that is now a library but once was part of the county jail, we will debate how deeply and in what way to cut state employee pay. It is that bad.

Will we use furloughs (days off without pay) or base cuts as deep as 5% or 7% in state employee pay? Some like governor Otter want to lay off employees. I personally do not believe that is good for the economy or for how well our state functions. This is the most Republican state in the nation, the last problem we have is too many government workers or people paid too well. Every new Republican governor finds places to "reduce government." They eliminate departments, cut staff, rearrange things. We are bare bones and state employees, especially those on the front lines, the kindergarten and math teachers, the adjunct professors, food stamp screeners, child protection workers and budget analysts work hard for the pay they get. This won't be easy.

If we cut jobs, unemployment rises more than its current record rate. If we pay families less, some will qualify for food stamps. They have to eat and pay rent and child care and heat and gas and electricity. Hopefully we will give some of them with families food stamps. Those are federal funds we have been stingy with. Our state's laws are different from any other state's. We make people lose everything before we make sure they are able to eat. Its called an "asset test." You can't own anything, just one car, not two, if you or your kids are hungry and need help for a bit. That may be something we can change. I know we need to.

How will our economy recover if families and businesses have to hit the very bottom of crisis before they get help? The deeper they go into crisis, the harder to recover.

Idahoans are rugged and independent. We also, especially in the small towns and older neighborhoods know each other. We need to know each other even in the suburbs. We need to watch out for our neighbors, make sure they are OK. I have something to give still. I'm buying things at locally owned stores and giving to the food bank and homeless shelter. I know i could do more. It is that kind of time. Over fences and in coffee shops, in senior centers and school yards, I think we better ask how it is going. Maybe over a conversation we can help each other out just a little bit and get through this.

Meanwhile, I have to head to the statehouse to vote on how to cut pay for thousands of Idahoans. Not a vote I want to make. There are better and worse ways to do this. May we do the least harm possible.

Deck Chairs

When the great boat was going down and an iceberg was ripping a hole in its new metal skin, I imagine those deck chairs, the ones that would have been wooden and heavy. Or perhaps there were none there on the deck of the Titanic because this was the North Atlantic and there was ice in the water and surely in the air.

In Health & Welfare Committee last week, we were visited by Blue Cross, one of our state's two largest insurers, in fact it is now the one the state now contracts with to provide insurance to most of Idaho's 17,000 or so state employees.

Blue Cross went to great lengths to show that spending more money on health care did not produce better quality health care. It is a point I would have appreciated coming from them had they bothered to mention how a health care system run by insurance companies creates a level of unpredictability and complexity never seen in the history of medicine world-wide.

Daily, the cost of American health increases because we as a nation and state government allow insurance companies to set their own rates. We let them decide what gets covered and what does not. We let these companies control and then change randomly who may treat whom and how much will be paid to those who provide care, based on who they are providing it to and whether that person is newly sick or has been sick with this same condition for a long time.

Imagine being a doctor and trying to figure out who and how much to bill for a colonoscopy. If the patient has insurance you get paid X. If they do not it is more. If the condition was pre-existing the insurance company might not pay, so you bill and work to get payment from the patient. Not only do you have to know the rules for every insurer, but you have to know that the rules can change at any time. So you may suddenly be designated as an out-of-network doctor or the procedure may no longer be covered so the company won't pay you and your patient, not knowing this, doesn't have the money to pay, so you don't get paid at all. Maybe, just maybe if you fight the insurance company you can get payment for the colonoscopy, or, if you use a different code on the paperwork, you will avoid the fight. In any case, before each procedure you need to make sure that the company will let you do what your patient needs. They may decide to pay for a lesser procedure or to make you wait until the problem is more severe, or until the person has moved to someone else's health plan.

Clearly you would never have time to see patients if you had to do all this yourself, so you hire one or two people to help with the paperwork. That is part of what makes what your colonoscopy (and your patient's insurance) cost more because not only do you have more staff to deal with the complexity, but all the insurance companies hire more staff to manage the complexity too.

So the Titanic screams ahead.

In the Senate Commerce Committee this week, Bill Deal, Director of the Department of Insurance, brought a rule, which is kind of like a law, to limit "discretionary clauses" in insurance plans. It is a modest change that means more than you might think. Read your policy sometime, if you have one (and I understand that one out of four of you have no insurance policy.) You will find statements something like this:

We agree to cover these things, but at our discretion we actually might not.

We promise to pay for this, but at our discretion we might choose not to.

We will cover medical care that costs this much unless, at our discretion, we decide we won't.

Bill's rule says you can't do this, at least not to ordinary people with individual plans who have no way to negotiate those bombs out of their policies. Small businesses beware you still have discretionary clauses in your policies.

The rule is progress. It is one deck chair a few feet to the left as the metal tears and the ship pitches starboard.

Like many, I've been spending a lot of time assessing what made our economy collapse. You can look back at reasons why wages are low and why still American companies could not survive manufacturing anything in the U.S. The cost of health care is clearly a factor.  U.S. companies have to pay for it while companies from countries with national health plans do not. It still weighs heavily on businesses trying to hang on while, all around them, businesses close and people lose incomes, buying slows and the chill sets in.

The icy waters froth and lap. Brilliant blue ice glows in darkness.

I plan this year to propose a bill to make companies tell small businesses the details of their health plans BEFORE the business signs on the dotted line. It says the insurance company can not change the plan in the middle of the contract.

Wooden legs scrape on a painted metal deck.

I look to President Obama to do this one thing for American business. Simplify this mess. Make it so no American family ever goes bankrupt or into deep debt to pay for needed medical care, ever again.

The Economy

I'm told I've been mighty accurate in my estimations of the economy over the last five years I've served on tax and economic outlook committees in the Idaho legislature. These days we are doing a lot of urgent predicting. Predicting a volatile economy though is not the sort of thing that lends itself to strict formulas. In my humble opinion, the world is too complex for formula economics. That, I think, is why a lot of economists sound sort of odd right now, like they are describing a different world than the one we all live in. I think many are having trouble fitting all the factors into one calculator.

I might put it this way: we have created a hollow economy, one built on fiction, on money none of us have, money that is promised against debt large enough to consume more wages than we may ever earn in a life time. And that is just the personal debt. Medical expenses, balloon mortgages, loans for new more fuel efficient cars, home equity loans, and everything from groceries to nick knacks stacking up on credit cards. The average person owes more than $10,000 in personal debt. That's the average. That means most Americans own nothing, or that someone else owns most or all of what we live in, eat off of or sleep on. It is a disturbing thought. Who owns it and can they take it back?

As a nation we have waged two wars on trillions borrowed from other nations. Dollars that a President and previous Congress pretended we had to spend.

We have allowed American companies to manufacture everything elsewhere or to sell us nothing but goods entirely made by other countries. Our dollars flow out to buy little plastic plug-in fans that make rooms smell like lilacs, accent tables and CD holders made for pennies by children using whole forests of foreign trees. We pay dollars and companies owned by shareholders on several continents earn the rest. Our wages flow out of our communities for insurance premiums and every daily necessity, staying only in tiny portions for the hamburger flipper, the bus driver, the nurse, the teacher, the shop keeper. Local stores are shuttered and dark and their owners who once slaved for a decent wage, work now for people they don't know and will never meet, in a chain store selling goods from far, far away.

Our factories still stand there, and people who know how to run them are still alive because much of this has happened in the past eight years. We could fix this. Not by outlawing or taxing foreign imports but by recreating a sense of pride in what we make and a sense that our very survival depends on our buying what our communities produce.

Even our food now finds us from far, far away. We may grow carrots and produce milk or beans or flour, but it leaves the state so we can buy someone else's, paying then the cost of packaging, shipping, cooling and storing it all when we really don't need to.

We have grown soft and dependent because it was profitable for Texas to watch oil prices scrape the stratosphere now and then. Alternative energy research has been underfunded by Washington or bought wholesale by Mobil and Shell. We were allowed to become dependent on oil made by other countries which long have known exactly how to gouge us just long enough to start and then quell revolutions in fuel efficiency and electric vehicles. We all know oil prices will again be at $4 a gallon, but, by design, we don't know when.

And then there is how we let banks play dice with debt. With bad debt. How we let a loan become a Las Vegas game worth 50 times anything material that was ever attached to it. We let insurance companies and investment firms pretend that one dollar was worth $50 and created fifty trillion in fake value or "derivatives" that inflated everything like a giant stay-puff marsh-mellow.

You know how a marsh-mellow turns into a weightless crisp black shell when it hits a flame?

Well, our economy is a crisp black shell and we are all sitting on the surface of it. This is just my opinion, but I think we'd better start filling it with something, making something to fill it with. We can, as a nation. Not that long ago we did. And whatever we make will form a lattice-like scaffold inside the burnt shell and the dollars we spend to buy the things we make will be like the bricks that turn that lattice scaffold into a solid place.

We can't wait for government help to come because there isn't quite enough real money in the world economy to bring back the whole sticky stay-puff that was our economy.

Things will get worse before they get better. And the stimulus will keep state governments from raising taxes and may help us prepare to be a bit more independent. But more important than that is that we have the ability, each of us, to choose to buy what we make. And those of us who are still doing OK can maybe think about what we can make that we or someone else made in our communities, one time, not so long ago.

And then we'd better start making that thing like our lives depended on it.

From the Field

For many days we heard that the proposed cuts to public schools budgets were going to mean cuts to number of teachers across the state. Fewer teachers for already over-full classrooms, jobs lost, kids sitting in desks, raising their hands, teachers running from one to the other, hoping to get to them all.

Each day in the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee (know as JFAC, the budget writing committee) a different part of state government stands before us to tell us what they do with your tax dollars. They describe how many employees they have, which Idahoans they serve and under what conditions. They tell us if cost are increasing or needs are. They answer our questions, which are sometimes pointed. Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Moderates, all probing to find out if there is money sloshing around in this part of the budget, hunting for funds that might be used for something else or asking leading questions to help the presenters convince the committee that the budget is appropriate or even that the cuts the Governor has proposed will hurt real people or cause us more costs in the long run.

The Superintendent of Public Instruction was in the committee yesterday. He is in charge of representing the hundred and something public school districts, all the teachers in their classrooms in the snow of the mountains or the dry flats of the desert a long days drive from the capitol here.

I'm glad to say he must have heard the groan of parents, the long sighs of kids at desks, the frustration of principals -- because, though he proposed many cuts, those cuts were not to the number of teachers given to Idaho public schools.

Let me just say one more time, Idaho already has some of the largest class sizes in the nation. I have taught kids from kindergarten to college age, and, in public school classrooms, from sixth to tenth grade. I can't speak for all teachers in this, but I do want to explain something.

You can put me out in a field with my 20 or so students. Out there in the weeds, with little physical support, it is not ideal, but for awhile I'm just fine. I can still teach and, with pencils and paper and a spot in the shade, my kids will learn just fine. However, leave me in that high-tech classroom with every possible book, every bit of technology and other amenity and then double my class sizes, and it is much, much harder, much slower and more frustrating for me and especiallyy for the kids. Given a choice, I'd give up all the technology and choose the smaller class, teaching them out there in the weeds of the field.

Empty Chambers

Today the Senate chambers are empty, thirty five chairs sit tucked under desks and snow falls outside. Snow is good, it means a slightly less stressful legislative session since dry hills and dry wells and ditches will not be plaguing the minds of my farming colleagues. At least perhaps water will not be as scare as dollars.

This week we begin to gather. The session starts officially on January 12th at noon. And then from Challis and Sagel, Bear Lake and Kuna we will assemble and the gavel will fall. We will begin the task of writing state law and of keeping the doors open in job training programs; dollars flowing for emergency medical care, for classrooms and doctor visits; for supervision, housing and treatment for those released from prison. We will decide who gets paid and how much, whether to cut all salaries or just those at the top. Whether the dollars saved by laying off or losing front-line state employees will be dwarfed by the increased cost of backlogs in child protection, the cost of new mental health and substance abuse crises, the cost of increased prison populations and greater demand for emergency medical care and more.  

I wish I could say we will be wise and think ahead, weighing consequences with the costs, thinking about who can bear the losses and who, right now, can not. Just as more people fall on hard times, will we cut the services they need to feed their families?

With Governor Otter talking about this being a time to re-evaluate the size of government I can't help but fear that this economic downturn will be used as an excuse to gut disability, medical, mental health and substance abuse services permanently. I worry that we will lose sight of our growing understanding that it saves budget dollars if we prevent a mental health crisis, prevent addiction, prevent incarceration and offer preventative care to avoid the need for expensive emergency medical services.

The chambers feel hollow. I hope our coffers, our reasoning and forsight will not be.

Healthcare: No Debate

    There is a fine line as to how many times one person can get up and debate in one day. I was so far over that line on Thursday that I didn't bother looking back. I'm serving my last days in the Idaho House of Representatives. I have credibility I want to maintain there for next year, voters willing, when I'll be far across the hall in the Senate. But it didn't matter on Thursday.
    Some of my Republican cohorts have said they will miss me. Brent Crane has said it kindly more than once. But he has a smile which I suspect means he knows I keep the place lively. Thursday was no exception.
     I went into the floor session knowing that I'd be working along side Mike Moyle on defeating the CID tax. (A scheme under the guise of growth paying for itself where developers have no liability at all to pay for the cost of their development's impacts on cities and towns, but instead pass the whole liability on to home buyers in a large and easily hidden special CID property tax.) I debated twice and asked pointed questions of the sponsor on that issue. That's rare. It did little good. The floor fight was spectacular on both sides but the bill sailed to through, and is now headed for the Senate.
    Phil Hart's horrible memorial to congress on immigration was up after that. I sat up in the balcony waiting there after his long, cruel speech, hearing no one get up to debate against the boilerplate John Birch Society rhetoric. And so I did get up again and when the house made its voice vote we had a fair number of nos. Not enough to make the speaker call for division, but enough that I wish more people across Idaho could have heard the vote itself.
     Later there somewhere in the blur of that day was a little memorial to congress saying Idaho was doing a grand job regulating its insurance companies and that Idaho wants no part of plans to let the federal government create consistent policies to regulate health care. I have yet to determine if the federal law is good or bad. I also realize that memorials have no weight of law and are at best grand statements of legislative sentiment with lots of whereas and therefores. But when they pass they send those sentiments off to Congress, the president or the universe with my name attached to them and the people of Idaho supposedly standing behind them.
     What got to me with this memorial was that this would be as close as we will probably get to having a floor debate on health care for the entire legislative session. People across the state are opening envelopes to paper printed with numbers, dollar figures beyond their comprehension. They are going bankrupt, setting aside plans of retirement, eating the heart out of savings accounts with prescription medication bills, cancer therapies, physical therapy, surgery, and psychiatric care. And very, very few of us, when those white envelopes come, are prepared or often in any way able to pay for what the bills say we must.
    Even with insurance, or especially with it, I think we often are lulled into the false assumption that we will be OK. We have paid, and maybe too our employer has paid thousands of dollars over the course of the year, maybe even thousands more this year then last, just for the privilege of having insurance. But here is no security in it any more.
    What is wrong is that our nation has allowed the insurance industry and our nation's health care to become so completely devastating to the finances of the vast majority of Americans. Here in Idaho even if you have health insurance, today you can still go bankrupt, end up with your home in hawk and yourself at the mercy of the temporary charity of the county indigent fund, subsidized by property tax dollars and general state tax funds. Small businesses struggling to find something to offer employees, typically can only afford bare bones coverage, a policy so full of lifetime maximums, deductibles and exclusions that the narrow strip of what it covers leaves families vulnerable and employees desperate when they realize what cost they are stuck with.
    And what have we done about it this year? Well, a house committee refused to consider and actually allow us to debate the merits of Margaret Henbest's proposal to begin universal health coverage by starting with opening up the state's CHIP program to all low and moderate income uninsured children. They refused to dedicate the tax dollars and consider offering parents an affordable option to ensure all kids have insurance and preventative care to save the state and families millions across Idaho. Margaret has run numbers on expanding state programs like Medicaid to more and more adults as well, especially that band of people who (and the small businesses that employ them) can not at all afford coverage now.
     Ask yourself and ask your neighbors, because I'm curious, would you rather trust a health insurance company, rather pay them premiums and let them decide your rates each year and what they will cover and not cover and how much of each procedure they will pay-- or would you rather pay those premiums in taxes and allow the state or federal government to expand their Medicaid or Medicare programs to let every middle class family buy in if they wanted. You might not get cosmetic surgery, but you'd have care  you could predict. You'd have the security of knowing that your premium would not double the next year and that your only cost might be a co-pay for office visits based on your income.
    National research is clear that access to early detection and prevention, eliminating administrative costs (insurance company's infinite red tape) and things like the need for costly county indigent funds and hospital charity care (which increases the cost of everyone's care,) would hugely reduce the cost of American health care.
    But why do I bother mentioning these issues? We did not debate them on Thursday. No. I sat in my seat after Mark Snodgrass presented his insurance regulation memorial and no one spoke. Though it was futile, and I was so far over the line in debate for the day, I stood up and pressed the white button on my desk at the base of the microphone on its long, black neck. I leaned in to ask one relatively brief question about whether federal regulation had any chance of ending the random raising of rates and denial of coverage which is common practice under insurance companies in our country and state now. The answer was that the sponsor didn't think so. He did reiterate that Idaho does just great regulating insurance companies.
    "Compared to what?" I wish I'd asked. "Couldn't we make them just a little more accountable to someone, especially since we have so few choices here in Idaho and since we don't really get to take our business somewhere else or just decide to do without if they do something we think is unconscionable, deceptive or dishonest?" But I'd been at that microphone far too many times that day.
    Has anyone asked Idahoans about how pleased they are with what they pay insurance companies so very much for? 
    We sent a memorial to Congress telling our nation that we are regulating insurance companies just fine in Idaho. There was no critique, no room for improvement, even just under the category "Healthcare." Everything is peachy with health insurance here. We "heart" our insurance companies. They, in their gigantic shiny new buildings, with their outstanding board member and CEO salaries and bonuses, are doing just the best work for our families here in the great potato state. Let's give them a medal for creative problem solving, selflessness and clear dedication to those families they send white envelopes to year after year after year. 

   

Coercive Rhetoric

Interesting our debate now on Rep. Bob Nonini's HB 654A making it unlawful to coerce a woman to have an abortion but leaving it lawful to coerce and threaten a woman with violence to force her not to have an abortion. Do the sponsors think it is OK to threaten a woman to force her to have a baby she feels unable to bear? Do the sponsors want to protect their right to coerce women for this purpose? Nonini said this was about protecting women, about our safety and our rights. I would have to say I doubt that. This bill is about politics and religion, not about women.

Only two men voted with the 9 women who voted no.

Waiting for the Train

If you look at legislative agendas (see link at right) you'll see a lot of notes that the committee will meet at the call of the chair. That is to say the committee room sits empty and the secretary may be wrapping up  committee minutes or doing other tasks (and, on a side note, yes, as far as I know all the committee secretaries are female. Four of our committee Chairs in the House are also female: Jo An Wood in Transportation, Lenore Barrett for Local Government, Sharon Block in Health & Welfare, and Maxine Bell as chair of the House's most powerful committee, Appropriations. In the Senate only Patti-Anne Lodge is a committee chair and in all, only six of the Senate's 35 members are women.)
    So, call of the chair is a suspended state of non-animation. There may be back room meetings, like that this morning to discuss transportation. Or there may be a bill coming from the Senate or a bill that the Senate wants which won't get a hearing until the Senate passes something else. That would be the case with Public Transportation Funding right now. Tomorrow morning we finally will see a hearing on a bill AUTHORIZING (not just limiting as the constitutional amendment does) the use of voter approved local option taxes perhaps for pubic transportation and roads. I'm not sure what exactly we'll let local people vote to raise their own sales tax for. I've not seen the bill since several have been proposed and counter proposed, trying to please Republican leadership in the house. I'm fascinated to learn if the crafters of the constitutional amendment will allow the Treasure Valley or others to begin work on funding public transit systems this year or if everyone must now wait a whole year more until November 2009 after this constitutional amendment passes statewide this election year.

Playing Chicken

    Feels later than it is and I should go to sleep. Home thinking about tomorrow and the week. We have still left much undone. So much good effort dead in drawers or on the committee room floor.
    This week will be about force. These last days are. The big boys fight, take hostages and dare each other to kill bills. It sometimes is as if no issue is attached to the legislation. Like Governor Otter vetoing a substance abuse budget line. You never know if its about policy or personalities. Did the sponsor make him mad? Was there a political rival who would benefit. Did he have other designs for the money?
    So we have to do battle with plans to change retiree benefits. We have to remind the overzealous amenders of our constitutional that their work is not done until they actually pass a real piece of legislation to let local people vote for local option sales tax for roads and transit. They can pass fifty of these useless constitutional amendments and we are no closer, only farther from having public transit or local road funds.
    And we could stop the foolish amendment but the house Republican leaders have kept lots of Senate bill as hostages. They will commence a grand game of chicken to see if the Senate will cave and give them what they want. I'd like to be wagering for some backbone but treasure valley Republicans should be leading that fight and I'm not sure if they will step up, steel themselves and take that thorny bill by the horns.

Of Cars and Roads

House Ways and Means Committee. Rep. Ruchti presents his bill.

...

It felt really good to stand in the back of the room while the Flying M Six presented a state transportation funding plan to the House Ways and Means Committee this afternoon. Looking at Governor Otter's idea of requiring a $150 across the board annual vehicle registration fee and at the other plans proposed so far, we decided there could be more equity and more account for how much impact trucks, especially heavy trucks have on roads. Six of us democrats from the house sat in the sun one afternoon early this week wit calculators, a computer and cell phones to draft a plan. A photo appears a few post back on this blog at Alternative Solutions. http://notesfromthefloor.typepad.com/notes_from_the_floor/2008/03/alternatve-solu.html
    Ways and means is an unusual committee made up of equal numbers of the house's Democratic and Republican leadership: Reps. Jaquet, Rusche, Sayler, Moyle, Bedke and Roberts, plus the chairman Rep. Rich Wills who I know to be one of the more honorable legislators in the body, (and one of the best actors. He's part of a theater troupe.)
    The committee heard our presentation from Rep. Philis King first. An alternative proposal for personal vehicle registrations. Our proposal is hardly Otter's $150 and will include a hardship exemption for those who could not afford the $42 fee for an older car. Our increase at this level was less than a proposal from the committee earlier which would have made the fee $48 and would have provided no hardship exemption.
    Rep. Ruchti got up next and proposed our 38% across the board increase in heavy truck fees and ton mile calculations (no, before working on this plan I did not know what ton miles were and that they were a way of accounting for impact on roads.)
    Finally Rep. Ringo presented our proposal for a 2% sales tax on the retail price of gasoline. This was a hard decision, but to raise $100 million to address shortfalls in transportation funding without raising registration fees to $100 we had to get creative. This money, because it is not just based on the gallons of gas used, will hold revenue for roads steady, even as fuel consumption falls and prices rise.
    All three bills got unanimous votes for introduction and the dialog was friendly, with the chair expressing enthusiasm for discussing the plans and coming up with a transportation funding solution we can reach consensus on.
    Our plan included support for the bi-partisan Moving Idaho Forward local option sales tax legisation to allow local governments, with voter approval, to share in the cost of urgent local road projects and to let them construct public transportation projects such as light rail or trolleys, bus systems or other projects to reduce the need for expensive freeway and road expansions and reduce congestions on highways and roads.
    Doing this felt good. It is hard to grab time to plan, especially to address an issue that comes up in the middle of a session. In fact, in general, I don't think legislatures plan ahead particularly well. We respond to crisis. Successfully finding elected law makers willing to spend or "invest" to avert disaster is hard. Disaster is typically more expensive than preventing the disaster. I think sometimes in conservative bodies like ours though we have to be pretty familiar with the data and projects to be ready to justify to voters why we used tax dollars for a project, especially if some might say it means "growing government," increasing regulation or raising taxes.
    Something has to be really bleeding for the Idaho legislature to raise taxes. We seem to shift taxes readily, but raising them is feared now after years of anti-tax rhetoric from within the Republican party. Yet this year you heard Republican law makers and Governor Otter talking about more than doubling major car registration fees which almost every family pays. Pavement and tail pipes, over passed and rush hour traffic is bleeding in Idaho or about to bleed.

Spin Control

Republican leadership threw an emergency press conference Friday after passing their constitutional amendment out of committee. They claim their amendment is all about making it harder to raise taxes. They say anyone opposing it just wants to raise taxes.
     Let's be clear, if this amendment passes it will make it harder for local people to raise their own taxes for things like public transportation which they urgently need (which typically the legislature doesn't value and won't fund.) Where is our faith in local people or local governments with this constitutional amendment. We are holding local governments up to a bar we do not hold ourselves to. Do we have to be elected by a 2/3 vote to vote on tax issues? Not as I recall.
     And let's be a little more clear, House Republican leaders Mike Moyle and Ken Roberts who are quoted as caring about keeping Idahoans taxes low are the same two who are behind shifting almost $100 million in business taxes onto families and individuals by repealing the $120 million personal property tax. It should be hard to raise taxes they say? How about shifting taxes from one group of payers to another? Is that some how OK? Maybe we need to let the people of Idaho vote on that. Vote and see if they believe the idea that the benefits of the multi million tax cut for Simplot and Canadian mining companies will trickle back down to the families of Idaho who will soon pay for this huge business tax.
    Of course if we did take a vote on this one on a ballot in November it would probably end up being written so that it would sound like the Jim Risch tax shift did, like motherhood and apple pie. Like something designed to save education when it simply took locally controlled school dollars and made schools come begging to the legislature for every dime instead. It cut taxes for vacation homeowners and big business while raising the sales tax, which is mostly paid by families. Can you call that protecting tax payers from tax increases? I don't think so.
    I'm tired. But we have many miles to go before we sleep. The session is far from over. Every one is just gearing up for elections with a fresh batch of wholesome "we are only saving you from yourselves" rhetoric. The house PR guy is running over time. It seems to be time for the spin doctors to go to work.

Constitutional Politics

Out legislative committees meet in fairly small rooms downstairs from the floor of the house here in the old Ada County Courthouse, our temporary Capitol. We sit in big chairs around folding tables with maroon skirts around them and when we vote a roll call vote the ayes and nays snake around the table and table extensions sometimes in the shape of a big "E."
    I can't even count how many years people have been coming to the legislature with requests for authority to raise their own local sales taxes to address their own local needs. Again and again people have come to the legislature desperate for public transportation funding to address their own public transportation needs. After last year's public transit bill came darn close to passing to the floor, some Republican leaders who oppose public transportation generally said the bill needed to include local funding for local roads as well. The now statewide coalition supporting the bill complied and changed the bill to include roads.
    Next Rep. Mike Moyle, key opponent of public transportation, then said that we needed a constitutional amendment before he would allow a public transit bill to get out of Revenue and Taxation Committee. Canyon County legislators who at some point last year had heard their constituents and agreed we needed public transit funding, today seem to have bowed down to the idea that a constitutional amendment should be passed before we address public transportation needs.
    What does this mean for any community with broken buses, bare bones service or no service at all? What happens to businesses who suffer from a lack of parking or people waking up in wee hours to commute through dense traffic? What is the consequence to the elderly and people with disabilities, to those with no alternative but to walk, beg a ride or take a cab?  Delay.
    We will wait now while the legislature debates this constitutional amendment, while it goes to the voters for likely approval. Who wouldn't agree local people should be able to raise their own local taxes for their own local needs? A majority likely will, even statewide. But what does it gain us? Nothing. We can already let local people vote to raise their own sales tax and some communities around the state do just that for jails or for tourist services. It keeps them from having to raise property taxes and let's local folks set priorities for what is urgently needed locally rather than waiting on the state or feds to even care. Funny though, until we pass the "Moving Idaho Forward" bill waiting hostage to this constitutional amendment, we still will not be able to fund public transportation or roads by a local option tax.
    So all this is to say that the legislature is wasting tax payers time. We are just standing in the way of the needs of many areas where people sit in long lines of cars to get to work, where smog rises and the big federal hammer of air quality "non-Attainment" is about to come down. Let's not pretend there will be no victims to this political game. There will be. There already are.
    

Losses

Valiview School Principal speaks with bill sponsor IACI lobbyist Alex LaBeau waiting behind him.

Committee members hear testimony. Seats were empty as some members of Republican leadership missed hearing those who testified against the bill because of other meetings.

........................

Just came from Revenue and Taxation committee. To me, today's vote is one of the biggest losses of the session. (Some things I'm not conceding loss on yet.) By one vote we failed to amend the bill to shift almost $100 million in business taxes on to families and individuals. The amendment would have given a $50,000 personal property tax exemption to all businesses, a move which would eliminate all personal property taxes for more than three quarters of all small businesses. It would benefit all businesses without putting budgets, schools, and local governments at risk. This bill passed as written and so now we face the mother of all tax shifts.
    It was one of those days when I passed long notes to JoAn Wood and Lenore Barrett and spoke to Phil Hart who was supposed to speak to Dick Harwood. But we didn't get Lenore or Dick. It was a big business vs small business day with the chamber and Alex LaBeau from the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry and the Chambers of commerce on one side and counties, some school districts and local government folks on the other.
    JoAn Wood talked about how the Chamber can't have it both ways. They want more money for roads and they want this huge tax cut. They can't have both yet here we are now.   

Just Like Me

I was struck today while we debated a bill to stiffen penalties in order to protect domestic violence victims, how very colored our values are by our experience. I see in debate that what we've never experienced we really genuinely might not understand.
    The committee was hearing two bills from the prosecutor's association. Both allowed for a felony charge if a person is found guilty of breaking a domestic violence protection order or a no contact protective order for a third time.
    In debate, Phil Hart was concerned that his ex wife's own past behavior and accusations would land him a felony charge even if he did nothing wrong.  Raul Labrador thought that it was too easy for people to get a protection order just to try to get custody of the kids in divorce proceedings. Lynn Luker moved to kill both bills because he says that judges can put people in jail enough already under the existing law.
    None of these legislators I suspect has ever experienced domestic violence or stalking. None has spent long months with every day feeling like a dreaded test of your will to live. Every day a question of whether you can survive psychologically  long enough until you are no longer followed, no longer haunted by phone calls, impersonated, no longer tired of having the police on auto-dial, filing report after report, no longer exhausted waiting for your stalker to maybe snap and kill you with a gun, a car or fist.
    How many of my colleagues have lived in fear? Have some of the older ones been to war perhaps? It seems that those who have been in combat might know even better that I do just what living in fear of violence does to a person's life.
`    I look around the room in judiciary and rules and it is like many committees. Three women on a committee of 16. What are the chances that the law will often not reflect our unique needs in areas like domestic violence?
    We all seem to value what we know, and fear what we know to fear. Today by the skin of our teeth and with Raul Labrador's help eight of us passed just one of the two laws to allow women who are victims of systematic harassment or threats to seek some additional help from the court.
    Still many women will wait in agony, enduring repeat offenses for a year or more while three charges slowly reach convictions and the felony comes to play. But it will be well worth it I hope for the sake of those few women who now will find safety sooner or get a rest from fear for a year or two while their perpetrators are in prison. I have hopes that prison will work better than jail time because it provides actual treatment for that sort of obsessive control and gives offenders and a better chance that psychological healing (if not the deterrent) will make more Idaho women safe and prevent even a few deaths by violence or the suicide that can follow despair.

Giving License

Sitting on the floor in my big black seat with my electronic voting board on my computer in front of me. We are beginning debate on a long list of bills. This is the first day since Rep. Lake's stroke that we will begin again to tackle our backlog of legislation and send substantial numbers of bills to the Senate.
    The chair of JFAC, our Budget Committee is arguing we don't have the money to make misdemeanor probation a priority. This is the kind of argument which has filled prisons. It is also a bit of a turf battle for JFAC as they don't want to have funding detour around the Budgeting process and come automatically from liquor funds. More successful  probation and support for minor offenders will lead to fewer serious offenses, especially for substance abuse and mental health related crimes which make up a large portion of the crimes which fill costly prison cells.
     The other key issue for saving long term prison costs at more than $50 a day would be helping the children and families of Idaho get kids off to the best start in education so they find meaning in their lives, success in school and positive experiences and support to stay off drugs.
    We should be looking to find what every student has a talent for, what every student is good at, what will motivate them to become engaged. That is the best of education. That is how we can finally address the root causes and finally be successful at keeping them motivated to learn, keeping them strong emotionally and out of the state of despair which leads to drug use, depression, suicide and juvenile crime.
    It amuses me looking at today's agenda, that Idaho law appears to require a license for caring for plants but I know does not require one for the caring for young children in day care centers. http://www3.state.id.us/oasis/H0392.html
    We graze a huge range of issues today. Fertilizer, trucks, colleges, health care, juries. I just voted no on a bill to release the state from a requirement that Idaho based contractors be included in those who are hired to work on the state Capitol restoration. It seems foolish not to hire as many Idaho based contractors as possible since that is the most sound policy for our economy, keeping state tax dollars in state to re-circulate.

Stressing Treatment

It has been a long road. I've found that legislation that is going to survive this process, requires that.   
  Yesterday House Judiciary & Rules Committee introduced a bill I've been working for months with co-sponsors to negotiate and finalize. The bill allows judges, in certain cases, to use drug treatment focused alternatives to Mandatory Minimum Sentences. Specialists with the Department of Corrections have told our committee that prison sentences of six months to a year coupled with supervised parole which includes treatment is the best way to ensure people recover from meth addiction or addiction to drugs.
    Prison is a pretty violent place. Violence can be contagious, like desperation. We have struggled as a state to offer women and men a chance of recovery and better chances of returning to their families as productive members of society. It is becoming more clear that, for non-violent offenders, whose main issue is addiction, more than eight months in prison can be counter productive. Our system struggles to ensure that offenders leave prison less likely to return to drugs or commit other crimes. Treatment and parole supervision with random drug testing and resources for re-lapse are important for that. With more hard work, Lynn Luker, Raul Labrador, Phil Hart and I will try to make this change to allow judges to use these types of treatment focused sentences where appropriate. We are now joined by co-sponsors Dick Harwood and Eric Anderson. Having Senate co-sponsors would have been wise as the Senate Judiciary and Rules Committee is where the largest hurdle may be.

Childhood

Republicans on the Senate Education Committee today blocked introduction of a proposal I drafted to allow school districts to offer optional all day Kindergarten in Idaho public schools.

    Currently there are 21,778 Kindergarten students enrolled in Idaho Public Schools. The vast majority of these attend half day Kindergarten classes either in the morning or afternoon part of the day. Typically, a single teacher instructs both the morning and afternoon class.

    According to the education Commission of the States, full day Kindergarten produces higher math and reading scores. Offering parents access to more extensive educational programs which improve reading readiness, and advance social, emotional and cognitive development, reduces the need for remediation and speeds the development of important skills which help students excel in elementary and secondary programs.
    Currently, for the portion of the day when children are not in public Kindergarten classes, parents are paying for childcare in a variety of types of day care programs. In Idaho none of these programs is licensed and required by law to meet state health, safety and educational standards, though in a few areas, some are required to meet certain local standards imposed by city ordinances.
    Ten states offer full funding for all day Kindergarten programs. These programs save tax payer dollars by reducing the cost of daycare, providing more solid educational content and by ensuring more children enter elementary classes ready to learn.
    Idaho ranks 46th in the nation in per pupil spending for education. Our lack of funding for all day Kindergarten contributes to the low ranking. This legislation was intended to begin the discussion over how to more effectively spend Idaho tax dollars to create a strong education system which focuses on readiness and skills rather than expending large sums of tax payer dollars in efforts to correct early failures in our system. All day kindergarten is one way we can use preventive means to fill the need for remedial programs, to lower drop out rates and address the corresponding issues which relate to juvenile crime and the cost of Idaho’s over burdened corrections system.
    In my mind, together with lowering class sizes for students of all ages and extending the school day for some students, improving early childhood education is one of the most powerful and effective changes we could make to strengthen education and help Idaho's young people reach their full potential.

What We Fear

If you pull back and look at us from a distance,it is interesting what we as a legislature would seem to be afraid of.
1. Wolves: not for their teeth but for the fact that, to a sizable number of us as legislators, they embody the Federal Government. They represent that struggle locals feel as the back country is designated wilderness and federal law changes to reflect coming population demands, pollution and contamination and human health problems already urgent in cities. It is a struggle over change and over power. Some fear the wolf because we are accustomed to being almost invincible in the wilderness. We are accustomed to grazing sheep and cattle and making of wild places what we will, not what another creature wills. Even if we implant birth control devises in wolves and see their populations level, there will be tension. Even if we watch them strengthen elk herds, culling the weak and making wild game meat lean and strong, there will be those who still will wish wolves exterminated. Even if we are able to use federal dollars to pay for losses to ranchers, pay to cover investment and the future market value of calves, there will be some who will never see a wolf as magnificent or sacred, only scary.

What else might we as lawmakers fear?
2. Being without a gun. Unless recent legislation is only about the politics of gun rights, then I suspect that it is frightening for some of my colleagues to picture their own son or daughter on a college campus without a gun. Let's set aside that moments of passion and drunkenness are perhaps the greatest threats to public safety, even for those who remain sober, and to insert guns into such an environment might not help make it safer. Never mind that suicide by a fire arm may be one of the higher risk factors of allowing concealed weapons on campus. I suppose too we had best set aside the notion that a concealed weapons permit is an adequate test for emotional stability or any indicator of its owner's ability keep that gun out of the hands of others on a small campus with shared dorm rooms, open doors, and many parties. This week, as the legislature debates prohibiting colleges from banning concealed weapons on campus, we will contemplate what we fear and what we don't fear. Will a change in the law create more fear or less?

Bootstraps

Some days committee is just depressing. Today a stream of Idahoans testified eloquently to the overly punitive nature of Rep. Bayer & Senator Fulcher's grocery credit bill (it says no grocery credit for any month a person gets any food stamps -- even if the amount of food stamp assistance is small and they have paid tax on the remainder of their groceries for the month.)
    Just as I was feeling good about the day, Bryan Fischer got up to testify as to how the Idaho Values Alliance aims to "Make Idaho the friendliest place in the world to raise a family." According to his testimony, it will make Idaho friendlier if we make sure that no grocery credit at all goes to families struggling to feed their children and getting even $50 a month in food stamps.
    But that wasn't the hardest part of our committee meeting. Next, the discussion digressed into an estimation of which form of tax policy more effectively keeps "illegal aliens" from benefiting in any way from a grocery credit to the income tax (which many pay when they have taxes withheld from their wages using made up social security numbers --trying to do the right thing mind you by paying their income taxes.)
    Never mind that many of the 30,000 or so people in Idaho who don't have proper documents may have lived here for decades. Never mind that many parts of our economy depend on them or that they are frequently wives of legal citizens or others who have struggled for years to maintain legal status or were at some point in the long, long, sometimes ten year long, impossible waiting line for citizenship.
     It was a depressing day. On the floor debate stayed just short of ugly on a bill to further complicate driving for those who do have legal status. If a person's legal papers lapse (which happens frequently due to the nature of temporary visas) they must wait six months for a new drivers license. In the mean time how do they drive for work, for taking children to the doctor in rural Idaho?
    Some work places will have the resources to help employees keep up with the new requirements so that they do not lose their drivers license and insurance. Others will not and this will become just another hurdle to working in Idaho if you come from India, China, Britain or Mexico.
    For a state trying to bring in collaborative talent to our universities for research and trying to be a safe haven for refugees, for a state struggling to maintain rural economies, we are going to find ourselves with ghost towns where once there were vibrant, bustling communities. If we are not careful we will allow our hostilities over immigration to generalize further and will only incite more of those awful incidents around the state when a student at a university, a mother with a child with brown skin and an accent is harassed or even shoved or beaten, called a wet back and made to feel afraid for her life. What kind of a nation are we that we allow our concerns over broken federal policies to spill over to hatred of people working hard to make a living, working to hold families together and make a better life for themselves. Where is our humanity? Where is the soul of our nation? A nation where the vast majority of us are immigrants.

I wonder if perhaps too few of us know someone who has struggled to maintain legal status. Maybe more of us need to sit down with someone who came to Idaho as a small child or decades ago on a work visa, married here and stayed. There are heart breaking stories out there. People who worked hard to maintain proper legal status and all their paperwork for years, getting caught at the boarder trying to return to Mexico for a funeral or birth and losing their status because as long as they wait for citizenship we don't let them leave the U.S. Even if that wait is ten years we make them jump through impossible hoops just to stay and remain legal as they long to. No, I suspect we don't hear these stories in person often enough.

Greener Pockets

Today the House Energy, Environment and Technology Committee, which I serve on, approved a bill to require 30% more energy efficiency in the construction of state buildings in coming years. The bill, swallowed by the committee last year on largely partisan lines, passed today with only Rep. Steven Kren and Rep. Curtis Bowers voting no. I am sure Steve and Curtis have reasons for voting against saving state dollars by building structures which use less energy. I might not know what they are exactly but I know they have them. I might hazard a guess. It may be that deluge of fun publications which offer article after article about the evils of government regulation of everything from day care centers and water quality to building construction, carbon emission and fuel efficiency. I'm pretty sure that the Heritage Foundation, which publishes these newspapers, is largely an organization by and for businesses which are making strong profits for their shareholders doing things exactly as they do now. Not surprisingly they work hard to try and persuade legislators that there is no sense to arguments that human health or taxpayer dollars may be at stake if things (designs, materials, emissions, effluents, or the ingredients of their products) stay as they are right now. But that's just a guess. We all have our own legislative priorities and values systems within which we operate. We each have to weigh out how we prioritize human health, our feelings about government regulation, short term vs long term costs and what ever else enters our reasoning from the recesses of our minds.

Energetic Disagreement

The Idaho Legislature's efforts at energy planning in recent years leave much to be desired. As legislators, we ranchers, teachers, small business owners, insurance salesmen and retired farmers gather in committee and try to learn some of the basics. What are the limits to how much electricity we can carry on our existing power lines? What new energy producing technology is being developed? What are the true comparative impacts to our health and our environment of coal, nuclear, wind, hydro, solar and geothermal power generation?
    Sadly we rely heavily on presentations from industry to answer our questions and school us in the basics. Ultimately it is Idaho Power, Idaho National Lab, coal producers and the very corporations who stand to gain from energy projects who take committee chairs to lunch, feed us information and set policy for us behind closed doors so that we end up with plans which are designed more to improve companies viability than they are to create energy independence and security for uncertain times.
    For example, our interim committee on energy did not set firm targets for renewable energy in Idaho's portfolio of energy sources, instead our state energy office has been set free to focus on nuclear power whose lobby has been relentless in trying to convince the state that, though practically no other state wants to build new nuclear power plants, that Idaho should embrace the idea in spite of the fact that it ensures the storage of new nuclear wastes within our boarders.
    I'm quite certain that our new energy czar does not have a set of proposals or options from every possible type of energy producer on his desk. Solar turbines, tidal and micro hydro never seem to enter into the conversation. And what if we really thought outside the box and decentralized energy production somewhat, especially for residential usage? What if we heavily incentivized solar water heaters, passive solar heat and small energy projects on ditches, ranches and roofs across the state?
    Diverse and decentralized production makes more sense for creating energy independence and energy security for our state than giant nuclear project or new coal plants. Both coal and nuclear rely on limited resources and even with recycling of nuclear fuel, very dangerous wastes remain as by-products which will continue to accumulate and will have to be put somewhere for hundreds and even potentially thousands of years.
    In committee I ask questions and watch some of my colleagues roll their eyes at strategies to address the impacts of climate change, air pollution, and water contamination. We can keep feeding the folly that says we will be fine when gas reaches $5 a gallon. We can pretend we don't really need public transportation and that the public will accept radioactive waste being stock piled next to the Snake River. We can pretend we can keep building subdivisions out to the horizon and never run out of water, never find a time when the freeways can not be widened any further.
    Without question energy and environmental issues are the toughest ones I deal with. They have become sadly the most partisan -- I think in part because, as legislators we don't know enough about science to ask the right questions. We don't demand to know the other side of the story or demand to know who paid for the glossy publications or the monthly "climate" and "environmental" newspapers which appear everywhere we go. If we are to guard the interests, the energy security and health of our state and our population we have to be more critical and creative. Too much is at stake for us not to.

Finding Home

Sitting in Rev & Tax Committee. Our Minority Leader, Rep. Wendy Jaquet has waited three years to get permission to arrange today's speakers on workforce housing. Workforce Housing. That's the term resort communities use for affordable housing even though in many places its not just people in the service industry who need a place to live, it's seniors, young families, people who face a health crisis and can not work. I know we face a tough audience in here on this issue, especially if its not clear that people struggle with rents and mortgages far beyond Boise and Ketchum They struggle in Teton County, McCall, Coeur d'Alene, Bear Lake and Stanley.
    The questions from the committee are telling. Our Chair, Rep Lake, asked it it were not more wise to raise wages rather than buying land and building housing so as to create a class system where some people live in special houses or buildings set aside while others live in homes. He makes a great point. I passed him a note to ask if he would support a locally adjusted minimum wage up to say $21.50 an hour so that even those laboring for years in resort communities could have a chance at affording their own home.
    However, if saying we need to raise wages to address the problem is going to be an excuse to kill any efforts as helping set aside land and funding for affordable housing efforts, then we should all come clean.
    In the past two legislative sessions bills to raise Idaho's minimum wage a dollar or two above the present $5.15 an hour and then to index it so it keeps pace with inflation have been killed pretty much on party line votes. I'm just hazarding a guess that there will be no real legislative effort to bring wages anywhere near the level where someone trying to work in a restaurant in McCall can own a home in town or anywhere near by.
     And Rep. Wood's point about loss of land for trailer homes and later about how farms and ranches build on-site housing for workers is interesting as well. If only a school or gas station or cafe had an abundance of land, affordable, extra land, they could build a house or two on in downtown Victor, Stanley or McCall. But I think that is the point. Lots of businesses rent and don't have land to build homes on for their workers. And as Rep. Ruchti from Pocatello pointed out, the whole town benefits from having people live where they work and having people housed rather then homeless or driving fifty miles to work each day. So a whole town or city should help ensure housing is available for those who work there.
    One can't help but think of the city of McCall which recently mandated that a portion of all new developments include affordable housing. This policy keeps neighborhoods mixed, protects areas from air pollution, commuter traffic and sprawl and protects communities from potential economic instability that comes from having all members of a neighborhood or community belong to one single economic strata or class.
    Real estate developers were none too pleased with McCall's policy. The Idaho Association of Realtors in fact sued the City Council to stop implementation of this particular ordinance. I suspect that if developers, builders, real estate companies, ski areas and down town merchants do not step up to create proactive plans soon, we will need more mandates. Either that or we can live with homelessness, live with dishwashers driving hours in the early morning dark through a storm, live with streams of traffic as people commute from distant parts of the county to work, live with more people turning down Idaho jobs because they can not find a place to live near by on the wages we offer.
    There are consequences to prosperity that benefits only some but does not pay adequate wages or at least offer adequate help with the necessities to benefit all. Idaho's growth bumps us up against that problem, finding homes for those who need them most. Like homelessness, it doesn't seem to go away just because we build one small shelter, make a few arrests or buy a ream of bus passes. There are root causes and eventually we will have to tackle them.

Prison Tour

Dr. Mary Perrin, director of programing. Idaho's work at real rehabilitation.

Control Room

Maximum security segregation cells

Heath and Welfare Chair Sharon Block and Boise Rep. Sue Chew leave the prison in the snow

Sentences

The Capitol Annex is alive even on Saturdays now. Keys click at a desk or two on the floor and the budget analysts and bill drafters roam in jeans and base ball caps. Mike Nugent the lead bill drafter and long time veteran of legislative services looked like he'd come from a ball game.
    I'm working with Republican colleagues Phil Hart and Lynn Luker on finalizing legislation to change Idaho's sentencing laws to ensure offenders get supervision after they leave prison. This also for many inmates means better access to drug treatment, support and accountability to keep them healthy, productive members of their communities and families once they leave our state prison system. We hope it will help keep them from returning to an addiction, committing another crime and coming back.
    Hopefully too it will mean less crowded prisons as Judges specify how much of a sentence can be incarceration and what might be set aside for transition and supervision after release onto Parole. This is particularly important for sex offenders, but for some of those whose main issue is addiction, we have a separate bill to help focus on treatment as an alternative to long mandatory minimum sentences.
    Here in the statehouse we are wired and filmed. But nothing like the prisoners we watched from behind the glass on Tuesday. Rep. Margaret Henbest and I watched one man, shuffling, cuffed, long-haired and disheveled, he was moved from one cell to the next clutching some sort of white leather bag or purse. Everything about him screamed despair and bewilderment. What ever he did must have been horrible. But now his life is in that place, behind the glass with all those cameras, guards and all the pastel colors and white paint. 
    Downstairs here in the Capitol Annex, legislative services has set up viewing rooms where big TVs wait so the public can watch us when we assemble to vote on legislation in the House and Senate. The feed is now broadcast on Idaho Public Television as well as on the web at the IPTV web site. The cameras now are dead eyes staring wildly and blank at walls and empty seats. Most days they will click to life at 11 or 11:30 AM. At first boring procedural sessions will in weeks turn into long sessions of debate and parliamentary maneuvering which at last most people around the state will be able to find somewhere on the dial.

http://idahopublictelevision.com/leglive/

Lines Drawn

It is surprising how early lines are being drawn this session. Before we've even see any bills, editorials against the utility of public transportation are being xeroxed and circulated on desks. Everyone is digging in. Perhaps because over the summer so much work was done to show legislators good public transit systems like Salt Lake's, the stakes are upped. It has sounded sensible these last months so of course those who have built political careers signing anti-tax pledges and painting urban areas as axes of evil are now ready to make sure anything that benefits Boise is not signed into law. What kind of respect for the Democratic process and for true bipartisan problem solving does it show when the House Majority leader talks about ensuring that any place that elected Democrats will find its interests thwarted by this Majority. What of all the people in other districts who have similar needs. What of the Democrats and Independents in the minority in Republican districts whose communities are intertwined economically with these now Democratic areas? What of seniors and people with disabilities who rely on public transit to get to jobs, to medical appointments and for every aspect of their lives? What of commuters who are sitting in parking lots of traffic trying to reach work or home each day? Does none of this matter as much as ego or partisan politics? I think those who presume so much will be surprised in the coming week when they hear from angry voters and when they meet a brick wall in the often sensible Senate. We will see. But lines are drawn and we are all digging in.