Notes From The Floor

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.

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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.

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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.