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idaho legislature

Taxing Internet sales could bring in at least $30 million, Royce Chigbrow, Chairman of the State Tax Commission, told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee today.

That’s about 12 percent of the outstanding $250 million in tax revenue, pointed out Judy Brown, a Moscow economist who’s filling in for Representative Shirley Ringo (D-Moscow), who’s out for a few days for surgery. 

Internet technology

Not all the grants for expanding broadband in the U.S. using stimulus funding have been made, but some of the rejection notices are starting to come out.

In addition, both of the federal agencies making the awards have said they intend to announce all the awards—and rejections—by the end of the month, according to the Stimulating Broadband website.

How did Intermountain West states do?

opinion: presidency

I watched a video of President Barack Obama appearing at the GOP House Issues Conference for an hour-long Q&A session, and it just made my little wonkish heart go pitty-pat.

For a few years last decade, I went to graduate school for public administration at Boise State University. Remember high school English, with all the man’s-inhumanity-to-man, Hester-represents-the-Church-of-England symbology stuff? Graduate school is full of that kind of thing, and when you’re done, you swear you’re never going to use it again.

But watching the Obama-GOP interaction today, my fingers were itching to write some sort of turgid, footnoted, Org Theory-heavy, academic paper with all that stuff in it that nobody but wonks would appreciate, because it was just so cool. (I promise, though, no footnotes.)

idaho legislature

It’s ba-aaack.

Last year’s attempt at implementing a “pharmacist conscience” bill, which would enable pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions based on their personal ethics, died in the Senate’s Health and Welfare committee.

This year’s, which is limited to “abortion and contraceptives” but is extended to all health care professionals, is starting out in the Senate, but in State Affairs, and solves few of the problems with last year’s bill.

idaho legislature

The other shoe—the size of Big Bird’s—dropped in the Idaho Legislature as Idaho Public Television General Manager Peter Morrill gave his budget presentation to the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee (JFAC), two and a half weeks after a budget recommendation that would phase out general funding support for the statewide television network after four years.

“I have a great deal of respect for the difficult decisions the Governor has had to make and propose to this deliberative body,” Morrill said. “And there is an enormous amount of respect we have for the process you have to go through to understand the needs and wants, and try to guide this state to fiscal solvency.” But the long and the short of it is, without a new source of replacement funding, the station would have to let 41 of its 42 translator stations (with the exception of Lewiston) go dark, he said. The translator stations are what brings Idaho Public Television to rural Idaho.

idaho legislature

For people with no medical insurance and no resources who need medical care, the provider of last resort is Medically Indigent Health Care, known as the CAT (for Catastrophic) Fund. And between the number of people eligible for the fund, and the cost of the health care they need, the fund is in line to be hit with nearly twice as much in expenses as it has been budgeted for the current fiscal year – money the state is obligated by law to pay, said Roger Christensen, CAT Fund Board Chairman.

“If individuals meet the eligibility requirements, we cannot find any statutory authority to deny those claims due to lack of funding,” Christensen told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee (JFAC). “If they meet the statutory requirements, we’re required to pay the bills.”

idaho legislature

The Health and Welfare budget hearing is always sort of depressing to listen to, because they deal with so much human misery, but this year it’s positively Kafkaesque. It’s a double whammy – the state budget needs to be cut because the economy is in the pits, but precisely because the economy is in the pits, the load on the department is heavier than ever.  Plus, cutting Health and Welfare has other ramifications, ranging from losing federal matching funds to damaging the local economy to opening the state up to lawsuits.

“How do you do it and keep everything from falling apart?” asked Senator Nicole LeFavour (D-Boise). “There’s very challenging decisions the department has to make,” said David Taylor, deputy director of support services. “As far as what it’s going to look like, I truly don’t know.”

Column: idaho legislature

Oregon Public Broadcasting operates without any regular state funding. Idaho’s situation is different. Here’s why:

1. Oregon Public Broadcasting is not a statewide operation, said Peter Morrill, general manager of Idaho Public Television. It is centered around the Willamette Valley and operates a number of repeaters, or translator stations, along the northern half of the state, but the southern half of the state is a different public broadcasting system, Southern Oregon Public Television. OPB has five transmitters and 40 translator stations, said OPB president and CEO Steve Bass, compared with IPTV’s five transmitters and 42 translators.

Moreover, even though OPB did indeed stop receiving state operational funding in 2003 (not 2000), it did receive more than $3 million in capital support from the state in more recent years to help it convert to digital television—a process IPTV also went through over the last half decade (and which is not yet complete—several Idaho communities still lack such digital translators, after funding for them was cut last year). 

idaho legislature

It says something about the state of Idaho’s economy that Steve Ahrens, former director of the Idaho Association for Commerce and Industry business lobbying group, is advocating for new taxes.

Legislators and Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter should look into imposing an Internet sales tax—not surprising, as the lack of such sales taxes hurts local businesses as well as depriving the state of tax revenue—as well as removing exemptions to the sales tax, including taxing services, said Ahrens. He was appearing for the first time as a member of the annual City Club Legislative Pundits forum (which, again, inexplicably excluded New West) by virtue of his column in the Idaho Business Review. “We need a tax that fairly applies to the service sector that will take such a prominent place in the new economy,” he said.

report: idaho legislature

After they picked out their seats using a sort of musical-chairs-by-seniority, in the fine meeting room gloriously restored to when it was the Idaho Supreme Court, and after everyone figured out who the pages were and where to plug in their laptops, members of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee (JFAC) worked to put the sea of numbers, projections, shortfalls, and recissions into more concrete terms.

“We would be in the hole by $480 million without using the reserves,” said JFAC co-chair Senator Dean Cameron (R-Rupert). “Once you use those reserves, even if you used every drop, we’re still in the hole $220 million.” As a rule of thumb, every 1 percent of the budget is around $23 or $24 million, so the budget would still need to be reduced by 8 to 10 percent even if all the reserves were used, he said.