Idaho Legislators Tackle Supplementals

By Sharon Fisher, 1-13-07

The Idaho Legislature's Joint Finance Appropriations Committee started spending money Thursday the 12th.

They took to it pretty well, spending on the order of $8 million in about an hour.

JFAC starts out with supplementals, which are expenses for the existing tax year (through June 30) that come in after the Legislature adjourns. As JFAC co-chair Maxine Bell said during the morning's hearings, the Legislature is only in session for 60 to 90 days, but the business of the state goes on all year around, and there has to be a mechanism to deal with that.

A number of the expenses typically funded through supplementals have to do with health and safety, such as putting out wildfires, destroying agricultural pests, and dealing with hazardous materials spills. These sorts of things are the agencies' jobs, and the Legislature is pretty much obligated to pay them.

Supplementals this morning included about $4 million to pay for wildfires, $125,000 to pay for pests (the figure was lower than the amount actually spent because the department received a federal grant), and $65,000 to pay for hazardous materials cleanup.

The next two supplementals had to do with the Capitol renovation project, scheduled to begin after the Legislature adjourns. While the exact form of the renovation is up in the air, due to Governor Otter leaving the two new underground wings out of his budget, there's no doubt that some sort of renovation is going to be done, and the departments are all planning accordingly.

Noting that one can see water dripping along electrical wires in the Capitol, Bell said "We would be derelict to stay in this building one more day."

The first supplemental, of about $1.75 million, has to do with renovating the Capitol Annex -- the old Ada County Courthouse -- for the use of staff during the renovations.

This is paid for out of what's called dedicated funds, or accounts funded by a particular source of money that are intended to be spent on a particular function, instead of being paid for out of the general fund,which comes from Idaho taxpayers. This dedicated fund is paid for by the cigarette tax.

The next supplemental associated with the renovations was on the order of $1 million to $1.5 million to pay for expenses associated with the move.

The item that caused the most discussion, ironically, was one that was simply an authorization to spend Federal money, rather than one to spend general fund money paid for by Idaho taxpayers. After the last Legislative session closed, the State Board of Education received a Federal grant of $17.9 million that will award $9.1 million in scholarships of up to $16,000 -- $4,000 per year -- for up to 7,000 disadvantaged Idaho youth over the next six years.

Legislators were concerned that authorizing spending the money would obligate Idaho to continue funding the administrative jobs associated with the scholarships when the grant ended. There were also a number of questions about how many schools would receive scholarships (88 or 89 qualified, and 27 were chosen) and on what basis (first, a school had to have more than 50% of its students receiving free or reduced lunch, and then there was a geographic diversity component as well).

Margaret Henbest, one of the JFAC veterans, noted that while Idaho had a good record of graduating students from high schools, it had a poor record of having them then go on to graduate from college. Vice chair Shawn Keough, perhaps referring to Otter's recommendation of $38 million toward scholarships, noted that JFAC was not a policy committee but expressed her wish that the germane committees (in other words, the House and Senate committees responsible for higher education) would take a more "holistic" approach to scholarships rather than a piecemeal approach. Fred Wood, new to JFAC this year, said he had issues with means testing but did not specify what those issues were nor what he thought should be used instead.

Finally, the Department of Public Education requested an authorization to spend some dedicated funds in response to a Federal grant being cut in half. Two full-time equivalents (1 full-time person and 2 half-time people) had been paid for by that grant, so they were shifted to being paid for out of the general fund, while two full-time certification staff, who had formerly been paid for out of the general fund, were being shifted to a dedicated fund allocated to certification costs.

While some members of the committee looked askance at this, Legislative Budget Analyst Jason Hancock assured them that this sort of budgetary "musical chairs" went on all the time and that the Department was doing nothing untoward and that it had also not done anything to cause it to lose the Federal grant.

Another potential supplemental from the Department of Public Education was held back in order to give new Superintendent Tom Luna -- a Republican -- more of a chance to look at it. The budget, including the supplementals, had been prepared by outgoing Superintendent Marilyn Howard, a Democrat, before the November elections.

All of the votes passed with unanimous votes of the members present.

On Friday, JFAC will consider some additional supplementals. It was noted, however, that these supplementals would only concern Federal and dedicated funds, and that supplementals associated with general funds would be held off til later in the session.



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