Idaho Legislature Still Cooped Up: Column
Eleven Chickens in Every Pot
By Jill Kuraitis, 3-31-08
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Legislators are squawking for the 2008 Idaho Legislative session to be over, but going-home bills – the kind they can put in their re-election campaign brochures – are scarce as hen’s teeth.
Today, there is last-minute clucking over mental health funding – hat tip to the Republican Senate for seeing the light about preventive programs being cheaper and better than throwing people into steel coops - but the House didn’t even try to override the governor’s veto. There may be a report on negotiations later today, if too many feathers don’t fly.
Road funding flaps have divided the Gentleman in the Borah Building - as the governor is formally referred to on the floor- from legislators. The governor’s press office has hinted there may be something up with action on road funding. But the local-option tax bill was slaughtered this morning leaving local governments powerless to impose taxes to pay for transportation costs. Why DID the chicken cross the road?
Gov. Butch Otter signed a grocery-tax relief bill t his morning that will give the poorest Idahoans $50 a year and everyone else $30. Then, everybody’s rebates will go up $10 a year. The goal is for everyone to receive $100. With chicken at $4.50 a pound, that’s 11 chickens for the poorest of us. Okay, it’s something. Everybody can go home and squawk about that one.
But last week, Sen. Patti Anne Lodge, R-Nampa, killed a children’s bill that would have removed the stigma of Idaho being the only state in the union without a law designed to open investigations in the unexpected deaths of children. From Betsy Russell’s blog:
A Senate committee chairwoman has blocked legislation that would have ended Idaho’s distinction as the only state in the nation with no system for reviewing child deaths. Senate Health and Welfare Chairwoman Patti Anne Lodge, R-Huston, said Idaho doesn’t need to review child deaths if every other state is already doing it. “We can use the information that they’ve gathered,” she said. “If they’re already doing it, what could be different in a child death in Utah or Montana that we wouldn’t have here? Why reinvent the wheel all the time?” House Bill 511 passed the House on March 17 on a 63-5 vote, and it cleared Lodge’s committee on a voice vote after a public hearing. But Lodge then asked the Senate to return the bill to her committee, where it’s now dead. “The concerns mostly were, what could this lead to?” she said. “Could this lead to maybe more usurping of freedoms? Could parents be charged?”
Bawk, bawk, Senator Lodge.
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