Cole / Nicole LeFavour

Notes From the Floor

Former Idaho Senator Cole / Nicole Legislative Blog

Good Bye

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The whole pace of the session just accelerated tenfold.

The divisive and highly political anti-choice, anti-senior and anti-health care bills sailed through hearings this morning and so the legislature is well on its way to inviting constitutional challenges and keeping attorneys busy and well funded once again. We even take up hearings on politicizing state retiree benefits in Commerce Committee tomorrow. Do we help the economy and seniors or do we do what the Idaho Freedom Foundation wants?

We started setting budgets this morning too and in this, the very first day, there was a budget many felt would be harmful to the state, the economy and the people of Idaho if not given more money. While my personal first priority is not to hire bank regulators, I know they are necessary, but compared to a teacher I think I'll fund teachers… I even debated against the motion until Rep. Fred Wood said that not going with the same identical bare bones budgets and the same deep cuts for every agency will unravel the process.

I thought to myself, with the mess we are about to make of the economy what are we trying to defend here? What is there here in these cruel 2011 budgets so beloved that we would not want to unravel it?

All our reserves are gone and we have no stimulus with which to once more protect the state from letting prisoners lose or firing thousands and thousands of teachers and state employees. Who has asked the people of Idaho if they want to have their schools cut this deep? Can we even write budgets that work and balance given that the fist day we already fell off the wagon of austerity worrying about bank regulators. What happens when we get to children or people's lives and health?

I feel this pace accelerating and I long for the playful days of last week when we were wishing our first set of pages good bye, when Bart Davis, Kate Kelly and all of Democratic and Republican leadership stood in a big receiving line to shake hands and wish them all well. 

Everyone laughed each time one of the girls reached up and hugged Bart Davis because he doesn't like to be known as kind or as a softy. They all got hugs out him and a few even got one out of Kate who is no fan of the "touchy feely" either. It was charming and a bit sad since they were a particularly good group. But our new pages are here in their red sweater vests, wandering this giant gleaming place which is so very different from the place it was just a few days ago.

Hidden Agendas

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Sometimes our co-chairs Dean & Maxine have to balance and mediate very different agendas. Not an easy task.

Friday, twenty of us from the House and Senate met at 7 am on the 4th floor in a brand new conference room made for 20. This was the second of our early morning pre-meetings for the budget committee. We will have many more in the weeks ahead. We do not vote here since we are supposed to make public policy in the open, but we do ask questions and discuss consequences. Reporters come but the TV cameras are not there to watch us as we struggle to ask questions and come to grips with the language and process that often hides underlying agendas and grim hidden consequences.

Friday on a 4 to 16 vote those state agencies that the Governor had not already cut by at least 7% were put on the chopping block to be sure their total cut equaled at least 7%. A few like Public Education were, in a sort of slight of hand, given our last special chunks of reserves or stimulus money to make up for the cuts and to leave them "whole" or, for now, unharmed.

If you were a fly on a wall in that room or if you were listening on the internet as we went downstairs and voted on the cuts or holdbacks Friday you needed to listen for the word "permanent" or the word "ongoing" since this means something very different from a cut that is "one time." You can imagine the difference. What we did Friday the motion makers called "permanent" meaning that soon, when we start working on the 2011 budgets, the starting numbers or "base" will be a dire one. The 2011 budget will begin at the eviscerated level of funding already at least 7% below where it was in 2009.

So, so soon when we start voting to set the coming year's budgets, we will have no stimulus money and next to no reserves and, because what we will call the "base" already hides a huge cut, we will be making cuts on top of cuts. And worse, should we vote to eliminate a tax exemption, delay the grocery credit, raise beer or wine taxes or put in place a one time income tax surcharge enabling us to restore money to a budget, there is a conservative anti-government faction that can rejoice at the idea that we will have to ask for what looks like a budget "increase" just to bring an agency back up to the funding level it was at before the economic crisis.

This legislature does not increase budgets or staff positions lightly. It will be a struggle now just to put all this back together now that we have torn it apart.

You might say that for some law makers this recent vote is a dream come true. They have, in one year, undone decades or even a century of progress creating mental health and substance abuse programs, agencies to remove barriers in the lives of people with disabilities, entities that ensure that our drinking water is clean and our air is not toxic. How we put it all back together for the people of Idaho is anyone's guess.

Taxing Risch

Senator Jim Risch spoke before the Idaho Senate this week, telling the same jokes and using the same props he used a year ago. Democrats and Republicans noticed this. His address ended up sounding like little more than a tired partisan stump speech, void of substantive policy or real thought. The senator has been in office for a year and has little to say but how awful a place it is. Senator Crapo could have said the same but did not and chose to focus more on issues and on Idaho.

One has to wonder how completely U.S. Senate was Risch's fall back since Otter was then the one in line for governor. Risch shows little or no passion for issues of any kind. He is not a policy maker. A year later no solutions for how to better regulate insurance companies, how to save struggling small businesses or make it so that Idaho families are no longer going bankrupt over medical bills or the down economy. 

And worse the Senator spoke to us in a context where he addressed a state and legislative body facing the grim error of having bowed to then Governor Risch's very forceful persuasion to pass a huge tax shift that now clearly has put Idaho public schools in a dire position. Millions of dollars in property tax cuts went to out of state entities, huge corporations and speculators while schools lost over $100 million net and the security of more stable property tax funding evaporated. Yet worse families picked up the tab for millions in business tax reductions.

You can hear the buyer's remorse in the voices of those legislators who resisted the shift, voted no to stop what they knew was poor policy until given no choice in that one summer special session of 2006.

It was a less than sweet homecoming for the man who did not acknowledge the part he played in the budget mess our schools now face… the man who seems even to have forgotten or chosen not to care which speech he gave us just last year.

The Wolf Was Framed

Rather than a policy discussion, Senator Lodge has shared a story in presenting before the Budget committee this morning. She sees the legislature as a wolf that accidentally knocked down a straw house and a stick house, killed some pigs and ate them — not to waste them of course. In her mind and in her analogy Idahoans should have sympathy for us, the wolf (and isn't THAT ironic) because we are just trying to do our best and make a cake for our granny and get through this economic time, and if a few pigs die we are sorry. Really.

Nearsighted Conservation

Senator Siddoway has asked a series of questions about land conservation easements this morning. He said he opposes them because they are near sighted. The idea of preserving agricultural land as a farm or as wildlife habitat into perpetuity is near sighted. From the questions the good Senator asked, he had a ways to go to understand how easements work.

Can the land change hands? Yes.

Who makes sure it is preserved as the easement promises? A land trust.

Does that hurt the tax base of the county and local area? No since the land remains agricultural and may allow some forms of development on some small parts of the land, it may increase the taxable value. Even more important, the preservation of the land may increase the value of neighboring land which enjoys the wildlife, scenery and benefit of not being next to yet another house, road or subdivision.

We had before us a Supplemental Appropriations bill for an easement to preserve in perpetuity the Breckenridge Ranch along the Teton river. Supplementals are bills that allow for spending for a previous fiscal year. They allow new money to be spent and unexpected costs to be covered.

Senator Siddoway voted no, even Senator Mortimer who is a developer made the motion and voted yes. I think the fear of conservation is fading in the face of endless darkened subdivisions. Democrat and Republican can feel love for an open field, the sight of elk grazing, eagles in the tress, the sound of cranes calling. As Idahoans we have a sense of the future, what we do and don't want it to be. It is not near sighted, it is wise. I like seeing this in my colleagues. It gives me hope.

Schools on the Line

Looking at the legislative budget book I realize that the public schools and other budgets now are more or less fiction. You can go on line and look at the whole state budget. It is pages and pages and pages of numbers with some good narratives a little bit of year to year comparison and a few graphs. But when you look, you need to know a few things.

1) As of Friday we have voted not to spend as much money as even these bare bones budgets propose.

2) While the cuts don't say 14% or 10% these are cuts on top of cuts. Many cuts from last year were "made permanent" or now are the "base" from which we will set future budgets. We are digging downward. In mental health and substance abuse, in schools, when we look at the already bare bones health care we provide for people whose wages are too low to afford insurance we are undoing decades and years of progress in two short years.

3) We had stimulus money for schools last year when we set budgets. We don't have it this year.

4) To balance the budget now, after Friday's vote, we would have to cut school budgets, teachers, heat, lights, buses, counselors, everything by something like 15%. That is what will begin to happen next week unless my colleagues fear going home to constituents and admitting, yes we increased class sizes, laid off teachers and did nothing but cut deep deep into our public schools. It is up to the people of the state to render the fear of hurting schools perhaps more loathsome than the fear of not singing to the tea party tune of lowering taxes until there is little, less or no government left at all.

5) Over the course of history, budget bills have been killed by those unwilling to carry home the weight or harm of the budget to their districts. This sort of thing requires us to start over, to reassess what we had considered doing.

The Glass

This morning we set the state's fate in motion.  

The debate was about optimism and pessimism. It was about whether we want to cut thousands of jobs now as a preemptive measure or wait, and, only if things are worse then we expect, cut as many as we must later. The debate was about the economy and whether we could impact it with the vote we were about to make. We debated eliminating millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in jobs and contracts to private business and whether that would affect Idahoans whose shops, restaurants, markets, farms and production facilities depend on the wages of people in their communities.

We debated the appropriate size of government and whether government schools, government health services, government prisons and government consumer protections would be improved or rendered less effective with more cuts.

The debate soon became about the glass being half full or being half empty and whether we might do something so dire as to knock the bottom out of the glass itself with our vote.

We voted and from here the glass is officially only half full. We could choose to fill it to save jobs or schools or the Republican majority here could choose to go home with 33% cuts in many budgets. Schools at levels unimaginably low, teachers gone, classrooms crowded and Idaho kids missing something they will never get back.

Our confidence that we can pull together and correct this course has officially taken an ill turn. Some legislative leaders have resigned themselves to the least of aspirations and a willingness not to sustain state jobs but to eliminate thousands of them in the weeks ahead.

Bureaucracy

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The Department of Administration is here today and they seem nervous. Mr. Gwartney started by talking about consolidating phone services. I
have to question my ears but I'm pretty sure he said: "The
Governor has to dial 12 digits to get my office –and that's OK as long as he doesn't forget them." Not a helpful comment from the Governor's best friend given the difficult political environment the Governor faces. One has to wonder if there isn't a bit of friction there.

Gwartney's staff described to us the huge lovely technology bureaucracy they hope to create where state agencies lose their IT staff and those staff positions go to build Mike Gwartney's empire. Even our good co-chairman of JFAC expressed less than enthusiasm. "Candidly," he said, "I have a lack of confidence in the ability to deliver services –based on past experience." It seems that the Department of Finance and the Department of Insurance have not gotten what they were promised in retaining the specialized technology they need to do their work.

In case anyone has forgotten, Governor Otter & Mike Gwartney initially proposed eliminating the Department of Administration to improve the efficiency of Idaho Government. That plan was revised. The Governor and Gwartney decided instead it would be more efficient for the state not to eliminate it but to make it really huge and all powerful.

The discussion turned to creating "IEN" or the Idaho Education Network, an empire in school broad band connectivity run by, as the Governor has introduced them, his good friends at Qwest. All the little providers whose infrastructure could be improved with state funds will instead be replaced by Qwest. A few medium providers I think stay in place. So far no mention of the law suit that challenges the Department of Admin's rejecting a lower bid proposal to go with Qwest. We are told the ongoing costs of the project — the millions in state and federal dollars to Qwest — is sustainable because the state can apply for grants to cover its part. I recall the Governor telling state entities not to rely on or even apply for grants because grants often vanish, leaving programs unfunded.

But we are supposed to be excited that we can fire math teachers and not worry about the field trips kids don't get anymore because there are virtual field trips and people and programs far off on computer screens who will teach math.

Call me odd but I know I've always had students who needed to learn something in a different way, where I as a teacher had to be creative and ask questions to figure out how they think and how they might best understand something. How will a computer program know when that needs to happen? How will the screen know when a kid's eyes are filling with tears because she is confused or overwhelmed or scared because she knows she doesn't understand and someone needs to stop, take her by the hand and pick up an arm full of blocks, draw circles or draw pictures on paper to help her through it — to make sure kids don't fall behind or give up or melt down. Not all children think or learn the same and we will always need multiple ways to teach and a real person there to look the kids in the eye.

I think of our experience here with the keys to our office doors. The statehouse was opening and we were moving in but there were no keys for our office doors. We were putting files and photos and things on and in our desks and people were filing through the building day and night. Some creative high school kids even had a party somewhere in a senate room. We couldn't get Admin to send us keys. Secretaries for the ProTem and Majority leader couldn't lock their offices and files. It took forever. The Department of Admin was far away and didn't see that it mattered. Time passed and passed.

How about the part time employees, who, with a Mike Gwartney pen stroke, were required to pay hundreds of dollars more in health insurance premiums? Who was there looking in the eyes of those Idaho employees? Who was thinking about the consequences of this to those families and to the economy and state? The state is not a business with no other interest than advancing its own personal fiscal well being. We are also charged with advancing the Idaho economy, bettering the lives of Idaho families, making sure we retain and respect skilled and valued state workers.

But no, here we are today contemplating allowing Governor Otter to create this huge, impersonal and uncaring all pervasive entity, an empire of administration. Is this the future of our state? Is that Butch Otter's vision of government?

The Empty Room

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Behind the Senate chamber, in what used to be the Majority caucus room, is a room with tall windows, red striped couches and two fire places. The chairs in the room are usually empty and sometimes the fires are lit. Today I am sitting here with the warmth on my legs. It seems someone should sit here. We heard from the Department of Corrections in the budget committee this morning and I had to contemplate life in there as prisoners are packed closer, medical care fails, food budgets are cut, staff face furloughs and tensions rise. Gives a new meaning to liberty. I choose my food, go to a doctor of my choice, move from place to place, room to room. I can not imagine surviving in there. And yet too as the minutes pass while the gas fires roar, across the country, Americans do not have warm places to sit or sleep. This room sits here empty. Someone should sit in it.

From the Senate Floor to the Wild

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The senate floor is cold. The voices echo as Jenine calls the roll. Brad Little's voice is low with that lilt of humor he has. Edgar Malepeai gives our prayer, his warm, kind, strong self in every word. People talk on the phone, work on their computers as we read through the titles of bills on second reading, jump through orders of business to appointments. There are supposed to be a few fireworks here today over one appointee to the fish and game commission, I'm not sure which.

Shawn Keough gently reads the first resume. Denton Darrington is fiddling with his microphone but it's Senator Siddoway who rises to debate against the nomination. We do this, he says, to send messages to departments. I'm thinking yes, many here wish we could meld agencies to our thinking. Jeff says this is not about him ranching sheep, but about policy.

I feel a flash back to debating a Human Rights Commission appointment last year. Ruthie Johnson whose palpable distaste for gay people and those who step out of gender norms was alarming. Yet we rarely question appointments, even when it seems Commissioners fail to show up, fail to understand or work to further the goal or work of an agency.

So the gallery is filling with students, Senator Siddoway is talking about wanting to protect his sheep, his property he says, by shooting wolves, yet being allowed to kill one or two only. He has faced real loss but I wonder if wolves are at least as smart as my husky and know who has killed their pack members and if they have picked a fight with him now.

So Senator Broadsword begins her support for the Fish and Game Commissioner by saying something like that she hates wolves as much as anyone. Jeff Siddoway asks for a roll call. People move awkwardly in their seats, worried I think about not being seen as hating wolves enough. We are so far from the days of my childhood when girls hung photos of wolves on their bedroom walls, for their beauty and for their role in an ecosystem, their role in making the wild wild.

Senator Keough closes debate reminding us all that the courts have left us little room. And so the roll call begins, mostly ayes. Senator Goedde interrupts the roll to explain how he has hunted for wolves on his tag and could not shoot one, how Fish & Game even extended the season to allow more wolves to be killed and still the entire quota has not been shot.He points out that higher quotas probably would not have fixed this problem.

Just this morning I sat in JFAC listening to the Military Division present their budget and talk of a new wing coming into Idaho. I thought about a day about 20 years ago sitting in a meadow as a fighter jet flew below the canyon rim, wings tilting. This was inside the Frank Church Wilderness and as the roar faded, an odd sound rose, one voice and then another. I realized those voices, there so far from where people usually wander, were wolves, three of them through the trees at the edge of the meadow where I stood.

This was before wolves were re-introduced. These were wolves who had found their way to the quiet wild of central Idaho. That experience so rare twenty years ago, today is almost common and has brought us face to face with the very meaning of the word "wild." Do we still find anything to admire in the wolf? Are elk herds fewer or just stronger and faster? What and how much do we manage wilderness and the wildlife inside it? Outside wilderness we clearly pick and choose which and how much of each species we prefer exists. We manage the wild out of respect to ranchers like Jeff Siddoway, who in my mind should perhaps be better compensated for his loss. But where does the wild start or end? Do we ever manage the wild for the wild? What should we simply expect to face when we live at the edge of it?

Pan Back

The statehouse has been quiet today while many legislators are away for Atwell Parry's funeral. The long marble halls which connect the two underground wings seem empty, while upstairs movie cameras on mechanical arms swivel as Idaho media day shows off what is going on in on of Idaho's little known creative and often highly technological industries.

And here in the now marbled depths my inbox keeps filling with letters asking us to save Idaho Public Television. In JFAC this morning IPTV brought a second camera on line so that now in the coming weeks you can watch the expressions on our faces, the lines in our foreheads as we debate motions to cut, to fund or to de-fund every state service under the sun.

And still the wheels turn. Mike Jorgenson & John McGee's anti-immigration bills seek to make it yet harder for farms and ranches to harvest crops and do business. We debate again which disability services to make more expensive and whether or not we should mandate that insurance companies cover oral chemotherapy drugs just as they would injectable chemotherapy. We all work away on slightly narrower slices of bills — those with no cost associated. The Human and Civil Rights legislation that so many have worked on for four years is no exception. There is still a group of law makers dedicated to it. The group is more bi-partisan than ever and more diverse, fueled by success in adding sexual orientation and gender identity in similar non-discrimination measures in Pocatello, Caldwell and especially Salt Lake. 

This session will be like many others and yet not. There is no magic stimulus on the horizon galloping forward to make us giddy with relief, just sober numbers we can chose to change or choose to force the people of Idaho to live with.

Pan out to lines of people waiting for food stamps; pollution leaking into drinking water aquifers, lakes and steams that DEQ will not test for the second year in  row; school offices where administrators calculate which teacher will take the extra students as teachers and counselors are laid off; closed signs hang on offices; paint peels; state pay checks shrink. Pan back far enough and the place gets green-gray with peaks white, more eternal and seemingly impervious. We will get through this. Now is the hard part.

Helping the Thaw

JFAC, Idaho's budget committee where we sit in a room at big wooden desks and decide where the money goes, your tax dollars. Today the Department of Parks and Recreation set out plans for lay offs in their agency. I sit next to Representative Ringo who has been on the committee for I think six years. Shirley pointed out that our staff had listed how many years the fifteen employees had worked for the state. Twenty two years, 21, 19, 18, 17,16, several for 12 years… And who now doesn't now know someone with a family member losing a job as part of one of these many "government efficiency" and budget cutting proposals?

Meanwhile the Governor's office is straining to force agencies to strip back their services and staff, not just for the sake of us getting through this hard part of the economy, but permanently.

These are families, Idahoans who have children to send to college, food to buy, wages that small businesses in their communities are counting on. But we grind on and my impression is that we are nibbling around the edges. How we truly address the echoing hole in the middle of the budget is another question.

We are state leaders. If we botch this and underestimate the consequences of laying off people all across the state; if we do not inspire the confidence of all Idaho and do not help people feel secure enough that those still prospering will hire people and spend again, then this economic depression we face will go on.

Economic recovery is not a mysterious outside force that will swoop in and save us. It is the sense of renewed security  and confidence inside each of us, confidence in each other and in our leaders that spurs us collectively to participate again, to replace broken appliances and take a weekend trip in the car, to go out to eat and buy new socks or shoes. It is an end to our living so fearful that we will lose jobs, or our having saved enough or paid off enough debt that we feel better able to endure what ever is ahead. It is then, too, eventually, those who have lost jobs finding new work as those who are employed spend again at local businesses. It is all of us looking at the little businesses and families around us that we care about and helping them out any way we can.

Who We Are

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Today Peter Morril from Idaho Public Television came before JFAC to present his budget. Peter is a tall man whose voice I'm sure you'd know: gentle, warm, phenomenally reassuring. Everything will be fine. Everything will be fine.

Yet Morrel had to set out before us the 33% reduction in funding that the Governor has directed. He was gracious and clear in the face of Otter's proposal to, over 4 years, phase out all funding for Public Television.

He gently reminded us that, no, Public Television with its public funding, can not just start selling commercial advertisements like any TV station to make up the $1.6 Million dollars in lost funds. And will a few more weeks of telethons in this economic environment make up the funds? No.

Do we forget, if we don't ponder the question, that Idaho Public Television is the only Idaho owned TV station in the state? Might it have been awhile since we watched the award winning programs exploring our own Idaho history, our heroes, our unique issues, this place with its canyons, deserts, forests, farms and mountains — everything that is so uniquely us as Idahoans.

Listening to Peter Morrill today I felt odd pride for the station that is in essence our voice. It is indeed as Peter said, one of the few things we have in common as a state. Public Television is of by and for us as a people. What state would give that up?

Ransom

Some days are better than others. Today was a better day. Theresa Luna came to the Senate Commerce Committee to present the "group insurance" rules of Mike Gwartney's Department of Administration. Someone had foolishly mixed part time state employee health benefits issues in with the rules dealing with the effects of Otter's cutting/privatizing state retiree benefits last year. 

So the committee was suspicious. The media came. We asked questions:

1) I asked whether having even a small percentage of part time employees fall off of state health insurance could cause the state to lose all of its projected budget savings — because, if even a tiny percentage of the newly uninsured part time employees faced cancer and spent every resource they had thus ending up on the county indigent fund, then the state would have to pay for their health care anyway — not just $200 more in insurance premiums — but the medical bills themselves — potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per person.

ANSWER: that kind of consequence had not been calculated into the fiscal impact.

2) Senator Cameron asked if, as Ms. Luna told us, the rule we had before us today was NOT Director Gwartney's rule dealing with the roughly $200 increase in premiums for part time state employees — then where was that rule and when would we hear it?

ANSWER: there will be no rule. Director Gwartney feels he has the authority to make major changes in the benefits of over 2500 state employees without any form of approval from the legislature.

Needless to say Director Gwartney has not made himself popular with the legislature and his department telling legislators to mind their own beeswax did not go over well. Senator Stegner pondered whether our holding the rule in committee might spur the Director to come in and explain himself to us.

Motions were made and seconded and indeed we held the set of rules ransom. We will consider passing them only after the Director has shown us where the authority lies for him to singlehandedly cut part time employee benefits in this way. I look forward to it.

These rules and this issue could have passed quietly over this session while men and women around the state sat over kitchen tables calculating whether the wages their part time jobs earn would pay for their benefits. Many couples have lost private sector jobs and the benefits the state employee in the family has been given have become a life line. Men and Women grappling with cancer like Senator Stennett and probably Representatives Collins and Marriot surely hold their breath knowing that the health care they get is a thin line between them and disaster.

And yet Director Gwartney with the stroke of a pen takes these things away.

He robs families of policies established by a legislature that knows the value of paying benefits to make palatable the lesser wages of part time work. To me it seems more than anything not about the budget but about cruelty, about demonizing government, most of all demonizing sensible government that recognizes we live in a world that increasingly leaves people vulnerable, teetering at the edge of ruin because they have no insurance, no access to care that won't bankrupt them should they ever get seriously ill.

Today was a good day and perhaps other good days will come when lawmakers who have grow tired of unilateral action will finally use the law to reign in the man with the flowing white hair.

Generosity

I went on Nate Shelman's show on KBOI on Friday. Forty Five minutes of people angry at me for talking about taxes.

Do I blame them for being angry? No. The idea of some amorphous tax increase frightens people who already struggle to pay their taxes. As someone whose small business some years earned as little as $5,000 to $10,000, I struggled one year to put food on the table. The tax bill I faced in April seemed staggering, impossible and frankly unjust.

So House Republican leader Mike Moyle and I agree on one thing, the income tax rates on the lowest of income earners in Idaho are way to high. The rates step up so quickly that people earning just over $25,000 pay the state's highest rate of 7.8%. People who make $100,000 pay that same percentage.

To me it defeats the purpose of tax brackets if the only real steps and reductions come to people earning $1,000 as opposed to $3,000 — incomes that are all staggeringly low. But some people earn money from investments and stocks and inheritance and I wonder why we tax the hard labor of someone who has no other income so much more intensely than money people may make with little or no effort of their own. 

I think Idaho could have more income tax brackets above $25,000. I think once the economy improves we could even use the revenue from upper brackets to pay to lower the rate on the lowest brackets. In 2000 the highest rate was 8.1% but it and all income tax rates were cut. I would propose we return to this rate for those with taxable incomes of $50,000 or more. Until the economy improves I think we should add two other higher rates at $100,000 and $250,000.

But the sales tax, not the income tax, will likely be the tax my republican colleagues will eventually choose to get us through this economic crisis and keep the wheels from falling off the basic services like education and health and safety now that Idaho has far more people in need and suddenly far less to offer them.

If I had my way for now I'd only offer the grocery tax credit to individuals earning less than $15,000. Right now the state absolutely should not be spending millions to send $40 checks to families like mine, that are doing ok still. The money should go to schools.

But all my rational for our generosity in having higher income people pay more taxes would not convince many of the callers to Nate Shelman's show. I like Nate a lot. Clearly though there is a fundamental difference in philosophy and maybe even a different sense of morality at play with some of his audience here. Caller after caller seemed mad at the very idea of paying taxes that might benefit someone besides themselves. To a few of the callers the idea of helping people who have less or who have fallen on hard times seemed repugnant. Clearly some feel no obligation to ensure that our neighbors are getting medical care, food or shelter from the cold. It is a set of values I can not answer to.

Yes, I'm used to my colleagues saying that churches, not governments should provide help to the poor. But what church can run Idaho's medicaid program providing medical and health care to thousands of people living with disabilities? What food bank could feed the never ending lines of people needing foodstamps now for the first time in their lives? What church could extend mental health treatment and support to all of Idaho's unemployed at a time when suicide rates are climbing from what was already one of the highest rates in the nation?

Our population has grown too big and too complex. While many may not trust government not to waste their money, the alternative is grim. And funny that it is the Constitution, the very document which some value above all else, which helps guarantee that we do not let people with cancer die in the streets.

People are suffering and scared, yes. But where is our compassion? The economy is thawing but not in time to save this budget, our schools and state. Where is our generosity now when we need each other most — when it will take our collective effort to get us all through this short difficult year ahead.

Who is Doing the Math?

Senseless policy passed in Health & Welfare rules hearing just now. In the Katie Becket Program we will take $1 million out of the pockets of families with disabled
children just to save $200,000 in the budget. This is only the beginning of what I
fear is going to be weeks or months of brutal senseless cuts. 

Look at some of this. $54 million cut from a set of Health and Welfare programs where the recipients of the state funds are all in the private sector. We took $54 million out of Idaho's economy and saved only $11 million in general fund state dollars. And we hurt people with disabilities, cut mental health treatment and left many families desperate. How many jobs were lost? How much expensive state crisis care did we create a need for?

Is someone taking out a calculator to look at what negative impacts some of these cuts will have on the economy? I'm going to be a broken record. A cut that eliminates jobs and dollars, wages, consumer spending and small business income has far more negative impact on the economy than raising income taxes on upper income earners. 

Who is asking the people of Idaho if cuts this deep are the best plan? I have a list of tax exemptions we can do away with. It might be more palatable than cutting our schools 10% to 15%. At some point you cut so deep that the wheels come off and things break. Kids fall behind.

With this seemingly blind frenzy to dismantle state government, who is figuring out where that line of diminishing returns is going to be? How long will it take and how much will it cost us, our kids, our economy, and our state to undo the damage that will be done if Republican leaders' only answers are to lead by severing limbs and cutting it all to the bone.

The Unlovely

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The 20 of us on JFAC, the budget committee, sit in a tall cream and white room with vaulted ceilings, columns and a big clock. We sit at banks of huge desks, far from each other so that at best we can see only the two CoChairs, maybe one of the Vice Chairs and the people next to us. Clearly I got too got used to the courthouse where last year we were packed tight and I could swivel in my seat and look any committee member in the eye. We could pass notes to two thirds of the committee with ease and were never so far away as to start getting impersonal.

For several weeks now agency after agency will come to JFAC to explain how state directors have held it all together these past two lean budget cutting years and how existing budget cuts are impacting families, jobs in the agency and workload. Yesterday we talked about the Department of Health & Welfare –a big agency dealing with a lot of crisis and complexity. Children with disabilities, adults needing mental health treatment, suicide prevention, drug treatment, victims of abuse, kids needing adoption, foster care; health care for those with urgent special needs, the very poor; hungry families, doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists, social workers, clinics, home care providers, crisis intervention specialists. Thousands of people reel, losing jobs, scrambling for life lines as we cut again and again at services which more and more people need — and the economy settles like a ship in the dark depths of what seems to be the bottom.

And later in the day a different 18 of us law makers sat underground at the huge high desks of the new statehouse auditorium in the west wing. We picked a number out of a hat — the magic target we will cut all budgets to for next year, for 2011. It was a low number. As last year's queen of picking sadly accurate low budget numbers, I'm usually the first to admit when things will be bad.

But the numbers some chose today were so low I had the distinct feeling that a twisted game was being played.

What kind of a time is this for games, for trying to cut the base of our budget so low that when the economy recovers — just a little — Majority Leader Moyle and his house wrecking crew can call any money above their target number a surplus and turn it into the corporate tax cuts they so desperately want, but realistically can't put into law this year.

I wonder if the Senate prayer delivered under the grand Senate dome in the morning anticipated the day. It told us to be kind to the unlovely. I wondered who unlovely were. I feel a little unlovely sometimes but I think it is relative and means those harder for us to love, people different from yourself, people struggling in unfamiliar ways, to us the ones that don't sit under domed ceilings or shake your hand in a suit and tie.

But we were not kind. Our legislative bodies are on the verge of being cruel. If we plan to cut even deeper next year, if we claim we have no option but to cut more budgets deeper and deeper till everything bleeds, then we are cruel. We are willfully forgetting that some families, like mine are still doing fine, still have jobs, and though we might be a bit skittish, we could and would pay more — just to be sure that the whole burden of balancing the next budget does not fall like and ax on the backs of schools, kids, and the state's most vulnerable, trying so hard to get through this alive.

Dreaming of Fire

This is my Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Day Speech for BSU's 2010 March and Rally. I will be joining student leaders, our Human Rights community and wonderful speakers at Boise City Hall at about 11:15. At noon we will all join the Human Rights Commission inside the Capitol rotunda as they return to the tradition of holding a Human Rights Celebration in the statehouse.

Dreaming of Fire

…To me hope is sometimes a fragile thing. It burned bright
in me a year ago as our country inaugurated a president who embodied the
reality of the Dream. I myself stood on grounds of our nation’s Capitol gazing
at the faces that now comprise our beautiful nation, a nation of colors,
creeds, talents and dreams that are finally passing from sleep into waking.

 

But today in Idaho I fear the collective light of the Dream
has suffered in the bitter months of this winter… sadly here we face the
chilling anger of people at computers and town halls desperate to place blame
as they stagger too under the weight of profound economic injustice.

 
We face the chill of Governor Otter’s proposals to
eliminate, to phase out, the few agencies of the state charged with advancing
human rights for Latinos, for people with disabilities, the deaf and the
blind….
our Human Rights Commission itself .

Idaho’s Governor rejects the very entities
we have charged with advancing equality and justice for those denied it for so long.

 

Is that acceptable to us?

Will that help Idaho further the dream?


Will this ensure the fair treatment of people we call
family, coworkers, classmates, and friends ?

 

No. We know this is wrong. Though it has been four decades,
Dr. King’s words still have the power to warm us and guide our nation from
within — like a bon fire. Sadly in Idaho while the dream often wanes, its
burning pieces are still held by each of us who hope, who work, who stand up in
the streets to protect or welcome others or to instill in our children a tiny
fire of their own.

 

But inside us Dr. King’s dream, our dream can be a fragile
thing, an ember of fire, a warmth and promise of justice that you — like me —
may have kept from the wind, may have tucked deep in your clothes –carried in
your chest, pulled out and held tight in your hands every time the world around
you faltered, made you unwelcome or fell in its progress toward equality and
justice.

 

And while hope glows in the windows of the white house and
in bits of policy in the nation’s capitol — while we hope for a day when none
will again face bankruptcy in the face of cancer – and while we hope for a day
when families will re-unite, fear will fade, and our country will recognize its
need for the nations and people to the South – that day is not yet here.

 

…..Instead we look up to a state government set on stalling
progress.

 
We walk streets that bleed harsh words while too many
Idahoans have waited too long, holding embers of hope smothered daily by words
of cruelty – a boy taunted on a playground for his delicate walk; the woman
with her children on a street made unwelcome; a girl trying in vain to get
beyond the stairs; a driver arrested for his differences, his color; the man demonized not
for actions but for the accent on his tongue. —-When our daily experiences
stifle the dream, we grow cold, isolated and the ember of that promise can fade
inside us.

 

I ask one thing of each of you today………. We can be a state
kinder than our policy makers. We can ourselves create a state of promise in
spite of those who would divide us, those who would marginalize or demean those
we love or care for, our neighbors, coworkers, family, friends.

 


I ask you to practice using your own voice, your breath to
erase the cold someone you know has felt. Think of someone who has faced hate,
who has stood in the face of discrimination.

 
Think. Picture that person now, see him or her in your mind.
(It is OK if that person in your mind is you.) I want you in your mind to
say to that person, to someone you have met, or seen or know…….

 


“You — your presence, your voice, your work, your
questions..”  I want you to say: “You
make our state a better place.”

   

Now whisper that aloud with me, look around, say that to
every person here who has reeled in the face of harsh or cruel words…… “You
make our state a better place.”

 


In your minds eye, your words, your breath, think of it
igniting that ember of hope just a little in a person’s hands, your words in
their mind replacing words of rejection they have faced once, twice, maybe
many, many times.

 

Say it again with me, to each other, this time louder. “You
make our state a better place.”

 


OK one last time, this time let’s make sure Senator Malepeai
can hear us inside the Capitol. Let’s have our words carry North to the Coeur
d’Alene & Nez Perce tribes, South to the Shoshone Paiute, East to the
Shoshone Bannock, West to Nampa, Caldwell, Wilder, high into the mountains and
to the place the person in your mind can hear us……..

 
“You make our state a better place.”
 

Thank you. Now use that phrase in the streets when you see
someone face cruel gestures of unwelcome. Keep Dr. King’s Dream warm, keep it
burning in Idaho — through everything that is to come, through what we each
will see and feel and do in our lives ahead.

 

May we be strong and united and may we never ever give our
seats or our voices to those who would take them.


MLK

 

Harder to Find

Night time. Senators leave in groups, out through the bright wings into the streets. Thus begins the many weeks of legislative dinners and receptions.

I am in my office. This is novel. I have never had an office before. I always loved working on the floor. I loved having others around me working at their desks. We mixed, joked, got beyond the hard politics.

In the Senate we all have offices now and, if you know where these are, you can find us there. It could be a good thing. But I worry a bit that it will isolate us more, that the three Senate office areas down here behind the committee rooms keep us a bit segregated.

The 70 house members have cubicles, not offices, also on the "garden level" off their underground wing. Some are lovely, others are just that, temporary divided cubicles in a virtually windowless back room. For this reason, and because I'm sure many still like the camaraderie of working next to each other on the floor, I suspect a good set of Representatives will still work at their rows of desks in the chamber. I don't know if this is true of the House but the Senate floor is cold now and though the historic red curtains give it a warmer feel, compared to the old courthouse it seems so huge, tall and formal. My office is not quite as beautiful but far more homey to work in. In fact, since I do not have a window, I brought a disco ball and it throws wonderful patterns of light on the walls and ceiling in the low lit room.

I will hold my first office hours Friday the 15th, 1 pm to 3 pm. In two weeks I'll start earlier so people can visit me on their lunch hour. We'll see how it works. My plan is for every other Friday and then a few Tuesdays as well 4 to 6 so people can come after work. You will be able to go to my new web site soon and see a schedule.

Having an office hopefully means I have a place where people will visit and feel comfortable. I have hot tea and lots of chairs. Like others I'm settling in to this space a bit. Four of us Democrats are tucked away behind double doors at the base of the capitol's 8th Street West underground wing. Don't give up in looking for us. All the Committee Chairs and a few others are in suites behind the row of smaller committee rooms. You will find the door at the base of the short set of stairs that leads back into the old capitol and the new visitors center.

At the top of that short set of stairs, near the old vaults where we stowed the lobbyists away, you will find two more sets of Senator's offices. Don't be intimidated, we are back in these areas, just a little bit harder to find.

Ideological Butchering

I expect a little more out of a governor. On Thursday we learned what Otter must have known for weeks: that to balance the 2011 budget we would have to spend nearly all our reserves and would still be $150 million short and have to cut everything, including education by 6% to make it all pencil out.

But the Governor seemed to have little substance and almost no policy proposals, no ideas for making up the staggering shortfalls. Sure today he informed legislative leaders he plans to eliminate funding for
Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Human Rights Commission, the Commission on
Hispanic Affairs and the three agencies who advocate for people with
disabilities. Together all these agencies make up less than 1% of the budget. Cutting them is not a budget solution, it is an ideological proposal which shows the deepest of disrespect and the most twisted of priorities. In fact this particular proposal seems intentionally cruel.

Do these sorts of cuts even remotely address our looming budget problem or make the state a better place for anyone? No. In fact the governor said several times in his speech that he doesn't know what the solutions to our budget crisis are.

State Budget Committee Co-Chair Maxine Bell said to me after Otter's speech, and she's been around long enough to know, "It will get better. It will pass." She had a vision of getting through this, but she, not Otter inspired a hope for a return to prosperity sometime in the future. I wondered if our Governor could at least ask us to pull together, to spend our wages at Idaho stores on Idaho goods, volunteer and donate to soup kitchens and homless shelters, donate money to help teachers and principals in neigborhood schools get by.

Has Otter given up on the future and on asking the people of Idaho for help, for sacrifice to get our neighbors and the children of our state through this hard time? Where is the guy who vetoed twenty bills trying to get a tax increase to build more roads? Has he resigned himself to cutting health and education budgets as the only and most recurring policy proposals he is willing to make? Will he cut deeper and deeper with each passing quarter next year, regardless of whether there may be a point at which the cuts worsen the economy, lay off too many workers, weaken consumer spending, and bog down the safety net that is feeding and sheltering families of the 800 people a week who join the thousands whose unemployment benefits have finally run dry? 

If cutting another 2% from Idaho's bare bones school budgets is ok, is cutting 6% then? Where does it stop and do we as Idahoans have to step in and do the hard task and ask if maybe there is only so far we can go in balancing the budget on the backs of Idaho's school children, college students, the state's poor, elderly and people with disabilities?

I ask would you rather see every agency cut by 6% in the year ahead or is there some tax you might pay some small amount more of to avoid the crowded classrooms, the long lines, the wait for permits, the gated parks, the hungry or homeless neighbor, the loss of recourse when you are fired from your job for no other reason than your gender, your race, your disability, your age or your religion?

Nationally the economy is recovering. Some states are still deep in recession, and, while we are in a budget hole for 2011, Idaho does not face nearly the worst budget situation in the nation. We do seem to face the greatest lack of leadership to create jobs, inspire confidence and address head-on this short term crisis before it stifles our economy and the capacity of our state and its people to heal and prosper together for the long term.

On the Eve of Return

I think I can safely say we all as law makers greet this session with some caution, some dread. From home with families, we leave behind jobs as teachers, accountants, small business owners, farmers and insurance agents and we converge with three months of furniture, files and tokens of home to settle here in the city with the gleaming new Capitol and hundreds of millions of dollars in budget shortfalls waiting for us in the year ahead. It is bitter sweet the hugs of hello and the battles we know are ahead where we will have to draw lines and choose sides on layoffs, pay cuts, the decimation of state functions, tax increases and cuts to universities and childrens' class rooms.

And it is an election year. That more than anything hangs in the air like an odor, a place we have to go soon where we have to divide ourselves along party lines in spite of how much we agree on so many things, where we do all we can to drive wedges, inspire ire in order to come out the other end in November victorious. For my Republican colleagues this year must ache because the fights within their own party are growing cruel.

This year probably more than any year we've known, men and women our economy has chosen to forget for much of a decade gather in parks and town halls. While others grew wealthy, these frustrated now gravitate into mobs bitter and angry, understandably ready to blame anyone in power for their plight.

Tea bags stapled to hat rims, people who may never have engaged in politics before this year stepped up to microphones. Now we all turn stunned when we should have known this was coming. Economies do not collapse without leaving people scared and angry. History has much to say about how easily a bitter populace can be manipulated by those with an agenda; insurance companies, organized political factions, or moneyed lobbyists with paid consultants and email lists. I worry that well meaning people have been intentionally plied, their anger turned on neighbors and newcomers rather than on those who benefited most through the hard time we face.

I guess this year I hope desperately for clarity in the anger, a determination to have justice in itself, a fair share, respect and policy to heal the wrongs rather than simply revenge hammered down on some easy target, some peripheral minority or individual who plays into racist or anti-Muslim fears. May those truly responsible pay; the ones who started the wars which drive our deficits, the ones who cut corporate taxes shifting burdens from the wealthy onto to average families, driving wages down and medical and mortgage debt up. Yes, let it be Al-Qaeda or the banks, the regulators, insurers and oil companies, but let anyone except the innocent take the blame. I know we all choose the guilty and the blameless based on our political ideology. How sinister is it though to manipulate people bankrupt, jobless, hungry or frustrated.

This year in those marble halls too may will look behind them on every vote, seeing the riled crowd looming large and forgetting the consequences of what the furious ask for. We all have a new draft at our necks, new whispers in our throats: "Please, please, don't let the angry see me as the enemy. Please don't let me be to them one of the evil ones."

Giving it Back

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I've wandered the Capitol under construction with tour groups of legislators when it was dark, dusty and lifeless. Then slowly as we were allowed in, I wandered as the echoing building began to grow inhabitants, offices here and there had staffers, legislative colleagues would appear now and then in an empty chamber wide eyed and wandering too.

While I generally don't seek them out, I've been to monuments, to cathedrals, castles, the Taj Mahal; huge human crafted places, large, beautiful or strange enough to inspire awe. I will say that our State Capitol rises to that plane. Its beauty, size, it splendor has reached a level it may not have reached before. Perhaps I say this because the absence has made our hearts grow more fond of its roomy beauty; or perhaps the walls take the eye by surprise because no one builds things from marble anymore; perhaps because the 70s paneling is gone and the wear and tear and funk I loved perfectly well before have vanished. Now it all shines, not just literally, because it does that too, but one can't help but feel how much thought and labor has poured into the place; how many hours of so many skilled hands have worked there in the dark and through these summers and winters.

It has been gone. The building fenced and ugly like a wreck in the middle of our city for I think two and a half years. Over $100 million dollars poured into it, into wages and materials and minds for their problem solving and invention. I did not vote for the wings or, because the bill contained both, I did not vote to fix up the Capitol. But it is done and in my mind it is enough beyond belief that I ask you to go take a look.

The money that could have put school children in class rooms instead of trailers is is gone and it will be well spent if this building returns to those who really own it. The people of Idaho. If you all step inside and look up, if you climb the stairs, explore the corridors, step to microphones in the new hearing rooms, then it will be money well spent. If generations of Idahoans step in the building and find awe and pride, maybe then those who study now without current text books or run science experiments without proper equipment, maybe they, when grown, will forgive us. Maybe they will not think ill of us because we built something for them too– not just a stone shrine to house our own lawmaker's vanity.

Last night and today the building has warmed with life and people. I hope for much more of that. I hope that Idaho might feel it has its building back, that it is yours, not ours, that it is a place we as law makers can aspire to be worthy of in our life times and for the three months we stay here borrowing the air, the beauty and the space to write your budgets and laws.

Short Days

Boise has been thick in fog. Days are short and the session begins again soon. January 11th. Like many legislators, I take short trips to Legislative services to draft bills. I visit on the phone or after meetings with Republican colleagues. I contemplate strategy, wording, policy, politics. Sometimes there is too much debate about politics rather than about policy and law makers don't do things they should/could/want to because of what their party would do or what they think voters might think. But now I'm trying to hold onto what is possible. I'm watching the clock tick forward toward that day when the gavel again falls and I'm getting ready. I'm thinking about how to thrive in the more somber house, the Senate, and remembering how different every session is from the ones before. There is just no telling. It never feels the same. Like different worlds one year to the next. One tune taps its way through my lips and toes today. The whistled part of the song at the end of The Life of Brian. When they are all hung up on crosses they whistle and sing that tune… "Always look on the bright side of life… always look on the bright side of life…"

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.

Without Fischer: Less Violence

I keep getting asked how I feel about Bryan Fischer leaving Idaho. Quite frankly what is most striking is how i feel when I think of the impact he has had in the time he has been here, relentlessly repeating the cruel words of national anti-gay groups and spending long days in the legislature with people who should know better than to listen to him.

But of course the media has covered him solidly. That love of controversy has earned him front billing whenever he wanted it. There are not a lot of people willing to dedicate their lives to hurting other people and doing so with a megaphone in public life. So he got covered. The media made him louder, more powerful and more virulent than he might have been somewhere else.

You know when young people write to me about hope, hope that someday they will not be hated or pitied for being gay or where they will feel safe and not ridiculed or targeted for violence, I think of Bryan Fischer. If it was his goal to ensure that gay teens in Idaho would find themselves in a hostile world, then he accomplished that.

Idaho has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the nation. Typically in any state about 1/3 of all teen suicides are related to teens struggling with coming out or with conflicts within themselves as to whether or not they are gay. If a parent were inclined to be uncomfortable with their child being gay, sure enough Bryan Fischer would be in the paper over the past decades, talking about how we gay people destroy families and live dangerous lifestyles. Of course he has always hammered away at the idea that being gay is a choice. For a parent and that child, something changes when that is the frame within which you exist. For the parent there is the sense that the child can be forced not to be gay. For the child there is the hostility of those statements, the devaluation of the lives of people who are gay, and the conflict of failure when young people, especially young men find that they can no more make themselves straight than their straight peers can force themselves to find boys attractive and make themselves gay. The idea that gay people can be "fixed" or reprogrammed has long been found false, yet Fischer and people like him know that by insisting that being gay is a choice, they can make it a moral issue, make young people and all of us feel that if we were better people we would not be gay.

I'm sorry, but I think the criticism of Bryan Fischer is all too mild. This man, through his relentless words has incited hatred and violence. He has impacted thousands of lives daily, not for the better, by assisting in forcing through a constitutional amendment not just to ban marriage but to hugely complicate our lives by ensuring that we can in no way be recognized as couples by the state or any government in Idaho. Every year in Idaho we will be turned away from emergency rooms or the bedside a partner who is dying. When we die, our joint possessions can by default be taken away from our partner and given to estranged parents or siblings. Already, our social security benefits can not go to our partners. But here in Idaho now, some couples have had to struggle just to get a family gym membership or health insurance from anti-gay companies like Blue Cross.

The cruelty of all this, the lack of Christian values in working to create an environment where real people suffer, where good people suffer, is what is so hard to take. Young people die at their own hands in this state and I lay some of that blood at Bryan Fisher's feet. When you spend your life perpetuating hate against a group of people, people die, people are beaten and harassed and fired from their jobs and even murdered.

The recent death of Dr. Tiller just shows further how hate leads to violence. Fischer
can claim he does not condone violence, but how many times did he
ensure that those listening would not do harm to those he condemned? I
don't recall a single time.

I wish Bryan Fischer's departure meant an undoing of all the pain and harm he has done to so many. Sadly it doesn't. That is up to the rest of us including that vast majority of Idahoans who know gay people as family, friends, co-workers and classmates. We have to make the changes that end the violence and suicide.

The tide has long been turning against people like Fischer. There were times he was shunned in the legislature, especially in the House under Speaker Bruce Newcomb. I think he found luke warm response to his anti-gay rants and recently focused instead more on promoting absurd fear around gender identity and cross dressing. Nationally, efforts to divide our country over gay people have worn thin but I'm sure Fischer will find others to demean and condemn. I send a quiet apology off into the rain today to the people of Mississippi. I'm sorry you get him now.

End of the Endless

We are done. Senators are Standing up to say thank you and good bye. Soon the Lt. Governor will bang the gavel and we will go Sine Die for the year.

I will write more later.

Juggling

In these last hours of a legislative session, stuff flies, errors are made and leaders juggle the timing of bills flying from one house to another. What order are we in? Do we have to read that across the desk again before we can pass it? You will hear us skip from "order of business" to order of business, trying to move things forward at break-neck speed.

Fourteenth order is for amending or changing bills. 13th order is 3rd reading or final consideration where we vote on them and . 12th order is 2nd reading or a place where we can suspend rules and pass bills if we want but usually where they season on the calendar for public absorption for another day before we vote. 11th order is first reading where bills arrive from the amending order, the house or a committee which has passed them.

Right now the caucus leaders Senator Davis and Kate Kelly along with the Lt. Governor are trying to time how legislation that will have to pass the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee soon will get back to the floor of the Senate here for a vote and over to the House for a final vote and passage. We are close. It feels like it. After five years in this place that final juggling is what gives away the end.

Earmarking Road Funding

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We are at ease for the hundredth time today. Thankfully there is actually a bit of a ruckus over two amendments to the GARVEE bonding road building bill. Senator Keough and Senator Davis both are trying to obligate future borrowing for specific projects in their districts, in spite of the fact that the Idaho Transportation Department is supposed to objectively determine the most needed, safety necessary, urgent roads to build and repair.

Seems always in the last hours that the pork slides into the appropriations bills. Quietly, greasy and a bit acrid. This one smells none too pretty. We'll see if behind the closed doors here behind me in the Senate Chambers if Senator Cameron prevailed in putting his foot down and questioning this idea. Or if the pig will be all the better greased and slide on through when we come back to order.

……….

Greased in the Senate. Look for a bit of Oink in the next round of millions Idaho borrows for roads.

P.S. It the amended and earmarked GARVEE bill passed the Senate but the house killed it later. So the Senate amended a different House bill and the same initial GARVEE funding was tacked onto that bill (near as I could tell without all the two previously added earmarks). While I am not a fan of GARVEE and its millions in highway borrowing, (I always try to vote no,) I ended up voting yes because the Design-Build bill that the GARVEE borrowing got tacked onto seemed worth a try as a cost containment measure. These are the quandries we end up with at the end. Things get packaged together in ways they are not quite supposed to and it all moves quickly, often no time to read every word of the bill. I think this time mostly because that was the quickest way for Senate leaders to get us home.

A Brightening

The sun was out this morning and Carol washed a mountain of spinach while I planted chili plants and put up a trellis for the peas. The Senate started a good half hour late as has often been the habit this past month of waiting, redoing bills and battling back and forth between the the Governor and House and Senate Republicans. But here in the building, faces are not as somber, tense exchanges are forgotten. Grey haired men are back to telling stories. Reporters roam the halls and stairs expectantly.

We passed two transportation funding bills this morning, neither of which was substantial, one of which was pie in the sky, amusing. It would entice trucking companies to register here in Idaho. I stood and presented my final two appropriations bills. I see them flying through the brown granite halls to the House as a sort of trial test balloon. We are hopeful but there is a slightly tentative flavor to the hope. There have been close deals or trials with a whole array of transportation funding and education gutting legislation, almost all of which was killed in one body or another.

We are close to going home. We think.

The rain leaves fields safe from drought. We all know that soon it will dry and there will be pipe to move, fields to irrigate. We are close now. Really. We think.

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.