Cole / Nicole LeFavour

Notes From the Floor

Former Idaho Senator Cole / Nicole Legislative Blog

Republican Caucus

Republican Caucus


Before the door closes it is possible to visit republicans in their caucus. Here Representatives gather for what was announced on the floor as an hour and a half meeting where some have come braced for an arm twisting.  This will be less than fun for moderates or small business oriented legislators who want to "concur" or agree with the Senate amendments to H599.

Friday the Senate turned the big business bill into a more modest $75,000 exemption from personal property tax which will be more focused on small businesses without shifting over $100 million in taxes to families.

We are going back on the floor at threeish and now in our caucus are strategizing about how to concur with the $75,000 exemption. The Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry wants to kill the bill now so they can get the whole $120 million tax break next year. They seem to know  that the public will lose  sympathy for their cause once the sponsors can no longer hold up examples of small businesses like the hot dog lady and the burden of her paying her personal property tax (which it turns out was grossly misrepresented in Jim Clark’s stirring floor debate.)

So our caucus is done and the door on the Rev & Tax room where our colleagues meet is still closed. I think that before they went in we probably had the votes to pass the $75,000 exemption. When they come out, who knows.

Healthcare: No Debate

Heart

    There is a fine line as to how many times one person can get up and debate in one day. I was so far over that line on Thursday that I didn’t bother looking back. I’m serving my last days in the Idaho House of Representatives. I have credibility I want to maintain there for next year, voters willing, when I’ll be far across the hall in the Senate. But it didn’t matter on Thursday.
    Some of my Republican cohorts have said they will miss me. Brent Crane has said it kindly more than once. But he has a smile which I suspect means he knows I keep the place lively. Thursday was no exception.
     I went into the floor session knowing that I’d be working along side Mike Moyle on defeating the CID tax. (A scheme under the guise of growth paying for itself where developers have no liability at all to pay for the cost of their development’s impacts on cities and towns, but instead pass the whole liability on to home buyers in a large and easily hidden special CID property tax.) I debated twice and asked pointed questions of the sponsor on that issue. That’s rare. It did little good. The floor fight was spectacular on both sides but the bill sailed to through, and is now headed for the Senate.
    Phil Hart’s horrible memorial to congress on immigration was up after that. I sat up in the balcony waiting there after his long, cruel speech, hearing no one get up to debate against the boilerplate John Birch Society rhetoric. And so I did get up again and when the house made its voice vote we had a fair number of nos. Not enough to make the speaker call for division, but enough that I wish more people across Idaho could have heard the vote itself.
     Later there somewhere in the blur of that day was a little memorial to congress saying Idaho was doing a grand job regulating its insurance companies and that Idaho wants no part of plans to let the federal government create consistent policies to regulate health care. I have yet to determine if the federal law is good or bad. I also realize that memorials have no weight of law and are at best grand statements of legislative sentiment with lots of whereas and therefores. But when they pass they send those sentiments off to Congress, the president or the universe with my name attached to them and the people of Idaho supposedly standing behind them.
     What got to me with this memorial was that this would be as close as we will probably get to having a floor debate on health care for the entire legislative session. People across the state are opening envelopes to paper printed with numbers, dollar figures beyond their comprehension. They are going bankrupt, setting aside plans of retirement, eating the heart out of savings accounts with prescription medication bills, cancer therapies, physical therapy, surgery, and psychiatric care. And very, very few of us, when those white envelopes come, are prepared or often in any way able to pay for what the bills say we must.
    Even with insurance, or especially with it, I think we often are lulled into the false assumption that we will be OK. We have paid, and maybe too our employer has paid thousands of dollars over the course of the year, maybe even thousands more this year then last, just for the privilege of having insurance. But here is no security in it any more.
    What is wrong is that our nation has allowed the insurance industry and our nation’s health care to become so completely devastating to the finances of the vast majority of Americans. Here in Idaho even if you have health insurance, today you can still go bankrupt, end up with your home in hawk and yourself at the mercy of the temporary charity of the county indigent fund, subsidized by property tax dollars and general state tax funds. Small businesses struggling to find something to offer employees, typically can only afford bare bones coverage, a policy so full of lifetime maximums, deductibles and exclusions that the narrow strip of what it covers leaves families vulnerable and employees desperate when they realize what cost they are stuck with.
    And what have we done about it this year? Well, a house committee refused to consider and actually allow us to debate the merits of Margaret Henbest’s proposal to begin universal health coverage by starting with opening up the state’s CHIP program to all low and moderate income uninsured children. They refused to dedicate the tax dollars and consider offering parents an affordable option to ensure all kids have insurance and preventative care to save the state and families millions across Idaho. Margaret has run numbers on expanding state programs like Medicaid to more and more adults as well, especially that band of people who (and the small businesses that employ them) can not at all afford coverage now.
     Ask yourself and ask your neighbors, because I’m curious, would you rather trust a health insurance company, rather pay them premiums and let them decide your rates each year and what they will cover and not cover and how much of each procedure they will pay– or would you rather pay those premiums in taxes and allow the state or federal government to expand their Medicaid or Medicare programs to let every middle class family buy in if they wanted. You might not get cosmetic surgery, but you’d have care  you could predict. You’d have the security of knowing that your premium would not double the next year and that your only cost might be a co-pay for office visits based on your income.
    National research is clear that access to early detection and prevention, eliminating administrative costs (insurance company’s infinite red tape) and things like the need for costly county indigent funds and hospital charity care (which increases the cost of everyone’s care,) would hugely reduce the cost of American health care.
    But why do I bother mentioning these issues? We did not debate them on Thursday. No. I sat in my seat after Mark Snodgrass presented his insurance regulation memorial and no one spoke. Though it was futile, and I was so far over the line in debate for the day, I stood up and pressed the white button on my desk at the base of the microphone on its long, black neck. I leaned in to ask one relatively brief question about whether federal regulation had any chance of ending the random raising of rates and denial of coverage which is common practice under insurance companies in our country and state now. The answer was that the sponsor didn’t think so. He did reiterate that Idaho does just great regulating insurance companies.
    "Compared to what?" I wish I’d asked. "Couldn’t we make them just a little more accountable to someone, especially since we have so few choices here in Idaho and since we don’t really get to take our business somewhere else or just decide to do without if they do something we think is unconscionable, deceptive or dishonest?" But I’d been at that microphone far too many times that day.
    Has anyone asked Idahoans about how pleased they are with what they pay insurance companies so very much for? 
    We sent a memorial to Congress telling our nation that we are regulating insurance companies just fine in Idaho. There was no critique, no room for improvement, even just under the category "Healthcare." Everything is peachy with health insurance here. We "heart" our insurance companies. They, in their gigantic shiny new buildings, with their outstanding board member and CEO salaries and bonuses, are doing just the best work for our families here in the great potato state. Let’s give them a medal for creative problem solving, selflessness and clear dedication to those families they send white envelopes to year after year after year. 

   

How Long

    I’m sure many Idahoans are wondering just how long this session will last. This session which was supposed to be expedited, which began in dark of winter and now has languished into the time that crocus are wilted and tulips are working on flowers inside their tough green skins.
    I can say this. The length of a session is largely about ego. Who will give first? There are definite power dynamics and struggle between conservative House leadership and the moderate Senate. Then there are the dynamics between the governor and the legislature. This is an election year so the fear of raising taxes creates a tension over not fully funding substance abuse programs and failing to address shortfalls in transportation funding. Shifts in funding and taxes seem to be fair game as we have moved items like the state police off transportation budgets on to the general fund (the sales and income tax dollars which fund all our health, safety and social service programs.) But we seem to have moved beyond real debates over how to raise even just the $50 million or so for paying for the debt service on our GARVEE highway project loans. We’ve even abandon talk of raising the beer and wine taxes for the first time in many decades to provide more substance abuse funding to avoid the need for even more costly prison expansion and backlogs in those who need treatment for meth, heroin or alcohol addiction.
    With all legislative elections falling every two years, you seen the willingness to think ahead vanish every two years.
    So here we are diving into April we know we have an even more difficult year ahead for revenue, where tax dollars coming in may, because of the economy, force us to cut essential services. We are with S1447 already on the verge of making this year’s budget balance on the backs of state retirees, cutting their allowance for supplemental health coverage and leaving them at the whims of private insurance companies who can raise retirees rates at will, leaving many services uncovered and prescription drug coverage sliding into the donut hole.
     When will it end? Not necessarily next week, but probably. It all depends on whether House leadership digs in on their big business version of personal property tax breaks. It depends on whether the Governor who came in a day late with with half baked transportation solutions bothers to come up with something sensible and balanced.
    We as democrats have proposed solutions, most of which are no longer on the table, most were never given hearings, because after all this is an election year and who can allow democrats to solve problems. But we know that. We shape the process in other ways, through amendments and through working with the Senate. Someday, maybe not so long from now we will be in the majority. We will gain the 16 seats we need in the House to set the committee agendas and choose to spend wisely and with forethought to save taxpayer dollars by not always waiting until things bleed and fall into expensive crises of meth addiction, over flowing prisons, dirty air and water and limping transit alternatives. Someday. But for this year we push and run back and forth to the Senate whispering mutual plots and plans. I’ve worn a pair of shoes out so the nails have come up through the soles and the rain comes in.
    When will it end? Hopefully after a bill or two is finally changed and another killed. So, soon, while we have half a chance of being sure no more damage to the future is done.
      

Those We Like

It is hard to
debate against those we like. Maybe we see harm in a piece of
legislation that they don’t see. Maybe the harm they see of not passing
it is out-weighed by the harm we see in passing it. But we disagree and
we have to debate, maybe even with some vigor. Maybe we are in our
same party, maybe not. But we are friends. We have shared meals or
conversation, stories of our lives and families. And today we have
different positions and we each have to fight them, advocate for those
we are standing for, who we represent.
    We all try not to take it
personally but the words said in debate are hard to hear sometimes,
especially when you have legislators who lose if a bill passes and
others who gain politically, in terms credibility with constituents or
real policy that is part of their life’s work. Tomorrow we all have to
rearrange ourselves into other alliances and coalitions, so, rather
than taking the fight off the floor, we all as seasoned lawmakers in
the end of our two year terms, we know to leave the heat there in the
big black seats in front of the lap top computer screens, go to lunch,
go home, let it rest until it is less raw.
    There is a line in debate we
have to be careful not to cross, that is in characterizing another’s
intent, or speaking poorly of their efforts or integrity. There are
unspoken rules about this. When a line is crossed, a legislator is seen
to have an edge that I think makes many dread having that person debate
on the floor. It takes a while to learn that, to see how it works. Its
part of fair play that you are careful. At the same time, in an
election year, making partisan contrasts, claiming better moral high
ground for a position on an issue that falls largely on party lines, is
a role many of us are supposed to take. But it is a delicate balance to
do that with in the rules. This time of year you can watch us walk that
line, delicately or not.

Caucus

Caucus

We debate strategy on tough issues including passing local option taxing, public transportation funding and proceeding with a small business focused $75,000 exemption for the business personal property tax.

Caucus

Margaret talks about substance abuse funding as the caucus takes a position against the Governor’s veto.

Caucus

Bill Killen calculates fiscal impacts.

….

House Democrats caucus. Our door is open and so you could walk in to the legislature and come in and join us. The Republican majority party does not hold open caucuses so I can’t post a photo of their caucuses. But maybe one of my good Republican balcony colleagues will get me one next week.

Survival

Photos

Put the head phones on and wow. Here I am. The message-focused, issue-automaton that I become falls away and its just me here at the computer on the floor listening to Taj Mahal, Tracy Chapman and Concrete Blonde. I’ve literally been too busy spinning here between committee and balcony, key board and sleep to dig out the ear phones and listen to music here since weeks back in February.

    We are far from there now. Today I went to the press conference which some of Boise’s stalwart Human Rights organizations had pulled together, there out on the lawn as the rain turned to white snow. We discussed Senate Bill 1323… a bill saying I, as a gay person, am human. I matter. Saying that this state agrees that harm against me is not OK. Saying that firing me or throwing me out of my apartment for no other reason than that I’m gay is not O.K. What state or nation would not up hold that value?

    Odd day today. Full of odd moments. I’ve written so much e-mail that my brain now naturally streams bill phrases, numbers, consequences, debate. The music here in the head phones reminds me that I can survive anything, even as good bills go down and bad ones creep ever forward. If it all gets to me for a day or two each session, I’m doing pretty well. I have a well of strength from many places. Carol’s brilliant humor, my years in the wilds, having seen a world where I know never to pity myself too much. I’ve seen lives people live elsewhere in the world. I can survive anything here.

Here’s one I will share……. Having walked alone for hours following foot prints, through deep snow at first, and then downhill for miles along the winding dirt road out of a Tibetan mountain town through forest, toward the boarder with Nepal. An army jeep stopped and I took a ride with a group of Chinese military men in uniform. It was a ride that I know from the faces and voices there in the cramped seats very nearly went wrong. I speak no Chinese only some Nepali and when I insisted on getting out, I was on a huge hill side above the boarder gate. Rocks fell constantly across the road from high up in the rain and I threaded my way down huge switchbacks until a voice below the road called out. An old man sat there under a low piece of corrugated metal. He invited me in with hand gestures. Leaning over a little fire, he made Tibetan tea for me, a kind of salty yellow soup made with yack butter. He showed me how to dip little dough balls made from tsampa flour into the warm broth and I sat with him, communicating with gestures and smiles there in his shelter of tin by the road side where he had pulled me out of the rain to share with me what food he had.

Shenanigans

Lake

Quite a moment in Committee this morning. Chairman Lake banged the gavel and the 18 of us committee members were starting a to hear testimony from the public on a bill which had been granted a hearing with a majority vote the day before. Suddenly the chairman addressed the committee in his formal, friendly way and announced that we would have our hearing on a different draft of the bill instead, a substantially changed version which the committee did not pass and did not approve at any time, and in fact had not yet seen.

As Democrats, we sit together in a row at a leg of the table on one side of the room. We looked at each other and I raised my hand. I objected, pointing out that it was improper to substitute one bill with another bill, when the committee approved only the one of them. I also pointed out that it was particularly a problem that the changed bill would affect people in North Idaho who clearly were not at today’s hearing and would have not chance to comment on how the bill would affect them and the local option sales tax which they use for property tax relief.

The Chair shrugged off the discussion saying we’d take testimony. As the few speakers wrapped up, the chair announced that we would not vote today but would have a hearing instead tomorrow on the new bill. The chair mentioned that since we had "an agreement" in the last committee meeting to hear this other draft, we would do that instead of voting on the broad local option sales tax authority we had just heard testimony on.

You know sometimes it takes a second for an incongruity to register. When you hear it, there is that moment of delay while your memory registers that no such thing took place. Rep. Jaquet pointed out that we were part of no agreement at any time on this bill and that the agreement clearly took place within republican leadership. (There is no such agreement in the committee minutes.) Chairman Lake smiled and looked down ready to adjourn the meeting without a vote on the bill people had just come to testify on.

Rep. Jaquet raised her hand and made a motion to approve the existing bill anyway. She moved to send HB 688, the broad local option tax authority bill, to the floor with a due pass recommendation. Rep. Lake squirmed and smiled and said that it would be his call. Even with a motion on the table, he adjourned the committee, no vote, no other motion, just the gavel.

So you might wonder what would matter so much that the chairman would bend rules to change this bill and eliminate the ability for local communities to use a local option sales tax for property tax relief. If you think about all the ways that certain members of House Republican leadership have tried to stand in the way of local people’s ability to fund urgent local needs like public transportation, you realize it is likely that they recognize that property tax relief might be pretty popular use for a local sales tax, especially since communities in North Idaho already use local option for this purpose. It might even be popular enough that, when combined with a proposal to fund public transportation, it would easily pass by 2/3 majority, even in places like Star, Eagle and Canyon County. And well, even if it means eliminating a potential method of lowering property taxes, they seem to stop at nothing to stand in the way of this kind of progress. Light rail, street cars, a real bus system. Apparently, the last thing Rep. Moyle wants is having the local option legislation include anything that improves the chances that the Treasure Valley will ever use a 1/2 penny local sales tax to fund public transportation.

Coercive Rhetoric

Interesting our debate now on Rep. Bob Nonini’s HB 654A making it unlawful to coerce a woman to have an abortion but leaving it lawful to coerce and threaten a woman with violence to force her not to have an abortion. Do the sponsors think it is OK to threaten a woman to force her to have a baby she feels unable to bear? Do the sponsors want to protect their right to coerce women for this purpose? Nonini said this was about protecting women, about our safety and our rights. I would have to say I doubt that. This bill is about politics and religion, not about women.

Only two men voted with the 9 women who voted no.

Blues

    People ask me if it ever gets to me, bashing my well gelled skull against the polished granite of this place. I don’t give up easily but at the end of the session it is over, there is no hope but next year, the will of frustrated voters, a gift from the courts, acts of congress or something as yet beyond me. I know how to recover in the interim, how to take this feeling and turn it into determination, bring it to the voters and help them to take it to the ballot box to create change in this place. But for now we are stuck here with little but sinister excuses for policy before us.
    Yesterday I left the building on the verge of tears and walked in this morning trying to swallow the lump in my throat. We could go home now, bang the gavel now. Call it damage control. We would forgo hurting state retirees, encumbering the constitution, shifting burdens, letting developers charge hidden taxes and yes admitting that the majority are again this year leaving many still in harms way. That the Governor and Republican leaders have waited this long to address transportation funding of all kinds means we will likely do this badly, in some sort of forced or leveraged way.
    Here on the floor with a list of bills in front of us, I whisper to the white ceiling that we could go home now, before we vote. Make the clerk stop reading. Turn off the computers, empty our desks, hug, shake hands and be gone. The state would likely be better for it.

Waiting for the Train

If you look at legislative agendas (see link at right) you’ll see a lot of notes that the committee will meet at the call of the chair. That is to say the committee room sits empty and the secretary may be wrapping up  committee minutes or doing other tasks (and, on a side note, yes, as far as I know all the committee secretaries are female. Four of our committee Chairs in the House are also female: Jo An Wood in Transportation, Lenore Barrett for Local Government, Sharon Block in Health & Welfare, and Maxine Bell as chair of the House’s most powerful committee, Appropriations. In the Senate only Patti-Anne Lodge is a committee chair and in all, only six of the Senate’s 35 members are women.)
    So, call of the chair is a suspended state of non-animation. There may be back room meetings, like that this morning to discuss transportation. Or there may be a bill coming from the Senate or a bill that the Senate wants which won’t get a hearing until the Senate passes something else. That would be the case with Public Transportation Funding right now. Tomorrow morning we finally will see a hearing on a bill AUTHORIZING (not just limiting as the constitutional amendment does) the use of voter approved local option taxes perhaps for pubic transportation and roads. I’m not sure what exactly we’ll let local people vote to raise their own sales tax for. I’ve not seen the bill since several have been proposed and counter proposed, trying to please Republican leadership in the house. I’m fascinated to learn if the crafters of the constitutional amendment will allow the Treasure Valley or others to begin work on funding public transit systems this year or if everyone must now wait a whole year more until November 2009 after this constitutional amendment passes statewide this election year.

Playing Chicken

    Feels later than it is and I should go to sleep. Home thinking about tomorrow and the week. We have still left much undone. So much good effort dead in drawers or on the committee room floor.
    This week will be about force. These last days are. The big boys fight, take hostages and dare each other to kill bills. It sometimes is as if no issue is attached to the legislation. Like Governor Otter vetoing a substance abuse budget line. You never know if its about policy or personalities. Did the sponsor make him mad? Was there a political rival who would benefit. Did he have other designs for the money?
    So we have to do battle with plans to change retiree benefits. We have to remind the overzealous amenders of our constitutional that their work is not done until they actually pass a real piece of legislation to let local people vote for local option sales tax for roads and transit. They can pass fifty of these useless constitutional amendments and we are no closer, only farther from having public transit or local road funds.
    And we could stop the foolish amendment but the house Republican leaders have kept lots of Senate bill as hostages. They will commence a grand game of chicken to see if the Senate will cave and give them what they want. I’d like to be wagering for some backbone but treasure valley Republicans should be leading that fight and I’m not sure if they will step up, steel themselves and take that thorny bill by the horns.

Journeys in the Wilderness

Journeys in the Wilderness

by Nicole LeFavour for Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
February 10, 2008

I am honored …….and deeply humbled by being invited to speak with you here this morning.
I will share with you today my journey in the wild, a personal journey, one which may have elements in common with your own journeys, what ever they may be.

I come from a family which has left me something of a comfortable stranger to any house of worship. In my family, around the dinner table, complex questions of physics and science were an art to be prodded and explored. My father is himself an explorer of sorts.
    He left college just months before graduation to canoe one of the most wild and then uncharted rivers in northern Canada. He met huge grizzly, and while portaging with canoes across the tundra became the object of at first somber, then playful hunting practice for a pack of wolves with young. One of his party died on the river in the cold water, rations grew scarce and there is much from that trip my father never speaks of, but in him and from him I gained a reverence for the wild. He seemed to always seek it and when Colorado grew too crowded and indulgent he and my mom moved us to Idaho to live in Custer County along the Main Salmon River at the edge of a great expanse of the wild.
…………………………………….

In college I studied science. In the summers before I came to Boise I applied to the forest service to become a fire lookout and spent seven years working summer seasons in the wilderness of central Idaho.
Three of those summers I spent on top of two peaks in the Frank Church Wilderness, in the most remote area in the lower 48 states.
There I would arrive by pack string, my food and a few clothes packed in card board boxes for three months living 16 miles from the nearest road and 10 miles from the nearest air strip.

    I spent those summers in a 15X15 foot wooden house with four walls of 1920s divided light windows, mountains, tress, sage brush, valleys, rocky canyons, and peaks as far as they eye could see in every direction.
From there in the day time, not a single human feature was visible on the land all the way to the every horizon.
I cut my own wood, carried my water up from the spring on the mountain side, cooked my food on a propane burner and baked potatoes in a tiny wood stove which was my only heat.
At Night the silence was immense and complex.
    The first nights after I arrived each year, my ears would strain and even the tiniest noise of a rodent in the metal strapping under the lookout sounded huge and sent my adrenaline racing. I would lie with my ears covered shivering through hours in the immense darkness, wishing for morning.

    Soon each year I’d grow used to the silence, stand on the catwalk at night listening to elk hooves knocking against logs in the lake basin below, a branch breaking somewhere off in the deep black.
No radio, no TV, no music, for weeks at a time no human conversation; only brief coded check ins on the forest two way radio, but nothing more.

……………………………….

Time then would become so long and elaborate that it was impossible not to venture out, to see where trails led, try to reach distant mountain tops and make it home before sunset.
Out there I was followed by owls, studied by mink, chased by moose, struck by lightning.
I grew fond of leaving the little building, walking out from lookout to lookout, sleeping in a tent or under the stars.

    Eventually I left the lookouts altogether and spent four summers alone with a backpack on my back as the first wilderness ranger to walk the terrain of the South half of the Frank Church on foot.
I walked alone for ten days at a time along ridge tops collecting data from almost every speck of high lake on every mountain side and along nearly every trail in those thousands of acres of roadless wild country that make up the upper Middle Fork of the Salmon River drainage.

………………………………………….

Out there, there is of course the beauty of all of it all, the chaotic perfection of things untouched by our hands.
SMELLS
pine needles roasting in the hot sun
elk and deer, sometimes cougar scent marks pungent and repulsive
morels, puffballs and suillis mushrooms growing in pine duff, in sage, in the mossy velvet shade of aspen trees

LIGHT
the brilliant slant of sun streaming down in evening  through the smoke of a forest fire
the loft of towering clouds boiling above drifting over shedding patterns of dark and light on the undulating expanse of ridges from my feet to the sky line

LIGHTNING
in bolts, like great overturned trees, like waves between great clouds rolling across the sky,
simultaneous cracks of thunder, distant rumbles echoing between granite peaks

………………………………………….

Most of all though, there is nothing like living with your own thoughts for months on end. Whether I wanted it to or not, my whole life would stream before me, replaying itself for days, then weeks on end.
Of course if you are not OK with yourself, not settled with your own actions or with the events of your childhood or past I suspect that those thoughts can nag at you.

    There were stories of lookouts who didn’t make it. Many stories. One of the years I served as head fire watch, one of my road side lookouts started lighting fires. At first, within a mile or two of his little building, after his evening walks, we’d spot the smokes and the choppers and fire crews would descend. Later, as he was given a motorcycle, the new fires sprung up in more distant stands of tree. I hiked down 12 miles to the forest air strip and sent a note to dispatch to report my concerns, feeling hesitant to call over the forest radio where so many could hear my words.

    Another lookout before my time called dispatch in the middle of the night when typically no plane or helicopter can fly. He was panicked that there were people there to get him. Station Rangers who hiked up the trail hours later with a flashlight found him huddled in some bushes, the windows in his lookout building smashed out from the inside.

…………………………………………..

Up there it is as if your mind gets a will of its own.
At home I could distract myself, stay busy, the noise of life, volunteering, taking 20 credit hours or studying late into the night occupied me. I could avoid thinking about things I choose not to.
For me on those mountaintops, there was no keeping any of my thoughts at bay.
I was lucky, at worst what I had to confront were regrets. I’d sit on the catwalk dangling my legs over a thousand feet of air, or lay on my metal bed as the rain pattered, and I chewed on these regrets for long hours until they lost their flavor.
What I was bitter about I could turn over and over, replay until it grew dull and lost its ability to flush me to anger.

………………………………………………………

Of course in any kind of solitude, where we are or where to ourselves we exist inside ourselves is not solely controlled by where our bodies are or our location physically on earth or in time.
As a ranger I could walk for days replaying the same moment in time or a single series of events long past. This moment or moments would cycle through me, as if my mind was stuck on instant replay. And I would be gone, far off again reliving a conversation, trying out other phrases, other responses, living out alternate scenarios of reality for that time and place far, far away.

    I found a curious mix of kinds of presence out there.
I could live in books until I ran out of them. After that it was all my mind, my life and me and the wild alone.

…………………………..

I’m sure it is clear that there is a danger in this. In being alone with your thoughts. As with loss or with grief or anger we can get truly stuck in a feeling or obsessive thought. I remember a time years later, after a difficult break up where repeating a feeling or thought simply wouldn’t wear thin this emotion, instead it actually scratched it into a deeper painful groove. It became a place which hurt, a chasm I could try to skirt but always fell into. I found those years later that I could come to dwell in a place of pain inside myself and my avoidance of it could make it larger, thicker with gravity, so that like an addiction, my life could only be spent in conscious, all consuming avoidance or else deep in the pit of it.

    To escape and find my life again it was as if I had to grow new muscles, a strength and determination to pass that door in my consciousness, to think of other places inside me which felt warm, which might draw me in as a better place to be. I thought about the wild, about all I’d seen, I knew if all else failed I could go back, again feel the quiet the solitude, the strength in myself– and knowing this, I survived. I learned then that I could draw on that experience, that place that was now inside me as my own.

……………………………………..

Of course in those seven years in the wilderness I knew moments where I could feel my physical life and the limit of it only inches away from me.

–In the power of water, crossing a river, roaring ice-cold from spring run off. I couldn’t turn around because I was forty remote road and trail miles from town, having been left on a road corridor rarely traveled in spring. I remember standing hip deep in the pressing water, picturing my body dragged down under the weight of my pack, each boulder and log a place I might wedge and never rise from.

–I also felt this edge to my physical life in the power of gravity on a peak one day crossing a snow field which vanished below in jagged rocks. There my legs shook but I had to cross. I unsnapped my waist belt, swung my pack carefully off and let it slide down the mountain. I steeled myself, trusted my legs and kicked one step at a time in the snow to solid granite on the other side.

–Powerful animals, bears, cougar and wolverine tracked me in the wilderness like prey. I lived weeks knowing that lions watched, but coming to feel agreement that if they had not chosen to bother me so far, they probably would not.

–I came to know that bears have less acute senses and like least to be surprised, and so I had a special deep “hey ho” that I would call out in brush or creek bottoms where they might be rooting with cubs, head down never hearing my feet clomping on the trail.

–Twice in the wilderness I met wolves.
    Once in the late 90s before any had been re-introduced to Idaho. My boss had reported hearing one but I had joined the many who were certain he was mistaken and that it had been elk or the play of his own mind in the woods. Day hiking with the elderly wife of a station guard, fighter jets flew low over head and a sonic boom ripped the clearing where we sat eating lunch. Out of the fading sound of the jet engines we heard what seemed at first to be a voice, but then clearly was wolves, not one or two, but three, their voices rising and falling eerily, beautiful from the edge of the clearing where we sat. The sound reached into my chest, deep and brought tears to my eyes. They had traveled the forest parallel to the trail so that, as we walked– had they not howled– we never would have never known they were there.

    Years later my partner Carol and I hiked out from a remote part of the Frank Church. Our dog Pinza with a red backpack on trotted ahead on the trail. We were following the tracks of an elk and saw repeated wet spots in the trail. Then, oddly, the dog insisted on walking between us while we speculated how an elk would urinate several times in a row on such a short stretch of trail. Behind us, the sound of a helicopter’s blades suddenly thudded out of the valley where ten miles away a crew was fighting a forest fire. A column of smoke had towered all day, rising into the deep blue above. Suddenly out of the apron of tiny high alpine spruce on the hillside near us, the sounds of wolves voices rose one by one. Judging by the marks they left on the trail, at least six. They howled and we stood for a long time fixed still staring toward where they hid in the trees.

–Once in my later years in the backcountry, at dusk I clambered over logs on a long abandon stretch of trail in a huge remote valley bottom. An odd sound made me turn to see a light brown form on a log up hill from where I stood. I can only guess that this was a wolverine. I had seen a flash of one once from a truck driving to a trailhead. This one was standing firm in an avalanche shoot, unafraid of me, sending warning that I was where I was unwelcome. I did not sleep well that night, again and again picturing that I had transgressed, strayed this time where I did not belong.

— Of course I have felt also the fragility of my own life in the power of the elements and the chill of wind blown snow on a peak far off in Nepal. Living there for three months one day at 14,000 feet I felt the power of the sky to suddenly throw down a great weight of snow, like hands holding feet, paralyzing, wind rendering flimsy the tent until you huddle in the fluttering cloth trying to heat water, feeling hypothermia picking at you until you flee wallowing straight downhill breaking through crust, mile after mile to where the snow turns to rain —because you are not prepared for this…

But sometimes in the wilderness there is no luxury of flight.

Waking up after a day like that, after any one of those days where the end of life is even slightly visible, finding morning so brilliant in its warmth and welcome, is as close as I know to a symbol of beginning.
That simple sense of survival in face of powers so huge
has given me steadiness.
In my late 20s, at a young age I felt I’d lived a long life. I felt strength which I hold with me today, strength which puts my life and trials in perspective, strength which gives petty problems less hold on me, helps me hold my determination to see others find their strength, their health, their own sense of security, humility, self and belonging.

……………………………………………..

Perhaps too in my mind that is part of the definition of the wild:
a place where we learn humility
where it is not possible to control all things
where we adapt rather than making all things adapt to us
a place where we can be reminded how fragile we are
that place we grow humble, set aside the great powers of ourselves in our immense multitude and recognize that like a single ant, a single mole rat, or a single bee we are, except in rare instances, not entirely capable of surviving all on our own.

…………………………………………………….

We look around today and where there were once forests, there are now cabins; and where there were fields or endless stretches of sagebrush, there are subdivisions, roads, shopping centers, RV parks and gift shops …
It would be selfishness to want to keep these places to myself.  I wonder though more genuinely if it is not also selfish to want to close the door behind me and just leave the wild for the wild — keep it there untouched, even if I could never go back.

In the wilderness each year I could mark the increase in the number of people on the trails, the missing branches and scars on the trees, the fire pits burnt into the moss circling the high lakes, the tree wells gouged by hooves, the planes over head, the cars on the dirt tracks– and I would feel a sense of panic

    What I and many of us hold sacred in our own very different ways is vanishing for our love of it, for our collective need for it.
I wonder are there too many of us now?

Have we created a drought of solitude?

A famine of humility?

    We can pull over by the roadside, let the camera pan out and we have the beauty still, but what about the solitude?
Too often we take so much of home with us. Now in some places, every hundred yards, every few minutes there is another walker a mountain bike or pack string.
What happens when that solitude it is gone?
What happens when we have no place like this for confronting our lives, our pasts, our beliefs?

………………………………………….

Some of this at least in part we can create for ourselves, setting aside time and place in our lives to hear our own voices or hear the past or nothing but the wind or our heart beats and our breath for awhile.
But how do we save a place where we may be forced to recognize that we are vulnerable, a place to feel our dependence upon others and the fragility of our lives?

—There is great power in the microscopic world and in the betrayal of our own bodies through cancer. We may learn humility there. A best we learn, find some strength within ourselves and survive.

—The ocean is still vast and humbling but few have the skill to go there alone.
What is the destination of a people with no wild? With so little humility?

…………………………………………

    My years in the Frank Church rest in me like a place I can retreat to. A sort of well I draw from. I can stand in a street in the snow-blanketed early morning darkness on my way to the Statehouse and feel the power of a huge over turned bowl of stars spinning invisibly above me.
    I can run in the foothills as the sun rises and feel that same wind from the knife edged ridge-tops in the Salmon River Range, where the sun shines, illuminating the white shape of an old she mountain goat. The wind ruffles her fur and the universe freezes as, curious but trusting, her big black eyes stare right into mine. In that moment the blue sky rises and I grow tiny a dark speck with a white speck on a rock face. The eyes I stare into are like time itself. They have seen what I will never. They know things I will never. They feel the roots of a world I can only visit to graze the surface of.

    What ever goes wrong in my life, I consider myself one of the fortunate to have found a place, a source from which to draw humility, a world full of stillness and silence I carry with me, where if I look, I find a deep well, a place huge inside my own eyes but beyond them, a place where my own inner voice is humble, but clear, and strong.

Brutal Day

The floor is empty. The pages have come up to try throwing paper airplanes from the balcony. We are all headed home now to lick wounds and tie up the last of it next week.

This morning I made my final visit to the Senate, looking for my 5th vote to advance S1323, the addition of gays and lesbians to the Human Rights act to protect us from discrimination in employment, housing and education. Finally today I give up and concede that we will pick this work up again next year. I can’t say dead. The bill is resting in a drawer until next year. We will be back. As many times as it takes– and really too many have said that some year they know the time will be right. But why do they wait while people live in fear of losing jobs? Why do they wait while so many are forced to pretend they are other than they are? Why do they wait when so many in here clearly agree this is something which will be done someday. When will all the fear within this body stop overtaking the sense of what is right?

There were other losses today. Democrats watched as we lost MaryLou Shepard’s vote (actually a typical thing to have happen) and gained only Leon Smith’s vote on fending off a useless constitutional amendment to restrict local people’s ability to use local option taxes for local needs. Personal Property taxes passed. International Education, carried by Tom Trail, who I think has drawn unimaginable derision from his own party, died on the floor.

I know how hard it is to be a Democrat but being a moderate Republican might just be harder in here and may produce lesser, more stressful results. It is the fear thing. Fear of your own party. Something about party allegiance, where, under this kind of conservative leadership, you might pay dearly for stepping out of the fold. We Democrats don’t bother MaryLou, but Tom Trail, Mark Snodgrass, Leon Smith and Carlos Bilbao have paid for representing their districts and may still be paying for who they voted for as speaker or how they voted on something or how they spoke out and objected to a process or a piece of legislation.

But that’s what is feeding the fear, all this tension, all these primaries, a year of fear of primaries. The filing closes in five minutes. Republicans are going at each other out there. We Democrats have some good candidates and good issues after this session. It all unfolds now, after this brutal day.

Noise Under the Surface

As hard as it has been to learn to sit still, sit quiet, I did that today. The single issue I’ve worked hardest to oppose, not just this year but for three years now, the total repeal of Personal Property Tax, just passed the 70 member House by 4 votes.
    Fred Wood and I (he had paired with Eric Anderson who was gone and so was prohibited from debating,) the two of us were on the phone counting votes, talking to swing votes and urging our Republican colleagues to debate with the Democrats.
    Being on the phone helped. It kept me busy. Not debating but working the floor from the phone meant I could stand up and ask Steve Thayne to call Tom Loertscher, ask Diane Thomas to make her points about counties, ask Maxine to get someone downstairs to debate against.
    There was a most unusual mix of people on both sides of this bill. Pete Nielsen said that those he often follows are split so he was wavering. In the end he voted Aye. Somehow we even lost JoAn Wood who debated so eloquently against the bill in committee. We gained a no vote from Tom Trail who was a co-sponsor. People like Lyn Luker swung and stood up with concern that the bill reads that in 2014, regardless of the economic situation, the whole $120 million is due and the whole business tax comes off and shifts to the sales tax. 
    My quiet was on the surface, on the screen and the microphone. I know I did all I could, everything I possibly could. It is now up to the Senate. The Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry won’t sleep until they get every vote tied down in shiny pro-industry barbed wire. May the counties and families and schools and future budget writers tread lightly but not rest until we get a bill to fix personal property tax that does not do the harm this one does.

Ending Debate

White haired Reverend of anti-gay causes, Brian Fischer, caught up with me in the brown marble stair case last week. He wanted to tell me that he wants us to get along. I said, as long as you are pushing legislation which affects my life, that will be hard. He said he didn’t want it to be personal. I said, it’s my life, my family. That is personal.

    Oddly, Reverend Fischer nodded. When you debate him on issues he doesn’t give up. Like with me, there is no end to it with him. I guess that’s because you can’t debate different values and priorities. If one person thinks another is unworthy of rights and they see that belief as sanctioned in their religious documents, how do you debate that? You can debate whether their religion should be expressed in Idaho law, but can not really debate the belief itself. But Fischer looked up and nodded on the stairway landing below me, almost understandingly at last, and turned away.

Of Cars and Roads

Photos
House Ways and Means Committee. Rep. Ruchti presents his bill.

It felt really good to stand in the back of the room while the Flying M Six presented a state transportation funding plan to the House Ways and Means Committee this afternoon. Looking at Governor Otter’s idea of requiring a $150 across the board annual vehicle registration fee and at the other plans proposed so far, we decided there could be more equity and more account for how much impact trucks, especially heavy trucks have on roads. Six of us democrats from the house sat in the sun one afternoon early this week wit calculators, a computer and cell phones to draft a plan. A photo appears a few post back on this blog at Alternative Solutions. http://notesfromthefloor.typepad.com/notes_from_the_floor/2008/03/alternatve-solu.html
    Ways and means is an unusual committee made up of equal numbers of the house’s Democratic and Republican leadership: Reps. Jaquet, Rusche, Sayler, Moyle, Bedke and Roberts, plus the chairman Rep. Rich Wills who I know to be one of the more honorable legislators in the body, (and one of the best actors. He’s part of a theater troupe.)
    The committee heard our presentation from Rep. Philis King first. An alternative proposal for personal vehicle registrations. Our proposal is hardly Otter’s $150 and will include a hardship exemption for those who could not afford the $42 fee for an older car. Our increase at this level was less than a proposal from the committee earlier which would have made the fee $48 and would have provided no hardship exemption.
    Rep. Ruchti got up next and proposed our 38% across the board increase in heavy truck fees and ton mile calculations (no, before working on this plan I did not know what ton miles were and that they were a way of accounting for impact on roads.)
    Finally Rep. Ringo presented our proposal for a 2% sales tax on the retail price of gasoline. This was a hard decision, but to raise $100 million to address shortfalls in transportation funding without raising registration fees to $100 we had to get creative. This money, because it is not just based on the gallons of gas used, will hold revenue for roads steady, even as fuel consumption falls and prices rise.
    All three bills got unanimous votes for introduction and the dialog was friendly, with the chair expressing enthusiasm for discussing the plans and coming up with a transportation funding solution we can reach consensus on.
    Our plan included support for the bi-partisan Moving Idaho Forward local option sales tax legisation to allow local governments, with voter approval, to share in the cost of urgent local road projects and to let them construct public transportation projects such as light rail or trolleys, bus systems or other projects to reduce the need for expensive freeway and road expansions and reduce congestions on highways and roads.
    Doing this felt good. It is hard to grab time to plan, especially to address an issue that comes up in the middle of a session. In fact, in general, I don’t think legislatures plan ahead particularly well. We respond to crisis. Successfully finding elected law makers willing to spend or "invest" to avert disaster is hard. Disaster is typically more expensive than preventing the disaster. I think sometimes in conservative bodies like ours though we have to be pretty familiar with the data and projects to be ready to justify to voters why we used tax dollars for a project, especially if some might say it means "growing government," increasing regulation or raising taxes.
    Something has to be really bleeding for the Idaho legislature to raise taxes. We seem to shift taxes readily, but raising them is feared now after years of anti-tax rhetoric from within the Republican party. Yet this year you heard Republican law makers and Governor Otter talking about more than doubling major car registration fees which almost every family pays. Pavement and tail pipes, over passed and rush hour traffic is bleeding in Idaho or about to bleed.

Some Numbers

Some numbers:

  • Percent of Idaho businesses that are small businesses employing less than 50 people:  96%
  • Percent of Idaho employees working in small businesses with fewer than 100 employees:  66%
  • Percent of Idaho sales tax paid by businesses:  about 33%
  • Percent of the sales tax paid by families and individuals:  about 66%
  • Percent of the corporate and individual income tax paid by businesses:  .00015%
  • Percent paid by families and individuals:  99%
  • Cost of IACI’s HB599 tax exemption:  $120 million every year after the bill is fully phased in.
  • Where would more than 80% or $103 million of the IACI $120 million go:  To the 15% of Idaho’s largest businesses.
  • Tax exemptions these businesses already get and thus taxes they already do not have to pay on the personal property they buy:
    • –Idaho’s sales tax production exemption
    • –Investment Tax Credits
    • –179 Income Tax Deduction
  • Cost of a smaller $50,000 personal property tax exemption for all businesses:  $9  million
  • Percent of businesses which have less than $50,000 in personal property anyway :  aprox. 85%
  • Percent of all Idaho businesses that would benefit from a $50,000 exemption:  100%
  • Percent of benefit of $50,000 exemption going to small business:  44%
  • Percent of benefit of $120 million IACI proposal going to small businesses:  less than 20%
  • Estimated tax shift from businesses to families and individuals if IACI bill passes:  roughly $80 million
  • IACI proposals which included a way for business to pay for this
    tax exemption through extension of another business tax which their
    members feel would be less onerous than the personal property tax:  0

Amending the Shift

Bill
………..

Rep Bill Killen and a group of us in the House just made an attempt to amend House Bill 599, a bill which shifts $120 million in business personal property taxes onto the sales tax. The Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry (IACI), the big industry lobby and the sponsors of 599 moved the bill to the amending order to fix constitutional concerns brought up by the Attorney General. We rushed to prepare and Rep. Killen submitted amendments to the Speaker to compete with theirs.
    After some debate about which amendment would go first, the drafts were passed out by pages onto to the desks of 70 members of the house. Which amendment goes first can matter because sometimes, once one amendment passes, the other is moot. For that reason our amendment went last. Our amendment gutted their bill and replaced it with a far more simple and more equitable $50,000 personal property tax exemption for all businesses. This would cost taxpayers only $9 million in sales tax dollars rather than $120 million and would benefit small businesses most since about 80% of businesses have less than $50,000 in personal property to be taxed.
    The procedure for Amendments is quite elaborate. Normally the floor session where the 70 of us vote on bills is run by the Speaker. To amend bills the floor session is dissolved and the Majority Caucus Chair, Rep Scott Bedke, takes the podium as Chairman of "The Committee of the Whole." Rep Killen addressed the Chairman and fielded questions from all over the floor with precision and poise. We debated the shift to taxpayers, the impact to the county’s ability to borrow and the lack of guarantee that the replacement moneys will be adequate to cover county services (from hospitals to needed fire, ambulance, schools and more.)
    In the end the Chaiman for our Committee of the Whole closed debate. Normally we make a voice vote on amendments which is not recorded. Someone requested "division" which means we vote instead by standing or sitting in response to "all those in favor" and "all those opposed." I had called JoAn Wood to ask her  to second Bill’s motion to amend (this is a formality where we have a second person listed on the sheet which looks like a regular bill. In this case it was a thick packet.Lenore Barrett argued that since the amendment was longer than the original bill, everyone should vote no. An amendment often has to be longer because it includes section that have been changed or language to be eliminated.)
    When we rose for division, only Diana Thomas from Emmett stood with the six of us Democrats on the balcony. I could see Leon Smith and Jim Marriot standing downstairs but most people are not visible from upstairs. I’m sure JoAn stood.
    It is amazing the power IACI has over this place some days. I would have said their power was waning when they changed their organization to represent only the biggest businesses in Idaho. They did a lot of work on this year’s bill but we have labored to to make sure that Idahoans see the cost of this legislation and who pays that cost. They can call it apple pie and economic development but in the end  it is just a $90 million give-away to some of the biggest industry in the state, much of which is publicly traded and will go to shareholders, not to employees through the kind of trickle down IACI insists will occur. Small businesses we know would invest those dollars in wages, benefits and local expenditures which might benefit families and the economy. That can be said of many who benefit most from IACI’s bill.
    The benefit to small business is fully granted by the $50,000 exemption amendment we proposed. And our amendment would not have carried with it the $90 million tax shift that comes if the bill is passes exactly as IACI wants it to.

Madame Speaker

Madame Speaker
Retiring Rep. Margaret Henbest as acting Speaker of the House.

…………

I am a bit teary still. Long time democratic legislator for District 16, Margaret Henbest is retiring this year. She is very well known for her tireless work on health care and the House Health and Welfare Committee.
    It is a tradition of sorts that a long time legislator might have a chance, at the speaker’s consent, to serve as speaker for part of a floor session. When Margaret got up just now and the first of us had to address her as "Madame Speaker" a cheer went up. It sounded so good. Madame Speaker. May the day come and maybe should our numbers grow this year and next, just maybe that balance point in the state will be reached and maybe someday that Madame Speaker will be a woman, a democratic woman.
    I am leaving the House for the Senate so may never see that day. Seeing Margaret up there reminds me how close to the end of this session and this term we are. The board is full of bills to debate but committees are shutting down. We did not have Rev & Tax this morning but will print a few bills tomorrow. One will be mine. My technical fix to the sales tax exemption for non-profit organizations. I’ve labored over it for more than a year and may now have something that will work. The chair wouldn’t hear substantive proposals I or other democrats had, but this technical fix is probably not very threatening or likely to help me in my campaign or career so I think it escapes the political net.
    Somber times in a way. The secretary of state’s filings grow each day. Many of us will not be back. Sometimes that is healthy, sometimes we lose a unique voice or perspective common out in the voting public but not in here. I will miss Margaret. She is a strong, wise voice in the caucus, a balance to leadership sometimes much needed. I wish her well in her new adventures. 

Alternative Solutions

Alternatve Solutions
House Democrats’ "Flying M Six" (Clockwise starting at left: Shirley Ringo -Moscow, Phylis King – Boise, Bill Killen – Boise, James Ruchti – Pocatello and not pictured Sue Chew and Nicole LeFavour) gather to craft a transportation funding plan.

Trusting Government

    My partner Carol’s favorite legislator has got to be Lenore Barrett. Carol, like some Idahoans, tunes in to the IPTV webcast of House floor debate every day and plays it in the back ground as she works. If the debate sounds interesting she might even watch the video for a bit. http://www.idahoptv.org/leglive/ She always tunes in when Lenore debates. I’ve long thought Lenore could be a champion slam poet. As a former slam poet myself and one who went to the Slam Nationals in Chicago with a team of other poets from Boise a few years back, I’d know. Slam poetry is performance poetry. Some people have a style of delivery that would make the phone book sound interesting. Others just have a way with words. Yet others have a way with metaphors that makes for outrageous content. Lenore is one of those. She is legendary for the wild images she evokes in floor debate and even in committee. She’ll pencil something down, leaning back in her seat, pursing her lips and contemplating the ceiling to find the next line or rhyme.
    Today’s debate in Rev and Tax was not particularly poetic but she did make a statement that spoke volumes about our state. Lynn Tominaga was presenting a bill on irrigation water and noted that some who opposed the bill simply don’t trust the city council to decide who should be exempted from the tax we were debating. He noted further that these people just didn’t seem to trust government.
    Lenore, with her usual flair raised her hand and the Chairman, sitting next to her, leaned back and let her speak.
    "I don’t trust government either, babe," she said with some gravity. And on raged the debate about who should pay the tax and when and who should be exempted.
    Now further disclosure is probably necessary at this point. I in fact grew up in Custer County in Lenore’s home district #35. It is the largest legislative district in the state. It encompasses several wilderness areas, miles ad miles of national forest, national recreation areas, bureau of land management lands and then too, little threads of habitation along rivers and canyon bottoms and farmed valleys between the mountains. It is the home of the anti-environment and anti-government militias of the late 80s. I grew up hearing heated discussion about government and its evils when we went to gas up at the Clayton Mercantile.
    I’ve got to say that from Clayton, Idaho government sure seems far away and abstract. It might just be embodied by a property tax tax notice or the IRS. It might be a law you don’t like or a cop that gives you a speeding ticket. But as with anything we don’t know personally, the animosities sure can grow when  you don’t goverment meet face to face.
    I think about government and my own relationship to it. I worked for the forest service for 7 years outside Challis, Lenore’s hometown. I embodied government to people who saw me inspecting their outfitter camps as an intrusion into a way of life and a business they had run the same way for decades long before the area was designated wilderness. I think of my feelings toward government as a gay person and how disenfranchised I’ve felt and how disrespected and unvalued I’ve felt as I faced the hostile laws and lack of appreciation for what it is like to belong to a group of people who are sometimes killed just for who we are. What kind of government would not care? Would not do all it could to keep young people from being beaten and fired from jobs when we work so hard and just want to be left to make a living and live our lives in peace.
    Lenore’s point was about taxes. I think it cuts to the heart of it as well as anything. Do we see government as being made up of people with values like ours? Is government a vast majority which sees us as an insignificant blip on a screen? Will it look out for our unique concerns or steam roll over us without a second thought?
    Maybe it is my job as a legislator to make sure to put a face on government. We as elected officials have to do more than wait for people to contact us to say when something is wrong. By that time I think the damage is often done. It is all of our job to ensure that government is in part made up of people from diverse backgrounds who set policy having walked in the shoes of more than just a privileged few. 
    We will all trust government better if we see it as made up of people like ourselves. Helen Chenoweth was not elected on a fluke. She and Lenore Barrett represent a part of Idaho that does see black helicopters in the rain clouds and can not begin to fathom why it takes so much tax money to sustain the infrastructure of protections, facilities, services, relief and communication required to cobble together a nation like ours. We all shudder at "trust us." If we picture a faceless government above our heads, it might all seem pretty foreign to us. We might still see its interests as alien and its intentions as potentially hostile.

Spin Control

Republican leadership threw an emergency press conference Friday after passing their constitutional amendment out of committee. They claim their amendment is all about making it harder to raise taxes. They say anyone opposing it just wants to raise taxes.
     Let’s be clear, if this amendment passes it will make it harder for local people to raise their own taxes for things like public transportation which they urgently need (which typically the legislature doesn’t value and won’t fund.) Where is our faith in local people or local governments with this constitutional amendment. We are holding local governments up to a bar we do not hold ourselves to. Do we have to be elected by a 2/3 vote to vote on tax issues? Not as I recall.
     And let’s be a little more clear, House Republican leaders Mike Moyle and Ken Roberts who are quoted as caring about keeping Idahoans taxes low are the same two who are behind shifting almost $100 million in business taxes onto families and individuals by repealing the $120 million personal property tax. It should be hard to raise taxes they say? How about shifting taxes from one group of payers to another? Is that some how OK? Maybe we need to let the people of Idaho vote on that. Vote and see if they believe the idea that the benefits of the multi million tax cut for Simplot and Canadian mining companies will trickle back down to the families of Idaho who will soon pay for this huge business tax.
    Of course if we did take a vote on this one on a ballot in November it would probably end up being written so that it would sound like the Jim Risch tax shift did, like motherhood and apple pie. Like something designed to save education when it simply took locally controlled school dollars and made schools come begging to the legislature for every dime instead. It cut taxes for vacation homeowners and big business while raising the sales tax, which is mostly paid by families. Can you call that protecting tax payers from tax increases? I don’t think so.
    I’m tired. But we have many miles to go before we sleep. The session is far from over. Every one is just gearing up for elections with a fresh batch of wholesome "we are only saving you from yourselves" rhetoric. The house PR guy is running over time. It seems to be time for the spin doctors to go to work.

Constitutional Politics

Out legislative committees meet in fairly small rooms downstairs from the floor of the house here in the old Ada County Courthouse, our temporary Capitol. We sit in big chairs around folding tables with maroon skirts around them and when we vote a roll call vote the ayes and nays snake around the table and table extensions sometimes in the shape of a big "E."
    I can’t even count how many years people have been coming to the legislature with requests for authority to raise their own local sales taxes to address their own local needs. Again and again people have come to the legislature desperate for public transportation funding to address their own public transportation needs. After last year’s public transit bill came darn close to passing to the floor, some Republican leaders who oppose public transportation generally said the bill needed to include local funding for local roads as well. The now statewide coalition supporting the bill complied and changed the bill to include roads.
    Next Rep. Mike Moyle, key opponent of public transportation, then said that we needed a constitutional amendment before he would allow a public transit bill to get out of Revenue and Taxation Committee. Canyon County legislators who at some point last year had heard their constituents and agreed we needed public transit funding, today seem to have bowed down to the idea that a constitutional amendment should be passed before we address public transportation needs.
    What does this mean for any community with broken buses, bare bones service or no service at all? What happens to businesses who suffer from a lack of parking or people waking up in wee hours to commute through dense traffic? What is the consequence to the elderly and people with disabilities, to those with no alternative but to walk, beg a ride or take a cab?  Delay.
    We will wait now while the legislature debates this constitutional amendment, while it goes to the voters for likely approval. Who wouldn’t agree local people should be able to raise their own local taxes for their own local needs? A majority likely will, even statewide. But what does it gain us? Nothing. We can already let local people vote to raise their own sales tax and some communities around the state do just that for jails or for tourist services. It keeps them from having to raise property taxes and let’s local folks set priorities for what is urgently needed locally rather than waiting on the state or feds to even care. Funny though, until we pass the "Moving Idaho Forward" bill waiting hostage to this constitutional amendment, we still will not be able to fund public transportation or roads by a local option tax.
    So all this is to say that the legislature is wasting tax payers time. We are just standing in the way of the needs of many areas where people sit in long lines of cars to get to work, where smog rises and the big federal hammer of air quality "non-Attainment" is about to come down. Let’s not pretend there will be no victims to this political game. There will be. There already are.
    

Losses

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Valiview School Principal speaks with bill sponsor IACI lobbyist Alex LaBeau waiting behind him.

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Committee members hear testimony. Seats were empty as some members of Republican leadership missed hearing those who testified against the bill because of other meetings.

……………………

Just came from Revenue and Taxation committee. To me, today’s vote is one of the biggest losses of the session. (Some things I’m not conceding loss on yet.) By one vote we failed to amend the bill to shift almost $100 million in business taxes on to families and individuals. The amendment would have given a $50,000 personal property tax exemption to all businesses, a move which would eliminate all personal property taxes for more than three quarters of all small businesses. It would benefit all businesses without putting budgets, schools, and local governments at risk. This bill passed as written and so now we face the mother of all tax shifts.
    It was one of those days when I passed long notes to JoAn Wood and Lenore Barrett and spoke to Phil Hart who was supposed to speak to Dick Harwood. But we didn’t get Lenore or Dick. It was a big business vs small business day with the chamber and Alex LaBeau from the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry and the Chambers of commerce on one side and counties, some school districts and local government folks on the other.
    JoAn Wood talked about how the Chamber can’t have it both ways. They want more money for roads and they want this huge tax cut. They can’t have both yet here we are now.   

Divide and Conquer

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Not everything is digital in the House. Pages still post white numbers on a board to create the House Calendar each day. This is a pretty full board but yesterday’s was even more packed.

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Rep. Liz Chavez from Lewiston at her desk on the floor.

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Before the afternoon floor session the front row sets to work reading bills and answering e-mail.

……..

Quiet night on the floor now. We had a full calender and came back at 3 PM to do a second floor session for the day. We plowed through a lot of senate bills. Now I’m up on the balcony with fans rattling and Rep. Tom Loertcher out of sight on the phone below discussing how he feels he could pretty likely pass a bill through the house to do away with primary elections all together. "Get the government out of elections," he laughs. Sounds a little like get voters out of elections to me. But I’m biased. I like open primary elections and loved seeing all the Independents and Republicans at our Democratic caucuses this year.

Latest strategy from Committee Chairs is to hear controversial bills over two or three days. All the opposing testimony concentrated in the first day. Then all the supporting testimony (or the Chair’s preferred testimony) on the second day, right before the vote. The Business Personal Property Tax repeal today for example. Darfur Divestment in the Senate, testimony was split exactly like that.
    The Farm and Ranch protection act to save working lands from development was killed that way last week. Strong testimony from a woman who raises sheep in Canyon County the first day. Also eloquent words from a farmer from Swan Valley. He testified to the point I had tears running down my face. He talked about the loss of those working lands, the elk and bear and peasant and blowing wild grasses. His attachment to place. The dirt under his nails and his father leaving him the farm and its open beauty just as it was decades ago. What he has is now rare. Yet this land is still there, only because of the money provided by an easement he sold in promise that neither he nor any future owner would build subdivisions. It sits there in the open, below encroaching develop, off to one side as you cross the Snake River headed for the Tetons. This man spoke of his desire to see this land stay as it is until the caldera bursts open again and swallows the place. In perpetuity. We heard his testimony and then held the vote to the next day when republicans on the committee picked the bill apart and killed it.

Signals Crossed

In committee, when the vote is going to be close, we pass notes, make eye contact and try in any way we can to nail down any votes we may not have assured before committee started. Besides, after the testimony before a committee, you HOPE that legislators are listening and may be swayed one way or another by what the public has to say, if not by your brilliant debate or that of your even more brilliant colleagues.
    On votes past I’ve flashed a thumbs up and a shrug to Lenore Barrett; passed notes to Leon Smith or Mike Moyle; whispered to my democratic neighbors and counted debate, body language and anything I’ve got to work with to figure out if we have the votes for a motion or who should make the motion or even in which order the motions should be made.
    In Rev & Tax Committee this morning we had a royal break down of communication over strategies to kill what I think is a really bad bill. This bill touted itself as a growth pays for itself bill but really allowed real estate developers to place a hidden tax on homes in order to pay for roads, highway improvements, overpasses, sewer line extensions, fire houses and other city or county infrastructure that the subdivision developer might normally pay for through an impact fee. If local governments charge developers an impact fee to try to keep the cost of this new growth from shifting to existing homeowner’s property taxes, that impact fee would be included in the price of the home, easy for a home buyer to see. The bill we passed out of Rev & Tax today allowed the developer instead to hide the cost of all that city and county infrastructure in a special tax that would let the developer place a lien on the house and add more payments onto the other property taxes a homebuyer would have to pay each year.
    It is a really complex bill, full of technical issues which I’m sure we will be litigating for a decade if it passes this year. Rp Moyle and I have successfully seen it killed three years in a row now and I hope this year to be another year we protect Idaho homebuyers from this sort of developer slight of hand. Honestly anything that requires a consumer disclosure notice right in the bill is probably less than wholesome for homebuyers. Most people are not going to dream they need to look for these hidden taxes when they buy a home in a subdivision outside town.
    So what happened today? Well, we had a substitute motion (a second motion made by a committee member) to send the bill to the amending order and an "original motion" (the first motion) to "send the bill to the floor with a do pass recommendation." The motion to send the bill to the floor is the most common motion made in any committee in the statehouse. Very normal. Sending the bill to "general orders" or the amending order is less common. It usually means the bill needs a change of some kind and the whole 70 of us Representatives on the floor of the house will debate that change and vote on it.
    This bll sure needed changes. Unfortunately the amendment Rep. Jaquet proposed was pretty minor. It did partially address the sprawling leap frog development the bill would encourage but didn’t fix issues with 1) out of state developers voting to form or amend the district and raise the taxes, 2) issues with the bonding and debt or 3) issues with the disclosure notice not stating in big letters the words "special tax" or "lien" to warn homeowners in plain language about the house they were about to buy.
    So I messed up. I passed a note to Phil Hart whom I’d spoken with that morning about killing the bill. He tells me right as we enter committee that he’s voting for the amendment but doesn’t say why. I pass a note saying I think we can kill the amendment and the bill — hoping he won’t abandon me. He shrugs and smiles at me across the room. I take that to mean, OK try your strategy. Now mind you neither Wendy nor Mike Moyle has said anything to me about any stratgy around amendments. Wendy makes her substitute motion to amend the bill and debate flies. I debate against both the motion to send the bill to the floor and the one to amend it. We vote and by two votes the motion to amend fails. Next the motion to send the bill to the floor is voted on as Rep. JoAn Wood, who I was counting on to be a no, comes into committee late and pauses before she votes, visibly undecided before finally voting…… yes. The bill passes, headed to the floor where in  afew days the House will decide whether to pass it on to the Senate.
    Because I had encouraged Rep. Bill Killen who sits next to me (and is great on local government issues because he is a former Mayor and City Council member as well as an attorney) because I convinced him to vote no with me against both motions, the bill passed. No one had bothered to tell us about any strategy around amending the bill.
    Looking around the room I figured it was one of those days when word had come down from somewhere high in the Republican hierarchy saying this bill must pass and if ammended, we’ve gotten you to agree to vote yes… and so Rep. Moyle and Rep. Hart had caved in and voted to amend the bill. I should have more faith but I don’t. That stuff happens all the time. Rep. Jaquet had been seeming like she was with Rep. Ructi who was supporting the bill and she never leaned a few inches my way to explain the plan….
    All along, while I battled to get votes NOT to send the bill to the amending order I guess that Rep. Moyle was hoping to send the bill to the amending order to kill it by attaching many, many amendments until it went down under its own weight in a sea of hot, confused debate. I believe Rep. Jaquet was part of the plan. Maybe not. I know Phil Hart was but he never sent back a note say "NO! Vote yes on the amendment! We will kill the bill on the amending order!"
    Note to my colleagues in diverse bipartisan coalitions designed to kill bills we agree are bad: If there is a plan, share it!

Race in Debate

If you watch our House floor session each morning at from about 10 AM to noon on line or on public TV, you might have watched some pretty disturbing debate on the grocery tax on Thursday. The 70 of us debated a bill to offer a $30 rebate on your income tax which would climb each year by $10 until it reaches $100. It was one of those moments at which I cringed to be debating along side some of my colleagues on an issue I opposed for completely different reasons.
    Phil Hart was debating against the bill and began by expressing concerns about how people, especially low income people would spend the rebate, which would be as much as $50 even the first year if your income were low enough. He went on for some time about "illegal aliens" and must have said that phrase literally 15 times in only a few minutes. It seems that the proponents of the credit didn’t want to take the tax off food because illegal aliens and tourists in Sun Valley might benefit from the tax cut.
    I am supposing some think it doesn’t get any scarier to Republican law makers than to contemplate a few women in furs and Lycra and some unfortunate person whose visa has expired while her husband’s has not and she chooses to stay in Idaho rather than leaving the kids. Phil did not dwell on the tourists, only those whose "illegal culture" means they have a lot of kids.
    Phil mentioned some odd statistic about how people spent relief money from Katrina. It wasn’t flattering either and I’m guessing was only part of the real story, omitting the people who paid for caskets and house repairs, clothes to replace molded ones soaked in sewage and long gone. I wondered if Phil would ever feel comfortable if people analyzed how he spent his money. I listened and he went on.
     Next he talked about Idaho’s tribes and I cannot for the life of me remember how they were connected because I was on my phone to our Democratic Minority Leader Wendy Jaquet downstairs telling her I was going to stand up and object. She said she’d do it. And so the debate came back to food tax rebates.
    I know well that not every undocumented immigrant in Idaho is Latino and not every person living in New Orleans is black.  Still, later I found Phil at the shooting range and with a smile and pointed humor, gave him a big whack on the arm, explaining that using negative examples ranging from undocumented immigrants to Katrina to Idaho’s tribes was debate chock full of pretty dreadful racist innuendo. He said we all see things from different points of view. I agreed. He smiled sheepishly and said he didn’t mean it. I actually believe he didn’t. I also expect he might be more thoughful next time. 

Running For Senate

PRESS RELEASE     March 8th 2008     Information: Nicole LeFavour 724-0468

LEFAVOUR TO RUN FOR STATE SENATE

Following Senator Mike Burkett’s announcement that he will be retiring as State Senator from District 19, Representative Nicole LeFavour announced Saturday her intent to run for Legislative District 19’s State Senate seat.

LeFavour was elected in 2004 and has served two terms in the district. She has been a visible member of the House Revenue and Taxation committee where she has led efforts to stop shifts in taxation from Idaho’s largest businesses to Idaho families and small businesses. She has also worked for greater tax accountability for economic development incentives to ensure that Idaho does not give away tax dollars to corporations without some guarantee of state economic gain from strong jobs with good wages and health care benefits.

An educator who for seven years taught writing to at risk sixth graders and teens in Boise public schools, in 2007 LeFavour successfully led efforts to pass legislation offering teen mental health and substance abuse specialist to Idaho’s rural high schools and Jr. highs to help parents address teen suicide, alcohol use, depression, addiction and other urgent issues faced by Idaho teens.

In 2005, in LeFavour’s first term in the legislature, she was a key member of a small bipartisan group which, after almost a decade of previous efforts, successfully passed legislation which included mental heath coverage in health care coverage for State Employees. The 2005 mental health parity bill created a pilot project to look at the cost and benefits of requiring Mental Health coverage as part of health insurance statewide. In 2008 she received Idaho State Planning Council on Mental Health legislative leader award in recognition of her work on mental health issues, including her work as part of Governor Kempthorn’s Transformational Working Group on Mental Health in 2006.

LeFavour is well known for her work on prison sentencing issues and her role on the Judiciary and Rules committee where this year she led a bi partisan group of moderate and conservative legislators in efforts to address public safety and prison over crowding by creating a treatment focused alternative to mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

LeFavour has also worked this session with Senator David Langhorst to try to introduce legislative revisions of Idaho’s land use planning act to improve Idaho’s impact fee statutes to lower property taxes by making it easier for local governments to make growth pay for itself.

LeFavour’s long history of Human Rights work in the legislature included co-sponsorship of legislation affecting people with disabilities; efforts at requiring Idaho’s Public Employee Retriremnt System to divest from Darfur; and this year’s introduction of legislation to add gays and lesbians to Idaho’s Human Rights act provisions to end discrimination in employment, housing and education.  LeFavour also serves as a member of the Commission on Hispanic Affairs and has been an out spoken advocate for respect for Idaho’s Latino and Hispanic community.

In 2006 LeFavour was chosen, with 50 other legislators across the nation to attend the University of Virginia’s Darden Emerging Leaders program.

Said LeFavour Saturday, "I will be sad to leave behind so many friends in the House. It is an intense place where we bond often while looking for lighter moments; across party lines, ages and ideologies. But I will say that I look forward to new experiences and to joining some close friends and frequent co-sponsors from both parties in the Senate. In the House I leave behind much work I have begun with members of three fantastic committees. I will especially miss the Revenue and Taxation Committee because I feel that the work there is so vital to ensuring fairness in the lives of Idaho families. My colleagues know me and know I will be hard at it, continuing to work with Republican and Democratic Senators to make positive improvements to legislation affecting the taxes paid by middle class people and small businesses all across Idaho."

Shooting Guns

Shooting Guns

We get invited to a lot of events with different organizations working on creative ways to get us to show up after a long day in the statehouse so they can share their ideas on issues we face. Some events are participatory but most are not, unless you count the eating. Legislators do a lot of eating at evening events.

Some involve long power point presentations. This one was by far the best in a long time. It is a sunny afternoon in the Boise Foothills and after some safety instruction, officer’s from the Fraternal Order of Police let us shoot their hand guns at the Fort Boise range. K9 and bomb squad units demonstrate skills, tools, weapons and training. Above: Rep. Phil Hart fires.

Shooting Guns

Rep. Raul Labrador decked out for SWAT

Shooting Guns

Mom’s insistence that I learn how to shoot a gun at a young age comes in handy. Odd feeling but somehow I shoot a whole round into the head of my target.

Shooting Guns

Rep. Branden Durst uses his expert verbal and shooting skills in a lethal force simulation. He credits the shooting skills to video games.

……..

Earlier, Rep. Mack Shirley, Rep. Russ Mathiews and a group of House pages and I stood in a big circle in the annex out side the tiny page room where pages spend parts of the day waiting for directions and requests for assistance. We talked about guns and the second amendment
    On such a polarizing issue I’ve found that pacing oneself, taking deep breaths or using humor is helpful. We talked about how much control a student gun owner has over their guns, especially on campus. Humor was not going to be helpful. And as Mack pointed out, with the obligation of administrators to protect all students, how can they do that if they can not ensure guns are under lock and key?    
    Pages views were mixed and thoughtful. This is our second round of pages for the year. I imagine that watching all the debate in committee, especially now that its so heated, some must at times just wish they could jump in. I remember years past interns testifying at hearings, very powerfully in fact. Pages though, I wonder if it is part of the rules for them to be silent.

Ticking Clock

The session is ticking. The clock on the wall above the Speaker’s head whispers the two Latin words we simultaneously dread and welcome: "sine die." End of session. End of chances to get our bills heard. Time when all rushes, rules fly out the windows, heat on, tempers hot, phones ringing.
    Now we all just feel it coming. Out of committees onto the overflowing calendar suddenly flow the toughest, most controversial proposals. These are not partisan bills necessarily but those which divide parties and constituencies and interests, divide communities, professions, classes and families.
How to tax.
Who to tax.
Who not to tax.
Who to license.
Who to regulate.
How much to regulate.
How much to pollute.
How much to prevent.
How to manage the many crises we’ve let accumulate.
And all this in the context of elections. Some live in fear, asking, "What could they say about me with this vote?" Some try to fit votes into frames of values and principles. Some don’t even try, especially now. Some pull out calculators. Some go with gut. Some count calls and letters. Some call home.
The printer on the second floor shovels out paper, printing out vote tallies destined for use in elections. And it all spins on faster and faster rolling downhill now toward the end.