BOISE, Idaho — After beginning the session with new budgeting procedures, a sudden change was made on Friday, Feb. 2, in the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee. A group of lawmakers brought budgets using the former process after the "skeleton budgets" brought frustration.
“It was a process vote. That's what it really was because we were doing one type of work here and they were going a totally different direction,” said JFAC Co-Chair Senator Scott Grow.
JFAC Co-Chairs Rep. Wendy Horman and Senator Grow now have a new challenge to navigate, budgets created with two different processes.
“There's uncertainty and people are uncomfortable with that. They're comfortable with the way it's happened previously. They know how that works, and I'm not quite sure how this one is working. And so it gets a little disconcerted and they start to kind of pull back a little bit,” Grow said.
Senator Janie Ward-Engelking, along with 11 other lawmakers, brought new budgets to the committee out of concern about the new process.
“Some of us made sure that we took our names off the other budgets. And we've recreated what we believe are truly maintenance budgets,” Ward-Engelking said.
Senator Ward-Engelking said it comes down to things missing from budgets that she and others believed should be in a “maintenance” budget.
“We'd been working all week on them. Nobody was surprised that we were bringing ultra alternative budgets. I think they were surprised that we put everything in the budget that needed to be there for maintenance,” Ward-Engelking said.
JFAC member Senator Scott Herndon supports the new process.
“Unbeknownst to some of us, there was a group that decided they wanted to go back to last year's budgeting method, and the rest of us figured that out pretty quickly,” Herndon said.
Senator Herndon believes the new process digs deeper into budgets. He claims with the new process they are able to review 81% of the total budget vs 19%.
"This new method would allow us in the interim, between sessions, to dive down into the base budgets to really keep these two pieces separate. What I say is that I'm now able to vote in support of the Idaho State Police, for example, but maybe I don't want to buy their new helicopter, which would be the line item. Now, I can have two different votes on those two different issues,” Herndon said.
There is a question out there: What if lawmakers pass maintenance budgets and then simply don’t come back to add supplemental funding, short-changing agencies and programs? JFAC Co-Chairs said that isn’t the end game.
“First, the law requires that we consider all the agency requests and the governor's requests. We will go through this early and consider everything by law that we're required to do," Senator Grow said.
Rep. Horman said they followed and said, “I think they haven't looked at our calendar. They haven't looked at what we've scheduled to do. It's on schedule. We intend to evaluate all of those as we have in the past."
The budgeting conversation is complex and will need to be addressed soon. Lawmakers are expected to take up the topic, directly or via budget votes, early on Wednesday, Feb. 7.
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