Week Eight | Idaho Legislative Update

February 27 - March 3, 2023

The eighth week of the Sixty-Seventh Idaho Legislature’s First Regular Session was full of long committee hearings debating numerous complex issues. Many bills failed to move forward from committees after hours of hearings and testimony. Yet some bills, including those directly contradicting current law, continued moving forward as political litmus tests. These bills are nothing new, but they drain precious time and resources and slow the big-ticket items and good policies working through the process. We will see floor sessions grow longer and more contentious in the next few weeks. With legislators introducing several bills again this week, committee hearings will also become strained and more controversial. Beware the Ides of March, indeed.

The House and Senate continue working through their floor calendars to meet their March 6th transmittal deadline. The House has started to meet twice a day to debate bills to send to the Senate, but the Senate has seemed to rack up a laundry list of bills that still need to go through the process in the House. This logjam is partly due to the Senate spending time amending bills and partly due to the Senate’s traditional slow and deliberate nature.

The Senate Floor saw their first long and highly continuous bill this session; SB 1038 - Education Savings Accounts (ESA) was taken up on Monday, leading to a nearly two-hour debate. The bill failed on the Senate floor with a 12-23 vote. Many other versions of this concept worked through the legislature this year. Still, the supporters are not aligned on how to achieve success for this policy this year, and the savvy groups working to oppose the bills were quick to show constitutional and budgeting issues that were insurmountable.

The House Revenue and Taxation Committee began to hear and introduce more contentious bills this week. Many were dealing with urban renewal, impact fees, and property tax. Bills that haven't progressed through this committee this session are due to undue burden or adverse consequences on local jurisdictions that were deliberate at worst or not thought through at least.

Many ideas and potential legislation are still in the works to move forward in the coming weeks. We strive to be ahead of the curve to know what these bills do, who they may impact, and how we can help be effective stakeholders in the negotiations. We have yet to see movement in the Senate on HB 24 – Idaho Launch Program, but we anticipate it will get a hearing early next week and move forward to the Senate floor for final consideration. We have heard rumors of a trailer bill to amend it after passage but have not yet seen it.

JFAC continues working through all agency budgets, asking many questions about increases and changes. As committee members feel the full weight of the budget process and fatigue sets in, budgets are still being held hostage by the Committee Co-Chairs. Despite the log jam on voting being behind us, and agencies getting their base budget requests, the cash transfers for big-ticket items remain pulled from all budgets and held for future negotiations.

JFAC deliberated on Commerce, IT services, Transportation, Lands, and Health and Welfare budgets and supplementals this week, each of which passed out of committee after some fanfare. But the glaring absence of the large budget items for water, roads, bridges, parks, and other programs is causing consternation about those line items being leveraged by legislators for tax cuts or other political gains at the expense of strategic one-time investments throughout our state. Numerous adjustments to budget adjustments have occurred, and with the budget-setting schedule consistently changing, everyone is staying on high alert.

To see progress on bills, budgets, and rules we are monitoring on our Bill Tracker.