Notes From the Floor

Bad Mussels & Betsy’s Ugly Tie

Today on our first bill we had a long delay on the pea and lentil
commission while several members of Republican leadership slowed things
down so Senator Cameron could get back to the floor to vote. Senator Davis described how much Senator Cameron appreciated peas and lentils and the lentil commission. Senator
Stegner extolled the virtues of lentils, their fiber and flavor and
protein. The delay was effective enough to get Senator Cameron on
record as voting Aye with the rest of us.

We met early today at 9:30 and so blazed through many bills. Two I was
the floor sponsor for, meaning I was assigned or offered to take the
bill in committee and to present and argue for it to the full Senate. I also asked questions about the $5 Kayak/Rubber Raft Mussel Tax bill
as well. I wish I had voted no. Someone voted no. I don't know who. I
know that the mussels are a threat and that rubber rafts COULD
conceivably carry the young mussels, but it is hugely unlikely,
especially as I remembered how few boats ever leave the state to be
infested where the dangerous invasive mussels actually live. I voted
yes, tugged along in the long roll of yes votes.

The bill was not an ideal solution for raising money to pay for
education, enforcement and inspections of the motorized boats that
are most likely to carry mussels. However Betsy Russell has donned an ugly tie, so the end is near and I suspect we are
getting to the point where more and more imperfect legislation will be
set before us, rushed with the force of time and the daily cost of our
staying here in this building. What $30,000 a day did I recall?

Breaking Our Schools

I'm trying to understand the ideal school in the mind of Tom Luna, Butch Otter, John Goedde or Bob Nonini. These men are the four most powerful education policy makers in the state of Idaho, none have ever been public school teachers and I'm pretty sure that at least four of them don't even believe in traditional public schools. But what they believe we should have instead of our current system of free public education mystifies me.

Tom Luna has advocated for vouchers so that more kids can attend private schools. He must feel private schools do a good job. I've taught in private schools and public schools. I can tell you a key difference. Some of the best private schools in the state tend to have far smaller class sizes and more money for field trips and travel to ensure kids get hands-on experience so that they can finally figure out how all those words in their text books apply to the real world. Yet here we are this year with proposals that specifically cut field trips out of public school budgets and slash funding so far that many districts, already struggling, will have no choice but to lay teachers off and increase class sizes just to keep the lights on and the buses running.

This morning we met in the attic again before JFAC. The staff passed around color coded packets of paper representing three different proposals for funding public schools. There was the depressing-enough pink proposal from Democrats Wendy Jaquet and Shirley Ringo, who tried to do as little damage as possible given the budget situation. Then there was the "wisteria" purple proposal which tried to make a 5% personnel cost reduction for schools on top of stealing an extra $20 million in state dollars to use for other projects besides education. A yellow (code name "daisy") packet was supposed to represent the compromise which in itself was a grim mimic of Tom Luna's budget proposals including a two year phase out of early retirement and a massive cut in transportation for Boise schools.

There was no winning with this budget and this set of motions. But the votes fell entirely on party lines. Republicans had made a back room deal to actually put forward only one set of motions, including stealing the extra $20 million from schools to use on other projects, and failing to challenge Governor Otter on the $44 million in discretionary stimulus funds he wants to spend on roads and sewers. When the 4 to 16 votes were all called, it was clear that our current education leaders have a very sinister plan for our schools.

John Goedde has been recorded as saying, in essence, that public schools have failed. Bob Nonini has put forward some of the most anti-teacher, anti-public school legislation our state has seen. Butch Otter is sitting on $44 million in stimulus he could use to keep schools from laying off teachers and dooming kids to classrooms stuffed to the gills, frustrated and clamoring for help from single exhausted teacher. But he won't.

If there were ever an argument for saying that Republicans are not fit to lead our state on education, this year is it. After a decade of living so close to the bone that there is nothing left to cut, these cuts we are making this year could really leave a generation forever set back in its progress toward learning, its skills and enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge, its access to teachers who value what they do for work and, for decades, have given everything they've got to make sure kids learn in spite of the condition of our schools. This year, with the incredibly ugly set of priorities our four Republican education leaders have displayed, I can only believe they hope to finally once and for all break our public schools.

Bad Motions

I got in trouble for wearing a band aid on my forehead
yesterday during floor debate. Perhaps it was recognized as political statement
on behalf of fellow teachers rather than as a real sterile dressing designed to
protect a wound.

Today we came to the attic of the old courthouse where the
Joint Finance Committee meets at 7 am on budget setting mornings. We gather with
coffee or orange juice around several big folding tables where the heat rises. Typically
we share our “motions” or give each other a bit of fair warning as to where
each of us proposes that a budget should be set. How many employees will we
give an agency? How much for rent and utilities? Any replacement items, new computers,
cars, servers? And what money are we cutting? Where will funds they do get come
from? From the federal government, a dedicated fee, a grant or from the big $2.4
billion state tax bucket called the general fund?

This morning we had to make a decision we have been putting
off while the world adjusted to what the more than one billion in stimulus
funding will mean. We had to decide how much to cut state employee pay. There
were seven motions or proposals. In the heat of the attic in this big old
cement and stone building anything seemed possible. As we passed out the motion
sheets in that room that used to be part of the county jail, the options seemed
to contract.

By the time we got to our committee room in front of the
cameras our choices were down to three. Three bad motions made on the table in that
comparatively cold and empty room. All three motions proposed to cut state
employee costs by 5%. The worst one of these passed. It cut every state employee’s
pay by 3% and then mandated 2% more in employee cost be cut through furloughs,
keeping positions vacant and if necessary through layoffs.

The House members were lock step for this motion and its 3%
salary reduction and 5% net cut in personnel funding. Why in any rational way they
would want that, I do not know. We could have given more room for agencies to
use furloughs more or vacant positions. We could have used dedicated funds or stimulus
funds to keep it at 4% or even 3% total personnel cuts. But leadership in the
House has been twisting arms for weeks. I’m not sure what any state employee
ever did to them or if it is just that those particular Republican leaders need
to keep hating government, even when government is our tax dollars, people’s
jobs, people’s lives.

So I feel awful. I tried to make a motion that was only so
slightly better than the motion that we did pass. It was a band-aid for a
gaping wound.  Our Democratic votes are
band-aids on gaping wounds in a state government run by people too often angry
at living in a nation increasingly blue and progressive. We serve here at the mercy
of a political party increasingly hateful toward cities, astoundingly favorable
to big industry tax breaks and deregulation at the expense of the families,
farms and small businesses upon which our economy and unique existence as a
state depends.

Some days, while I love my colleagues as individuals, the
politics get so sad and ugly that I feel like a twig in a big red river flowing
ever more quickly toward the edge of the earth.

Role of Government

One of the pages is playing the bag pipes. Legislators are clapping and foot tapping outside the Senate chambers. Many JFAC Senate members have been up with budget staff trying to understand how we ended up with a 5% state employee reduction after all the work we have done to blend stimulus dollars into the budget and keep us from laying off people state wide. But the governor seems to be saying that since so many state workers are in Boise, he'd rather spend the money on highways. The House leadership has buckled down on their members to try to cut deeper into all parts of what the state does. The old starve the beast mentality, as if childhood health care, teachers in class rooms and people making sure that our drinking water does not get contaminated are some evil entity because they are paid for with tax dollars. This is the work of the state which we as tax payers pay our taxes for. We expect this of state government because we don't want a country in which the very wealthy get the kobe beef education, water and health care and the rest of us get the grizzled, greasy, big mac patty version. We know our state and nation are stronger if our people are well educated and have the skills they need to use their ingenuity to advance our economy and care for their families. We know crisis is expensive, that letting something simple go untreated because you can't afford care, means more cost for government and taxpayers down the line.

So we clap and the bag pipes play while the battles go on behind the scenes.

What is the role of government? How much can we cut before efficiency becomes inadequacy? How much costly crisis do we create when we underfund basic essentials and when let class sizes grow?

Bicycles on Highways

Pleeeeez Mr. Hammond and Mr. Governor, do you really think that all the people forced to ride bicycles because they can't afford or can't drive a car live in the North End? What do you think people in Middleton or Shoshone or Post Falls do when they don't have the money for gas or car repairs? Does it really help these people that you still propose to raise registration fees to as much as $120 after spending every penny of the stimulus you can, borrowing hundreds of millions through GARVEE and raising gas taxes to build more roads.

Mr. Governor your people talk about bike lanes like they are a luxury item. Have you ever tried to ride to work on a rural highway, especially one where the transportation department has eliminated bike lanes and further narrowed shoulders at your request. I grew up in Custer County and I am not talking about he North End of Boise, I am talking about trying to figure out how Idahoans get to work when they don't have a working car.

It might be OK if you'd dedicated some funding to making sure there was some bus or van or some public transit in every community, but you and people like Mike Moyle say public transit doesn't work. What do you mean? Doesn't work for you because you can't imagine leaving the comfort of your giant new pick up truck to ride a bus? What if you had no choice?

What choices to Idahoans have left? Walk, bike, hitch hike? What about kids in rural communities? They walk and bike along state highways everyday. Are bike paths a luxury for them? How many kids and adults in Idaho die on highways every year because they have no safe place to walk or ride? I  bet someone knows.

All for Roads and Roads for All

Headed into the Joint Finance Committee where arms have been twisted so the Governor can cut State Employee funding by 5%. Every dollar he can funnel into the world of concrete and asphalt is going there. As if the road construction industry's boom alone will revive the economy while we lay off state workers, make them take deep furloughs, cut teachers and teacher's aids, grow class sizes and weaken our ability as a state to serve people when they need it most. An economy needs small businesses and I'm wondering where we are working to help them. Little home energy efficiency companies, tech companies who scan documents and do data entry will boom, but not because Governor Otter wanted them to. The strings in the stimulus are accountability measures. Congress tried to make us prepare a bit to avert an energy crisis, be more efficient and independent finally as a nation in healthcare and energy. But this governor wants to tax us more for roads, borrow more for roads, spend all the stimulus he can on roads while his Superindendent of Public Instruction cuts deeper and deeper into Schools with every passing day.

Economic Quandaries

The Senate chamber is empty but for Senator Dick Sagness next to me
and the voice of secretaries in the back rooms. Outside, spring froze
and is again thawing.

It is Friday. The place emptied early.
JFAC this morning was about the economy. How can anything not be. Or
maybe for sanity we should all find something that is not. It is an
oppressive force in here but more so as people around the state try to
plan for next month or next year.

There is a danger in that
hesitancy to plan. If we are employed and so save our wages and pay off
debt, the businesses around us suffer. We don't go down to Jim's
appliances to replace the refrigerator that is turning the milk sour,
or decide to suffer with the clothes dryer that takes four hours to dry
a pair of jeans. We wait, not knowing if we will have a job to pay off
that credit card bill.

But in the long run, our savings, or more
critically our lack of credit card debt, makes our families more
stable. We pay less in interest and fees. This is very hard on Jim's
Appliances. But if it and other businesses do OK with the help of those
who are still spending, if the employed go to local shops where their
dollars circulate better in the local economy, then when the clouds
break a bit and we breathe again, less debt hanging over us, a bit of
saving to buy that refrigerator with, the economy will rise with all
that "pent up demand." We will all benefit as families across the
nation end all that "waiting as long as we possibly can to buy what we
really need to buy."

For those traditional economists who say we
need to personally borrow more so we can spend more now. I say that
will only perpetuate a problem at the root of our economic woes.
Americans are smarter than that. We recognize that we can't keep
running up personal debt at this rate and not fall off an edge some
day. The minimum wage can not stay as out of whack with the cost of
living as it has been.

Yes, millions are without jobs, hanging
on by that thread of little unemployment checks. They may be lucky to
pay for food and rent and doctor bills, and are not going to be the
ones buying new refrigerators or saving money. But roughly ninety
percent of American workers still have jobs. We will make this economy
suffer while we save and pay down debts, but when we are ready, this
revived middle class may again become a middle class that sets to work
to fill and even create new jobs in manufacturing, energy efficiency
and alternative power generation.

I sit at my desk in the empty
Senate and I know this is an economic quandary of epic magnitude. Who
will suffer and pay for the rearrangement of our economy? Will it be
families spurred simply to borrow more to buy more things? Or will it
be the box stores and restaurant chains we abandon for corner groceries
and little diners? The banks and mortgage brokers? Importers of foreign
made goods? The credit card companies? Someone will pay. Things will
change. If our determination is to hunker down and support the little
shops and growers and appliance stores right around us, then local
places may not be the ones to go under. We may see a trend away from
generic downtowns where the food and shopping is so nearly identical
that one might be in New York, LA, San Francisco, Boise or Chicago and
not even know it. We may see the rebirth of an era where cities have
character and people take pride in what local people make and sell.

That could happen. But it depends on what we do.

Regardless,
huge things are happening around us. Banks may go under. More stocks
could fall to nothing. But eventually we all do have to replace the hot
water heater, the furnace or the car. If we save or at least owe less,
we may feel we can do more than that. Maybe we will even save enough to
put dollars back into banks, some will start new businesses. The ground
will thaw. As a nation we have huge resources, huge ingenuity. Millions
work very hard and if we pay them enough to live on and ensure they
don't fall behind every time they need a doctor; if we take the weight
of providing health insurance off the shoulders of business and
families, we will endure. I'd place a bet even, that if we do these
things, pay off some personal debt, buy more locally, fix our health
care system, invest as a nation in manufacturing and energy, we will
thrive.

Crazy Highways

Here's what's crazy: By my best reckoning Idaho is getting over $15
million it could have spent on public transportation statewide. It can
only buy infrastructure with this money, nothing but buses, bus stops,
material stuff like that. No drivers, no gas, no operating costs to pay
drivers to make the buses go anywhere if we buy them.

At the same
time the Speaker of the House (I'm sure with a bit of strategic help
from Mike Moyle and his leadership team because Lawence Denny is the
man, but he is not the arm twisting type) the Speaker has said no
hearing on any local option authority legislation. No hearing to let
voters in local communities around the state decide if they would like
to tax themselves to fund something urgent that we as a state
legislature just won't give them money for.

The most glaring
example would be public transportation. No state dollars go there. No
local funding source exists because local governments are not allowed
to ask voters what they want to fund and how they want to fund it. The
state dictates that. So since Mike Moyle, a single man from Star,
elected to a powerful position by an increasingly conservative
Republican caucus, since he is still not a fan of public
transportation, the entire state has no way of funding public
transportation operations.

So, no matter how long the people of
Nampa wait in traffic, no matter how long it takes some days to get
from Boise to Star or Eagle, if we have no money to operate a bus with
fuel and a driver, we can not use the stimulus to solve the problem of
Nampa to Boise buses running at capacity, or a bus system so poor it
does not even run after dark, in early mornings or on weekends. Who can
depend on a system like that? Who can afford to miss the bus to work or
a job interview when the next one does not come for an hour or so?

So,
instead of using the stimulus to allow little cities around Idaho to
fund new van pools or real bus systems; instead of putting more buses
on that corridor between Ada and Canyon counties we will instead replace
old buses and then go on as we were, infinitely widening freeways and
overpasses between Nampa and Boise. We will spend billions on that
stretch of highway because a few powerful people don't personally like
or believe in public transit. We will waste millions infinitely and
futally trying to unclogg a clogged stretch of freeway, money that
could be spent to fix rural roads from Soda Springs to Sandpoint.

I would think my rural colleagues would be more annoyed about that.

Gifts and Promises

Last week the Potato Commission sent a box of potatoes to the House
and Senate for each of us. A Technical training center from Cassia
County gave us a beautiful laser- and
router-carved wooden paper weight with our names carved into the side
and an Idaho Quarter set in the top. At a lunch for the anniversary of
the Idaho National Lab we were given a thumb drive and sticky note
holder along with a mini nuclear waste barrel that functions as a
squishy stress reliever/forearm exerciser.

We
get gifts as legislators. I usually feel funny enough about them or the
expectation of a promise or vote that I give them away to interns or
statehouse staff. We did vote last week to pass a memorial commending
the Idaho National Lab on its anniversary. I voted for it because it
seemed to reflect the lab in a genuine rather than a wishful way. It
was a good memorial. I'd vote for it even if I'd not been offered the
nuclear waste barrel/stress reliever/forearm exerciser gift.

The
anniversary lunch where we got the Lab's gifts was a blur of slides and
very brief admirals and contractors speaking in front of a big back
curtain. Normally these folks at the INL focus public presentations on
the great promise of Nuclear Power and their mission to build the next
generation of nuclear power plants. Anymore they seem to go to great
lengths to avoid talking about all the radioactive waste buried and
stored out there in the desert of South Eastern Idaho.

But at
lunch, in celebrating that nuclear reactor technology was first tested
and developed here in Idaho, celebrating our role in nuclear weapons
production and nuclear waste storage, the lab did focus on waste and on
the thousands of people who have labored for decades under often
dangerous conditions to try and clean up what is one of the largest
nuclear waste dumps in the nation.

I've met many people who
worked out there at "the site" over the years. Most recently a fire
fighter who I worry about after having heard what he has breathed and
how he no longer fears that odd feeling of heat and gamma rays
radiating off of spent fuel and high level waste.

I will be a
big proponent of nuclear power when we do finally solve the issue of
waste. We will need to figure out how to neutralize it, not just
recycle part of it. We can't keep leaving the most highly radioactive
remains to burn somewhere in a mountain or building or pool of water
for decades, centuries or millennia. I hope our government continues to
invest money in solving the puzzle of how to render radioactive
materials harmless. I even hope our lab gets that job and does it well.

But
to talk of building new nuclear power plants before that task is done
is beyond my comprehension. To talk about how this energy is clean or
carbon free when in truth it is mined, refined, processed, transported,
reprocessed, stored, cooled, monitored, repackaged and labored-over
using decades of fossil fuels, that makes no sense. We still have no
idea what to do besides piling more radioactive waste next to every
nuclear power plant we build in every city or town from New York to
California. To revive the industry means billion in profits for a few
and a gift of consequences for the rest of us.

Nuclear waste is a
gift our state still keeps getting. Most Idahoans don't know it but the
nuclear navy's nuclear submarines still send all their radioactive
"spent fuel" waste here to Idaho. Dangerous materials so radioactively
hot that they are literally deadly to behold. Three Mile Island has
waste buried out there in the soil over our aquifer. Decades of taking
other state's nuclear weapons waste have left the soil so hot in places
that even now it catches on fire sometimes. Workers in big tents use
robots and cranes to dig it up out of the soil and put it in barrels to
become New Mexico's problem.

If we want more gifts, we will
believe the industry when they promise us it is a clean and safe form
of energy now. They say they have solved the issue of the waste by
recycling part of it. But ask them where it all goes. All of it. Ask
what precisely we are left with afterward and is this something Idaho
wants or is it something we're hoping someday to pass guiltily on to
some other state or community with our own hollow promises and wishful
thinking.

That's another gift I will decline. I will leave that
one, like I left the mini squishy stress reliever/nuclear waste barrel
on the INL luncheon table.