Notes From the Floor

Killing Things

My parents hunted, both of them, birds, deer, elk, rabbits. I had rabbit pelts in my doll house as a child. I still have one of those pelts at home, a bit worse for wear. When they shot game, my parents used as much of the animals as they could, not just the meat but there was something reverent about how they contemplated what would be useful.

Tuesday the Senate passed a bill changing what we define as waste. We loosened the idea of what it means to waste an animal you have hunted and killed. In another bill we allowed out of state hunters to get bonus permission to kill wolves if they do not kill an elk or deer. This is not an animal they will eat or even necessarily be able to take home as a trophy on the plane, but an animal they can legally kill and leave dead where it fell.

A few weeks ago we changed the law as to how we decide what constitutes humane killing of chickens and livestock. A panel of representatives mostly from the livestock industry will soon decide.

I debate how to respectfully say that we seem to have lost our reverence for those things we kill to feed ourselves. Personally I am not one who would ever kill an animal for amusement, for sport. I have killed animals for mercy and would hunt for food. I wonder is there no balance where we admire the beauty of and life of an animal? Its role in relation to the plants and animals around it?

I wonder about all those carcases out there. Does someone take a photo with the dead wolf, the mountain lion or the bear? Cut off a part as a souvenir? Or with an elk or deer do people just walk away from all parts but the now lawfully designated edible portions? At least the eating of an animal is personal and thus somehow reverent. It does not get much more personal than that.

I know the wild has an astounding capacity to absorb the dead. Creatures large and small dissemble carcases. Bugs and birds spread what is left far and wide, until all that remains is a hard, white shadow, the bones.

Freeing Us From Healthcare

I'm sitting down in my office in the speckled light of the disco ball.

Upstairs we just debated and then passed roughly 11 to 23 the "Idaho Health Freedom Act."

As families around the state pencil out wages and insurance costs, as they stress over whether they can still afford rising health premiums or risk shrinking coverage and care, we passed a bill that danced completely around the issue of health and whether people are able to afford it anymore. We debated for over an hour but the words are all air. We too danced in our political factions like John Travolta spinning in his white suit on that 70s disco dance floor.

While today small business owners sat down with employees to apologize for canceling health plans they could no longer afford, the Idaho legislature, an entity that refuses to regulate Idaho insurers except in the most minimal of ways, talked about freedom from government imposition, freedom from mandates. The Commerce Committee which supposedly regulates private insurance repeats its motto each week like a theme song "We don't do mandates. We don't do them at all." That means we won't tell insurers to stop denying treatment for certain illnesses; we won't tell them to stop refusing to replace a child's prosthetic legs; to stop refusing to cover an oral chemo therapy drug while covering that same drug if its given intravenously; we won't tell them to stop refusing to insure people with pre-existing conditions; to stop denying claims as a first resort, paying them only if the insured person has read enough fine print to know they have a right to appeal or challenge the company and its endless dancing army of lawyers.

While people all across the state chose today between paying the cost of their medications and paying for food, heat, or rent, we the Idaho legislature talked about liberty and justice and how liberty is less regulation not more — even if having to choose food over a heart medication is not liberty or justice at all.

Today we ignored the fact that it is the weight of paying for care for those who can not afford insurance or care that has caused health costs to rise.

Today we seemed to declare we have no responsibility at all to protect the people of Idaho from the giant and powerful insurance companies we have created in our vacuum of alternatives. But is it really freedom to offer no choice to the average American family except 1) pay hundreds of dollars a month for private insurance or 2) take full fiscal responsibility for the entire cost of any cancer, accident, illness or chronic condition someone in your family may face? What if people would prefer to buy into medicaid or medicare? What if they would prefer something besides private insurance just to give themselves some certainty that what they think is covered will be covered — some certainty that after paying for decades into an insurance plan that they will not lose everything anyway when they or someone they love gets sick, really sick.Where is the freedom there?

Is this the best we can offer as a state? Declare our sovereignty and do nothing more?

No it seems we won't solve this crisis for tens of thousands of Idahoans. We will just put on our shiny pointy shoes and dance around it trying to make people more afraid of change and of the federal government than they are of the uncertainty of what lies ahead in our current broken system where anything can happen anytime and you have no choice at all but to hope you are one of the lucky ones who doesn't get really sick until you are of age to have finally earned solid, affordable, efficient government care.

Nearsighted Conservation

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

Can the land change hands? Yes.

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

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

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

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

From the Senate Floor to the Wild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who We Are

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

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

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

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

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

Ideological Butchering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Eve of Return

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save Dollars & Lives

As our congress members and US senators explain why a public option and real health care reform is bad, let's be clear, if they do not do it now, the changes we need certainly won't happen on the state level.

Firstly, the US does not have a health care "system" yet to reform. No safety net for the average family. We have a system of care, Medicare, for the elderly, and Medicaid, a state system for people with disabilities and partly for the extremely poor. To be frank, there is no "system" of care for most Americans. We Idahoans are left to fend for ourselves in a sea of sparsely regulated private insurance companies who can deny claims, refuse to insure us, drop our coverage if we get sick, or price us out at any time for virtually any reason.

Note that, in Idaho, insurance companies use "discretionary clauses" or catch-all exceptions in insurance contracts to obscure what conditions, procedures, medications or treatments they might not cover. These are very broad statements giving companies legal room to deny care or payment. Only recently has the Idaho Department of Insurance actually begun to regulate some of these. Director Deal should be encouraged in his efforts. He's got a long way to go.

But to create a system of health care we still desperately need national reform. Eliminating discretionary clauses only helps those who actually have insurance. Those with bare-bones, catastrophic policies or high-deductible coverage will likely never use their policies until crisis strikes and they realize their lifetime maximums and fine print limitations will bankrupt or send them to the County’s Indigent Program anyway. Remember, we as tax payers, pay for this crisis care, through increased taxes and higher hospital bills. Paying for a system of preventative care and real national care could eliminate this tax burden and hospital cost escalator for all of us.

Congressman Minnick says he won't vote for a public option unless it's got cost-containment measures. Let's be serious. If you understand health care, you know that ensuring that everyone has decent access to health care, including preventative care, is itself a cost containment measure. A public option would offer roughly 50 million Americans a chance to go to the doctor rather than the emergency room for care. It would prevent costly cancers and conditions like diabetes and other ailments from becoming expensive medical crises.

Forcing all Idahoans to buy private insurance is not adequate. Such an approach would only make insurance companies more powerful and break small businesses and uninsured families.

Both Minnick and Simpson talk of eliminating "defensive procedures." More effective would be eliminating procedure-based reimbursement entirely. Doctors should be paid a generous salary to provide care. They should never feel compelled to pay off expensive equipment with unnecessary tests and scans. Critically, a public option could be designed to help provide communities with state-of-the-art medical equipment to be shared by providers in a local area.

Electronic Health Records are an important part of cost containment. Together with fine changes in liability law (so doctors trust each other’s tests) having a patient’s history and medications at each doctor’s fingertips, will eliminating duplicative testing and examination. The Obama Administration actually included fifteen million in the stimulus package for Idaho providers to convert to EHR.

As a legislator who serves on three committees which could have been advancing a system of health for every single Idahoan, I promise you change will not happen as long as insurance industry lobbyists continue to run health care and these committees, convincing law makers to kill every bit of industry accountability or transparency proposed.

For the past year, I've asked Democrats and Republicans, rural and urban people around the state whether they trust government or insurance companies more. That's a tough question in libertarian, anti-government Idaho. But people simply don’t trust the insurance industry. Every person in Idaho, with few exceptions has a story of how private insurance has harmed them, a friend or family member. And what of the fifty million who are uninsured or have very poor or inadequate insurance? Health Care in the US could not be more expensive. We have the most expensive and ineffective "system" in the world. People are ready for some predictability in health care, not more promises to be broken by companies with infinite legal funds and a long line of attorneys just waiting to explain why that illness, essential procedure or medication "is just not covered."

Simpson, Minnick, Risch and Crapo, this matters. Idaho’s businesses, families and budgets are drowning in this private insurer quagmire. We state law makers can't fix health care for Idahoans. You have to. It's now or never and not a debate that's just begun.

Messing With Elections

Imagine a school bond or sewer bond election where all the candidates for public office were on the ballot at the same time and weighed in on these issues. Imagine the elections for all these things were held on the same day at the same time and the various conservative, moderate, and democratic candidates took sides and aligned themselves with passage or failure of bonds to build schools, jails or waste treatment plants. Imagine supplemental levies, to allow schools to meet short budgets also became more partisan. Votes on local option taxes for construction of jails. Imagine that sewer elections, school boards, mosquito abatement funding, small taxes for auditoriums, all became part of the same ballot.

Unquestionably it would be easier to go on one day and vote for all of it at once, school board, school bond, supplemental levy, sewers, pest management, library issues etc… But as our system stands now, I rarely manage to ferret out every judicial, county and statewide race that will be on the ballot each primary and general election, much less every one of the various issues that will be decided annually by an election somewhere in my tiny part of the county.

If we held all elections for all the tiny jurisdictions and tiny local issues on two dates, I have no doubt that, even as a voter who works hard to be informed, I will walk into the polling booth and face a myriad of issues I know nothing about, but for which my vote may truly be the deciding ballot cast. I might even be tempted to vote on gut instinct, knowing nothing about the details of a proposal or the candidates and offices at stake. Like anyone, I will do my best, but I will not be an informed voter and in many cases my vote will be cast quite randomly.

Is it a great service to democracy that we have tiny obscure elections held on random seeming dates, where a handful of people show up to vote? I know that there have been some of these I have thought to attend, but in the end did not feel passionately enough one way or another to go to the trouble to participate. I think it is safe to say that I was happy to leave these decisions to those more closely connected to the issues, those more directly impacted.

It is important to note here that the borders of all the counties, school districts, mosquito districts, auditorium districts, urban renewal districts, transit districts, fire districts, water districts and more (the list is really long) overlap in often very complex ways. To hold an election for all these districts at once or even for a few of them at once can mean that ten people living within a quarter mile of each other may get ten very different ballots and have an entirely different set of issues to decide once inside the voting booth.

Imagine all those districts, boards, candidates competing for your attention at the same time. Half of what you might hear by radio, TV, bill board or e-mail might not even be on your personal ballot. Delivering a sample ballot to you so that you knew what would be on your ballot on election day would require as much work for the County elections office as would making sure that you got the right ballot when you came in to actually vote on election day to vote.

All this might be OK, or even really positive if every County had the software, electronic GIS maps, address level boarders drawn for every little district to make figuring out who would vote in each election on election day doable. Sadly Idaho doesn't have such technology or detailed electronic mapping. In fact our neighboring states don't "consolidate" elections in this way either, so it would be a leap of faith to say we would be ready to do this by 2012. But we might be. I don't know. But I do know that yesterday an election consolidation bill passed the Senate, having already passed the House. I can appreciate parts of it but fear how candidates will weigh in on these issues that will now be decided in May and November when partisan races are run. Schools can hold elections on two other dates, for four dates total, which is good. But the cost is more than $4 million, that's enough to have reduced cuts to state employees by more than an entire percentage point, saved hundreds of jobs, or to have ensured that state services to someo of those in need did not decline when many Idahoans needed them most.

In a year when we are cutting budgets so deeply, to bow to pressure from House Republican leaders to undertake such a costly task, one that could wait a year or two, is fiscally haphazard. Even worse, we have obligated funding this project in the years ahead when it will have to compete with other budget needs and when it is uncertain that our economy will be fully recovered.

It is ironic too that this is yet another costly computer system project. Technology projects have pulled in tens of millions of dollars from Idaho's budgets and stimulus funds this year, while we have cut services to people with disabilities, substance abuse treatment and school funding.

Election consolodation is not an idea we are exploring. It is legislation the legislature passed yesterday. All seven Democrats voted against it. It was a proposal House leadership has wanted to pass for years. A way for conservatives in the Republican party to have more control over local issues decided by autonomous local bodies. I am sad to think of some of becoming twisted by association with one party or faction rather than surviving on their own merrits. Be we shall see. I hope this grand and expensive experiment in government is successful, worthwhile and, most of all, nothing to fear.

Traveling in Sheep Clothing

Carol and I got a puppy from the Caldwell pound, a husky mix, white, seven months old. I slept in the living room with her last night while she settled in. She has kennel cough so we are walking her at night and in the early morning so she doesn't touch noses with all the other dogs which she so very much wants to meet. With bird flu mixing with swine flu and all of us mixing in airports, schools and at concerts from here to the tip of the nation to the south of us, it is hard not to feel for Bighorn Sheep in their canyons across southern and central Idaho. They meet a wooly domestic sheep and wet noses touch and its all over, potentially for entire herds of what is left of the bighorns. Viruses and bacteria hitch hike from one of us to the next across the globe. DNA mixing and then multiplying until the microbes run out of habitat, like bighorns coming up over the canyon rim when rafters set up camps below and the jet boats roar. And so under a bill we just passed out of the Senate, someone will load up the roaming bighorns who touched noses with the wooly sheep and send them off in trucks elsewhere, perhaps to infect a different herd than their own. The wooly sheep, with their own germs, stay, migrate out of the hills in the winter to pick up more disease and come back in the spring. And here in the statehouse, more than anywhere, we all shake hands, touch noses, move on.

Gauntlet

While here the Senate quietly debated the Governor and Department of Administration's budgets, across the marble hall, on a party line vote, with every single Republican in the House of Representatives voting no, the bill to undo deep cuts to state employee pay just went down. A vote like that says one thing. Republican leadership, Moyle, Bedke and Roberts have decided how their caucuses will vote. I say this because hurting state employees with a 5% funding reduction that includes a fixed 3% pay cut is NOT a partisan issue. Is it?

We are about to go into the 14th order where we amend or change bills. The 14th order is a time on the Senate floor where great mischief can be done. Elliot Werk and our Democratic Caucus is plotting now to "radiator cap" S1055 to turn it into a local option authority bill. And we rally can do that. In this order of business you can actually take any bill and turn it into a completely different bill…

Sadly, John McGee says he won't vote for local option unless Democrats vote for tax increases for roads. I'm sorry to see John will be an obstacle to Local Option when we have so few chances to move forward anything to finally fund public transportation in Idaho.

The Gauntlet is now down.
Today things should get lively and the end should start to really unfold.

Not About Salad Bars

Salad bars. That's the metaphor being used for seniors being assessed charges for services in assisted living centers. Senator Hill likes iceberg lettuce and dressing. That's it. He doesn't want beets and cauliflower.

H146 changes the way assisted living facilities charge elderly and disabled residents. Assisted living services for the elderly and disabled are not optional services, they are frequently critical medical services residents have no choice whether to or whether not to accept. If you live on a fixed income isn't some level of predictability important? Wasn't the previous tiered rate structure letting providers make as much as they do in other states?

Under this bill residents get a plate for roughly $2,500, a plate, no salad. A room to rent, no services. If they want salad or dressing they have to pay more. I'm sure most assisted living centers would give them lettuce with the plate, maybe dressing. Maybe not. Maybe some facilities will decide to charge for every leaf of lettuce and every gram of dressing. The bill doesn't say they can't. We will trust that accountability to a rules making process and an oversight board which I think assisted living facilities have so far ignored.

And if you know you can not afford more than a little lettuce or dressing, will you maybe then go without care you need even though it is critical to you health? Physical therapy, oxygen, travel assistance. If you are struggling with recovery or health issues, might a provider easily tuck a bunch of caviar under your cauliflower and charge you even though you never wanted it and knew you could not afford it?

And here I play with a really broken metaphor. I'll stop. The bill passed at something like two to 33. Those of us who opposed it were criticized for cruelly scaring seniors.

Good News

Sometimes good things do happen. This year it is pretty rare but a few good things did happen in the past few days.

1) This morning we reduced the cut to funding for state employees from the deep 5% cut to only a 3% cut with no mandatory pay reduction. For the record, Senator Cameron and Senator Keough are my heroes for today. It is extremely worth noting that the proposal that passed did not put budgets at risk should the economy worsen because it used just over $6 million of the governor's $44 million in flexible stimulus funds which he again insisted that he wants to use mostly on roads. (To be clear that's on top of the other tens of millions in stimulus he got from the feds specifically for roads.) The House Republican caucus is clamped down hard. Not a single House Republican voted for the proposal. I wonder what they tell their districts when they go home? Yes, I voted as party leadership told me even when I thought it was wrong?

2) Yesterday the Senate Commerce Committee which is a frequent bane of my existence for its very great deference to insurance industry lobbyists wishes, that committee did something good and on a 5 to 4 vote actually killed a bill I disliked. The bill would have allowed the State Insurance Fund to skate from under a judgment of the Supreme Court. The sponsor, Senator Goedde, it turned out, is a member of the State insurance Fund Board, and was a named defendant in the Supreme Court case.

3) Senator Kelly, after years of work on ethics issues, passed a bill to require some disclosure of personal finances for candidates for public office in Idaho. Yep you might know a little bit in advance about the many conflicts we may have in voting on legislation in Idaho. As to a preview of my own disclosure, I'm pretty sure I don't own single share of stock or have investments in anything anywhere. I'm hoping someday I might make enough to have something to disclose but for now I'm going to be really boring.

In The Words of Teachers

Boise High Auditorium is cavernous. It is like an old opera house, with a big balcony, hundreds of lower seats, and a large, deep stage. Almost 40 Senators and Representatives sat on that stage under bright lights in the dim hall. We sat in a big semi circle behind tables set with table cloths and silent microphones. Dean Cameron, Chair of our Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee, gave a long and very incomplete rational as to why we cut the public school education budget by 7%, cut teacher pay, froze pay advancement and eliminated much of the state's reimbursement for educational field trips and busing. Tom Luna was cut off from going on longer on the same subject by a bell operated by three women stationed in front of the stage. I am guessing they will long remember getting to ding this Superintendent of Public Instruction into silence.

After the introductions, teachers from all over the state stepped to the microphone one after another to tell stories of what it is and has been like in their classrooms these past years. They described their students or trying to pay their bills. Together the 30 or so of them gave the most amazing State of the Schools I've ever heard.

–One male teacher described his school without walls, how for years they saved up to buy walls to make actual classrooms. He said that was before the budget cuts.

–A local teacher, the only one from Boise, described her work with at risk teens. She was inspiring. You could feel how much she cares, how talented she is with these kids. She was just laid off.

–One woman teaching in a school near the Wyoming boarder said she pays over $1,500 to buy classroom supplies for her kids. Otherwise they have to write letters explaining why they need them. She has tried to save them the embarrassment. She could make $20,000 more dollars a year more, an hour away in Wyoming.

–A teacher who has been teaching for decades and still works 11 hours a day, told a talented scholarship student to get certified in Washington not Idaho because the pay and the teaching conditions are better.

–One teacher described teaching for 19 years, feeling undervalued and underapprecaited. She said we could spend dollars when the kids are young and it's easier, or when they are older and it is intolerable. Schools or prisons. Our choice. Clearly young and energetic, she said she has had it, and may not teach again in Idaho.

–Others reminded us that we are 41st in the nation for teacher pay and have the 4th highest class sizes in the U.S.

–One teacher said she does not need Tom Luna's expensive programs and
technology, his reading and math "initiatives," she knows how to teach.

–Some described being parents as well as teachers and worrying or even moving to keep their kids out of some of the more underfunded districts. They talked about crowded classrooms.

–Some described schools where art and science and civics has been cut and what might spark some kids to stay in school or be inspired to learn is lost.

–One powerful speaker challenged us as lawmakers to come to her class room and watch her teach.

On that stage, squirming in the hard chairs, lawmakers sometimes looked uncomfortable. Split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans for once, it felt odd that not a single member of Republican House or Senate leadership was there, not the Chairs of the education committees John Goedde or Bob Nonini, yet all six members of Democratic leadership for the House and Senate were there. The only one allowed to speak was Dean Cameron. He was tasked to speak for all of those whose hands are dirty with this mess we have made of so many schools. And he conveniently neglected to mention the $44 million in discretionary stimulus dollars that Governor Otter has and wants to spend on roads and sewers, over and above the stimulus dollars Idaho was given specifically to spend on roads. Otter can spend that $44 million on anything.

No we didn't have to do this to teachers or schools or kids or to State employees. Someone chose this course. Dean, you can stand and say we had no other options, but you know better. We do not have to cut schools when we've already starved them to the bone.

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.