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And it is painful and it is not fun.

And that's why the process has been difficult.

I would characterize the session as very hard, very tiring.

Procedural pressures are boiling over in the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee and on the House and Senate chamber floors.

We'll dive into the details.

Filling in for Melissa Devlin.

I'm Logan Finnie.

Idaho reports starts now.

Hello and welcome to Idaho Reports.

This week I sit down with Senate Minority Leader Melissa.

Intro.

House Majority Leader Jason Monks, Senate Education Committee chair Dave Lente, and Division of Financial Management and Ministry Lori Wolf to get a progress report on the legislative session.

But first, the Idaho Conservation League sent a letter to state lawmakers and the state Department of Agriculture earlier in February, raising concerns with documented biosecurity lapses at several domestic elk farms across the state, flagging the potential of possible chronic wasting disease transmission between wild and domestic animals is a fatal neurological condition similar to mad cow disease or scrapie, affecting the deer and elk family, also known as servants, or serve a day.

I sat down last week with ISIL's wildlife Program associate, Jeff Abrams, to hear his concerns about Idaho's approach to managing the disease.

The producers claim that they it's in their interest, right, to protect their domestic animals, it's not necessarily incumbent on them to protect the wild animals.

That's the problem.

And so they have an economic incentive to protect their own operations and make sure that they don't lose animals because of disease.

It's not apparent right now due to the lapses, due to the recent history that we've seen at several facilities, not just 1 or 2.

That they're perhaps, not as incentivized to really try to make sure that safety mechanisms are in place, whereby wild animals do not get infected.

We don't see that there are any reasonable ways other than going back to the previous regulations.

Double fencing, require 100% testing on all animals that, come from domestic facilities.

Right now, that standard is only 10%.

If we had had 100% testing facility up north that sourced an animal to eastern Idaho, we would have known that that facility had CWD positive animals.

And so we're very concerned that we have a pattern of these problems.

We have not seen Department of AG taking corrective measures, and we don't really see an interest from the producers to come together to understand that they are compromising the name of their own industry and compromising the sporting and the natural heritage that is fundamental to Idaho in general, and a birthright to all Idahoans.

Idaho State Department of Agriculture Director Chanel T laid out a Asda's view of the situation in a letter of her own last Friday, responding to Abrams and Ickes concerns.

Idaho reports obtained that letter through a public records request.

quote, while extremely unfortunate, exists at endemic levels in other states and wildlife do not recognize state lines, there is a risk of transmission without domestic operations having ever existed in Idaho.

T while also noted decisions about what happens to any wild animals who interact with domestic herds is the purview of fish and game, not the Department of Agriculture.

The current Idaho Fish and Game policy is to remove all increased wild servings due to concerns whether the disease has been confirmed on the captive facility or not.

Neither of the domestic service facilities that experienced recent wild increases were under quarantine at the time of the ingress.

ISDa agreed to assist Idph in the cost of managing the ingress as a gesture of good faith to our state partners.

The ISDa letter directly addresses several of Ickes assertions, while leaving the decisions about policy up to lawmakers, and adds detail regarding ISDs enforcement approach, as well as quarantines, testing, and imports at domestic facilities.

The most recent detection of food in a captive elk ranch occurred in Boundary County, in an elk herd that is not imported any animals, and over a decade.

Idaho law does not say that domestic server day operations are allowed to exist only if they are perfect.

Instead, Idaho law provides for a process to address violations if they occur.

You can hear my full interview with Jeff Abrams and the details from the exchange of letters on the Idaho Reports podcast.

That's at youtube.com, slash Idaho Reports or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Meanwhile, this week at the state House on Wednesday, the House passed the pediatric secretive Transition's Parental Rights Act, a bill building on a law passed in 2023 that bans surgical and hormonal gender affirming care for minors.

This bill would prohibit health care providers and educators from facilitating a minors transition without informing the child's parents or guardians.

The bill passed on a mostly party line vote, which most people expected.

The real surprise came after the vote when House Minority Leader Elena Rubel attempted to submit a minority report into the record, outlining the Democrats objections.

Thank you, Mr.

Speaker.

I'd like to draw your attention to the minority report on your desk relating to House Bill 822.

Per House Rule 27, it will be printed in the journal as well.

Gentleman from 22.

Thank you, Mr.

Speaker.

I move to suspend rule 27 and not allow the minority report to be included in the journal.

That motion to successfully suspend the rules blocks Democrats from officially registering their objections on the record.

I understand that we are part of a super minority.

We expect to be outnumbered.

We expect that we will frequently lose votes on substantive matters in this body.

But we do expect procedural fairness.

And the rules that are created to protect the expression of minority viewpoints will be respected.

And that did not happen today.

We worked very hard in our caucus.

We complied with the rules.

We did everything called for us by our rules to submit a minority report.

And, I do feel that it was, frankly, an abuse of supermajority power to suspend the rules that we have all voted into effect for the sole purpose of preventing the minority viewpoint from being heard and recorded.

Frustrations are boiling over elsewhere, including in the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee on Monday, Representative Kyle Harris of Lewiston voiced his frustrations with the committee's working group processes, which prepare materials for the public budget hearings.

the further and further we go down this road, the less and less I see the need for the working groups.

So if we're going to continue to just override whatever the working groups are doing, I don't know why we're going to continue to even have these meetings.

If that's going to be the case, I would recommend that we just dissolve working groups and just hash everything out in this room.

If you comment On Thursday, the full Senate resoundingly voted down the proposed health and welfare budget on a 10 to 25 vote.

In debate, Senator Jim Guthrie cited last year's tax cuts and this year's budget setting approach as his reasons for voting against the proposal.

every so often we experience a defining moment as we serve in the legislature, moments that signal the path we choose for the state as we pass legislation, and that define us as legislators.

when we talk about pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and tightening our belts, the Great Recession was a testament to that resilient Idaho spirit.

But today's challenge is not that You know, we talk about tightening our belts, but that is not the case.

We're not tightening our belts at all.

We're not taking a pay cut.

We're not compromising our benefits.

We are tightening the belts of Idaho's citizens.

And the feedback from my constituents is that they are not happy about it.

We could also opt to use some of the 1.7 billion in reserve accounts, keeping in mind that's taxpayer money we have already taken from their pockets.

You know, this issue gets painted as a conservative liberal issue.

It's really a human issue.

But as for me, I'm comfortable with how my no vote will define me.

is this an abnormal year for tensions?

Joining me to discuss the week are House Majority leader Jason Monks.

Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow, Senate Education Chair Dave Lent, and Division of Financial Management Administrator Lori Wolff.

Thank you all so much for joining us today.

It's good to be here.

Yeah.

Administrator Wolff, not a representative or senator, you hold a unique position among the table here, at Division of Financial Management.

You have a unique eye on the daily workings of JFAC.

Can you give us a progress report of where we're at in the budget setting process and the rest of the session?

Yeah, I think we're doing really well.

I mean, we have most or all the maintenance budgets are out on the floor.

We have most of the enhancement budgets that have gone through.

I think we only have public schools left.

I think we've done good work.

There's been good, healthy debate about what exactly is needed.

It's been a tough year.

We've had tough decisions to make.

But I think overall we're on a good trajectory.

The education budget, of course, is a really big one.

Senator Lent, over on the Senate side of the building, you're chairman of the Senate Education Committee.

You also have some experience on JFAC in the past.

What's your perspective on how the joint committee work product is coming out this year?

I think it's going great.

We've been really, I think, fortunate to somewhat protect the education budget this year.

So I'm very pleased with where it's at.

And, in my space, we're looking not only this year, but how do we modernize education in the future, and a big thing for us is moving forward with a new, funding formula for next year.

The public schools funding formula.

It's an oft-talked-about nut to crack.

Representative Monks, from your position on the House floor over there in leadership, how is session going in your estimation?

We're just trying to keep up with all the bills that come through.

Today, actually, on the floor if you wanted to look at that, we got through everything.

We burned through the entire third reading calendar.

We've only got a few bills on our second reading.

We're going to come back this afternoon, pick up our House bills on the second reading calendar, and send them back over to the Senate so they can continue to go.

So we're keeping on track to be done here.

Obviously, we can never predict if all the bill pass that need to pass, like appropriations bills.

Sometimes those get held up, they get rejected for one reason or another, and that's fine.

We just go back to that process.

But we're going to make sure that we're not going to delay the process by not being ready.

So we're doing everything we can to move bills quickly so that we can be done at a reasonable time.

There's been good progress on those, what are sometimes called going-home bills that must get done.

But committees are still also printing a lot of RSs, or introducing new draft legislation.

You're the majority leader, so I'm going to ask you, how many of those bills have a real chance of moving forward, and how many of them are just messaging for the upcoming election cycles?

It's a mix.

It's definitely a mix.

You'll see bills introduced almost until the day we leave.

While we're here, we have fertile minds and we just think of more things that that can be done.

And so we'll continue to do those.

I think you're going to see here at the end of this week, the speaker is going to probably limit germane committees from being able to print or introduce new bills.

On our side, anything that would need to be introduced would have to happen in Ways and Means.

So we're kind of stopping that right now, and we'll hopefully be going faster now.

The end of March approaches.

Just for housekeeping purposes, we're having this conversation on Thursday between two floor sessions in the House.

That's good to note.

Senator Wintrow, you are the Democratic leader on the minority side.

You were in somewhat of a super minority in the legislature overall.

You, in addition to leadership, are a rank and file JFAC member today.

What's your perspective on the process?

I think we're going to hear the most discontent from your side of the camps here.

Well, well, I guess I'm in the minority here, but, yeah, I guess how I would describe this session is very rough and challenging and being in fact on a daily basis.

Sometimes things go okay and sometimes they don't.

We've seen a lot of conflict and challenges right on the floor as people are making competing motions, killing things, not moving forward.

It's been very difficult to come to agreement, but I think a lot of it is because the budget climate we're in, you know, after cutting the revenue so hard.

We put ourselves in a position now where some folks want to justify cuts, and to a point that's going to be harmful, I think, to citizens and the services we need and demand.

So today, the Medicaid budget was- the Health and Human Services budget was up, or the maintenance portion of it, today in the Senate floor.

And it actually went down.

And it was a very heartfelt, healthy debate; one that really was surrounding the deep cuts, and really all the stories.

We're getting hundreds.

I had a stack on my desk, probably this high, of handwritten and typed letters of concern about Medicaid cuts, from the 4% in the current year as well as the ongoing.

So I think I would characterize the session as very hard, very tiring.

It's very hard to look at people in the eye and listen on the phone and read an email about how they're struggling, and how we could stop the struggle a little bit by pulling in some reserve funds and really tackling the gaps that we have that we're facing in our budget, instead of continuing to cut the services we need and harming folks.

So I'd probably characterize it a little bit differently, but, I mean, that's just my perspective.

There are, of course, the number or mathematical dollar decisions to be made.

Those are all in service of policy decisions, under the purview of the germane committee.

But it's hard to undo those, that nexus, of course.

Senator Lent you are one of the leading voices working on medical education - undergraduate medical education, graduate medical education - or at least involved in that.

What's your view on the funding for you know, funding goes into education.

Education then affects other things like health care.

How do you, in your mind, keep the policy part of the equation and the budget part of the equation separated, in your mind?

Well, there's a number of balls in the air on that particular issue.

It's not an easy question.

It's, on one side, we've got the WWAMI folks that we're trying to maintain, and build out those programs, so we can have more physicians in our state.

Most people don't realize that we have the lowest per capita physician rate in the United States, so definitely a need.

And I was so surprised to find out that not only are we low, but we would need 1500 new doctors today to get up to the national average.

So that gives you a little bit of the scale of the scope that we're looking at.

So I'm pleased to see that we're trying to make efforts to at least maintain that.

And then, of course, we've got to face this, what we're going to do to build it out in the future.

On the other side of that, the veterinary side, we're moving forward with the Utah State University and their new veterinary school, to try to try to do something similar to what we've done with WWAMI for the last 50 years and create that.

And then, of course, we have issues related to ICOM, and what's the state's role going to going to be there in the future, going forward?

So it's a very important subject for our state.

Sometimes we have to really think in terms of long game and not just focus on short game, which we tend to be driven to that in our election cycle and the way we do legislation in our state.

It's kind of a one and done.

How are we going to fix it?

What are we going to do?

This is really a long term look.

But I'm feeling very good.

We did a lot of work on this last year, so I think we're getting close.

Representative Monks, one of the other, you know, dollar figures that's hanging out there that you guys have to deal with is the Rural Health Transformation program.

That's a provision that came from President Donald Trump's one big, beautiful bill.

There's been disagreement between House and Senate on what the committee or working group that works on that should look like.

That money needs to get spent somewhere or it goes away.

There's been discussions about whether it should go to specific hospitals, whether it should go to these type of medical education programs that we were discussing.

In the conversations you're having among the House caucus and body, what's kind of the House's perspective on the best way to handle rural health transformation moving forward?

I think, first thing to say is, I think the House and the Senate are both pretty united on the fact that we believe that the Legislature should have a say in where that dollars get appropriated.

And so that's one of the things that we wanted to do.

And that's why we've been looking at forming that committee, so that we can go through and have that committee go through the process of helping define where it should go.

And so that's the whole purpose of this committee that we're trying to put together.

And I think it's one of those issues that, you know, was not on anybody's docket at the beginning of this session, or I should say maybe at the end of last year, but with the one big, beautiful bill, obviously it changed things because it put essentially $1 billion in our hands to say, go and do something.

And so we're just trying to figure out what the best mechanism is to provide that.

The one big, beautiful Bill did a lot of other things too.

It was very big, very beautiful, it affected- I'll come right back to you in a moment, Senator Wintrow.

It affected the revenue projections that the state is dealing with.

It's no secret that Speaker Moyle likes to cut taxes whenever he has the opportunity to.

How do you, and your conservative members in your caucus, how do you balance the real and legitimate desire to cut taxes and reduce that burden?

At what point do you draw the line and say, this is having too much of an impact on social services, and it's time to pump the brakes here?

That's a great question.

I think it's important to understand that that one big beautiful bill, it has essentially four years of cuts and then they go away.

And so if we did not accept them for the current year, then that meant we would only get three years of tax cuts.

And again, these are tax cuts for people on tips and overtime, and additional deductions for our seniors.

Those were things that were very important to us.

And we felt that we did not want to delay or eliminate a year of those cuts to our constituents.

And so, if you do that, then we have to look at everything else.

I think it's important for us to recognize the argument that we cut too much.

I go back to our budget on what they've done since I've been there.

In the 14 years that I've been there, they've outpaced inflation and population growth.

If we would have stayed with population and inflation.

Since I've been in the legislature, our budget would be about $4 billion and we're at $5.5 billion and have been up to $6 billion.

So we've outpaced that.

So we've spent a lot more than what we used to spend.

And so cutting that back slightly, I think, is not only okay, I think it's necessary.

I grow a lot of fruit trees in my life, and I've got a bunch of them out there.

My wife loves selling the fruit.

Because we have too much fruit.

Every year I have to go and I have to trim those trees.

If I don't, my branches break and I don't get good fruit.

And I'm not saying we need to trim budgets every year, but occasionally it's not a problem to go back and look at our programs and find out if we haven't cut them in 15 years.

Maybe it's okay if we trim them up a little bit.

Is it difficult?

Absolutely.

Is it painful?

Absolutely.

Is there a person behind every one of those cuts?

Absolutely.

But to say that we can't cut budgets after 15 years of growth outpacing population and inflationary increases by over $1 billion in that period of time, I think it's I think it's okay that we go ahead and do that.

And it is painful and it is not fun.

And that's why the process has been difficult.

And we're going to have other budgets to go down that that was mentioned by Senator Winter.

We're going to have other budgets on the House floor, Senate floor that are going to be we're going to disagree about.

But that's the process and that's a good process.

If we had every bill that came out, we all passed it.

I think that would be a failing process.

I think we should have those healthy debates, find out where we where we missed, where we did too much, where we did too little.

And we'll go back and fix those.

You need to make sure the bodies themselves have the chance to deliberate.

Before we move on, Senator Wintrow, I know you have something to say.

I'll give you that chance.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

I think, you know, we have a different philosophy here.

Number one, when we went to JFAC, Keith Bybee - our head, you know, the head guy - he gave us all the charts.

And actually, if you look at inflation and population growth over time, the last two decades, the budget is actually flat.

And if you think about a population growth that we have had extraordinary growth in our state, of course we witness a demand for more services, more road miles, more kids in schools, you know, more people getting health care.

And, you know, the philosophy of you've got to do more with less all the time.

That's what we do every year, and we've cut every year.

The bill that was passed, Trump's mega bill, I agree, we could prune just like I do my roses.

But I think what we did is we're hacking budgets, and we didn't need to accept all the things in that tax conformity cut bill.

We weren't ready for it.

We cut revenue $453 million the previous year.

We are already behind the eight ball.

And then to go retroactively, even though most people say - even the governor said - we'll go forward, not backward.

And by going backward, that's where we have those parentheses on the green sheet today that have gotten us in trouble, which means that we are upside down, because of that easy way to deal with the revenue projections.

And any of these deficits would not to be go backward and go forward, period.

And again, I have been in this body 12 years and I've been on JFAC for six years now.

And every single year, like, it's always a dance.

The governor brings in the budget and the legislature wants to undercut it so they can be conservative.

We understand that.

So every single year we do that, we have dialed it back every single year.

If I can interrupt you, I do want to dial in on that for a second, the interplay between what the governor and his staff put together and then what the legislature is working with.

Lori, over at DSM, you basically own the governor's recommended budget.

At the end of the day, what's your perspective on that interplay?

Between what the governor has put together, and the ultimately the legislature makes these decisions, so what's the interplay there?

You know, what could be done to help this dynamic - that we're seeing here on set, that's a microcosm of what's happening all over the building.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, it's a process.

And the governor does come in with his budget recommendation.

We came in with our revenue numbers and the legislature set a little bit different, higher, revenue numbers.

I think overall, you know, the governor saw this early last summer, which is why he did his executive order, at the end of the summer to start addressing some of the potential shortfalls that we saw as revenue was coming in.

So the Idaho Act, you know, really started that process of saying, look, we've got to figure out how to trim spending.

Our revenues are coming in a little lower than what was then where the budget was set last session.

On the Green Sheet?

That's right, the green sheet.

Yeah.

For the folks at home, the 'green sheet' is daily tracking numbers.

The parentheses at the bottom, that would be the current bottom line, we're in a negative.

We're in the red.

That's something that representative Tanner, the new co-chair, has been really harping on over the last little bit.

Yep.

Just making sure we're on the same page there.

Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, we've been working on this for months, and I think the agencies did a really good job working with the governor's office on saying you know, here's where we can cut.

And we put a 3% cut in early for fiscal year '26.

And then the governor's budget cut an additional 3% ongoing for 27.

We had to look at some priorities and say we're going to have to reduce spending in some of these areas.

We made some deliberate, intentional, decisions about what to recommend on conformity.

But I think overall, we also decided, you know, what is it that we need to protect?

And what are those things that we need to make sure we have funding for.

And the governor was very clear on, we're going to protect water, we're going to protect workforce.

We protected graduate medical education.

He recommended the rural health transformation funding.

And knowing that we need to get dollars into our rural hospitals, and continue to protect health care and medical.

We've also had the opportunity to hear from constituents on some of the additional cuts that the legislature made, in some of their maintenance bills.

And there have been some, we've brought some of that funding back.

We just today passed, took back the 2% additional reduction in adult and children's mental health, knowing that, you know, those probably did cut too far and, making sure that we were protecting those individuals that we needed to.

So I think overall, you know, the process has been good.

We go through this every year.

But at the end of the day, you know, we do have some aligned priorities.

And, you know, what we want for Idahoans is their government needs to operate effectively.

We also need to make sure that we're efficient and that we're using our resources as we need to.

And whenever possible, we're putting money back in the pockets of Idahoans.

All right.

I will recognize we're running a little bit low on time here.

Senator Lent, I wanted to circle back to you as someone who's not intimately involved with the joint committee these days.

From your perspective on the floor, what unanswered questions still need addressed before sine die is a realistic possibility?

I think we're moving forward.

Nothing comes to mind immediately for me that just hanging out there, it's just going to be getting these budgets passed on the floor.

That's what it's going to take for us to get done and close out.

I would just add that I'm very interested in President Trump's executive orders on nuclear and what that could mean for our state.

It has the potential to double the size of the INL.

And so working very closely with the Attorney General's office, the governor's office, and INL to help make some of that happen.

All right.

Well, the status of those budget bills changes daily as we are moving rapidly, hopefully, toward the end of session here.

Tolks back home can head to idahoreports.org to check out our budget bill tracker for the latest information.

Senator Dave Lent, Senator Melissa Wintrow, Representative Jason Monks, Administrator Lori Wolf, thank you all so much for joining us today.

This has been a great conversation.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Presentation of Idaho reports on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho.

With additional major funding provided by the estate of Darrell Arthur Kammer in support of independent media that strengthens a democratic and just society.

And by the Hansberger Family Foundation.

By the Friends of Idaho Public Television.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And donations to the station from viewers like you.

Thank you.