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After error, Idaho governor skips $27.5 million transfer to roads

By Betsy Z. Russell, The Spokesman-Review
Published: January 15, 2018, 7:33pm

BOISE — When lawmakers started delving into the budget proposal that Gov. Butch Otter has made for next year, they got a surprise: Though they passed a bill last year to split a $55 million year-end surplus between the state’s rainy day fund and roadwork, only the rainy day fund transfer was made.

Due to a drafting error in the bill, Senate Bill 1206, the transfer to the Idaho Transportation Department’s Strategic Initiatives Fund didn’t happen, and Otter didn’t include it in his budget plan.

“Transferring the $27.5 million to the strategic initiatives fund will require legislative action,” Otter’s budget chief, Jani Revier, told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee. “Please note that this transfer is not reflected in any of the numbers that I have presented to you today, so it would reduce the current bottom line.”

That means if JFAC wants to complete the transfer that lawmakers approved last year, it’s starting out $27.5 million behind compared with the governor’s budget.

Under questioning from both co-chairs of JFAC, Sen. Shawn Keough and Rep. Maxine Bell, Revier had this explanation for why Otter didn’t include the transfer in his budget: He doesn’t like the idea.

“The governor does not support general fund for roads,” Revier told JFAC. “He has had a long-standing position on this. He is not going to recommend a general fund transfer.” That doesn’t stop lawmakers from making it, but they’ll have to come up with the money.

“There was a drafting error, we acknowledge there was a drafting error, but the transfer did not occur,” Revier said. “He did not recommend a transfer,” but he did make a note about it: that the transfer would be necessary if lawmakers want to spend the money on roads.

Bell said, “We made the transfer but didn’t put the spending in. We, I assume, will put the spending — I think the roads are still full of potholes.”

Keough was taken aback, asking Revier, “It doesn’t show up anywhere in the governor’s budget. So that we will, should we choose to uphold the law, we will have to account for that and take it off the bottom line — is that what I thought I heard you say?” Revier said yes.

But the Otter administration later noted that it did follow the law — the drafting error is the law that passed, and it didn’t include the transfer.

A day later, Keough said after further review, she’d concluded that the governor was following the law, and she shouldn’t have used that wording. “They — the governor and (the state Division of Financial Management) — did follow the law as it was passed, and we, the Legislature, made a costly bill-drafting error,” Keough said. “As I have reread SB 1206 and found the drafting error, I would like to retract my use of ‘follow the law’ and apologize for my mischaracterization.”

The governor’s budget shows a $155.9 million year-end balance — a surplus — at the end of the current budget year, 2018, and then transfers that over as the starting balance for fiscal year 2019. Then, his budget for fiscal year 2019 projects a year-end balance of $70 million. But Bell noted that with the $27.5 million transfer issue, “That’ll be a little bit of a different number.”

Support for pre-K

More than three-quarters of Idahoans want the state to start funding preschool, according to a new statewide poll. Seventy-six percent of voters and 80 percent of parents of children 5 and younger support state funding for pre-K, according to the poll unveiled last week by the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children.

Idaho is among only a half-dozen states that do not fund pre-K, and the idea has run into stiff resistance at the Statehouse. But Idaho AEYC Executive Director Beth Oppenheimer says she hopes the new data will make pre-K into a “safe issue” for lawmakers.

“This has been a missing piece in the whole conversation,” Oppenheimer said. “We didn’t really know what Idahoans all across the state think.”

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