Confused about the Idaho budget dustup? Here’s what’s going on and why it’s important | Opinion

There are few tasks in state government more obscure than setting budgets. But it is also one of the most important things that happens every year.

That’s why you should pay attention to an unfolding crisis in the Idaho Legislature.

Idaho’s longstanding and well-functioning budgeting process is in the process of breaking down. A few years down the road, you will feel the consequences in your kids’ schools, the roads you drive on, in crime rates and declining public safety.

Budgets in Idaho are written by the Joint Finance-Approriations Committee, composed of 10 senators and 10 representatives. Previously, state agencies presented their requests, the governor made recommendations, then lawmakers made changes based on their priorities. Finally, full budgets went to the House and Senate floors for up-or-down votes.

But this year, JFAC co-chairs Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, and Sen. Scott Grow, R-Eagle, instituted a new process of setting so-called “maintenance budgets” (which aren’t really maintenance budgets) and then passing supplementary budgets for each agency.

In early February, a group of 12 reasonable Republicans and Democrats joined together to pass traditional budgets, bypassing the new process and precipitating a fight within the GOP caucus that last week ended in the ouster of Majority Leader Megan Blanksma.

So we seem to be veering into uncharted waters.

The new process is not making better budgets or more conservative budgets or more closely scrutinized budgets. The only problem it solves is political.

Every year the far-right segment of the Legislature decides it’s going to evoke and attack some bugaboo — diversity, bathrooms, critical race theory — so that they can go back to constituents and say, “I’m fighting for conservative values. Vote for me!”

Their political messaging problem is that budgets come packaged together. So if you want to cast a symbolic vote against the made-up problem of critical race theory in grade schools, for example, you might have to vote against the entire public schools budget. And then your constituents might ask you, “Why did you vote to defund my kids’ schools?”

Under the new budget system, lawmakers might be able to vote for a public schools “maintenance” budget and then vote against a smaller secondary budget bill that includes supplementary curriculum funding, for example. This way, lawmakers can say they can vote against diversity programs without opening themselves up to attack ads saying they voted to defund public schools.

But politics an incredibly bad reason to break a budget process that has functioned well for decades. The electoral fate of individual lawmakers simply doesn’t matter very much when weighed against making state government function well for Idaho citizens.

And there are gaping holes in the new budgets.

As Clark Corbin, of the Idaho Capitol Sun, pointed out recently, JFAC has always started the budget process by making an educated guess about how much tax revenue will be collected in the next year. The budget is then built to aim for that target, since the Idaho Constitution requires a balanced budget.

This year, Corbin noted, the budgets are moving before the revenue target has been determined. It’s as if they decided to start driving, confident they could figure out their destination later. But they’re almost out of road. The proposed maintenance budgets spend about $5.1 billion of the $5.6 billion that another legislative committee projects the state will collect next year, Corbin reported.

This is in many ways like the process used by Congress, nothing like the time-honored process that has led to Idaho’s top-shelf credit rating, overflowing rainy day funds and regular surpluses.

Another problem is that the maintenance budgets really aren’t maintenance budgets at all. They don’t include things like paying leases for existing buildings, replacing equipment that regularly ages out (police car fleets, for example), or population growth (if the school-age population goes up 5%, you need 5% more teachers).

This experiment should be abandoned. There are warning lights flashing all over, and experienced budget watchers from all corners — including a majority of the budget committee — think the state is in real trouble.

The question is: Will lawmakers be able to put the concrete interests of Idahoans ahead of their personal interest in winning the next election? Or will selfishness rule the day?