Having broken one of Idaho’s smallest budgets, McGeachin seeks one 25,000 times larger
As she seeks the highest office in the state, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin has effectively bankrupted one of the smallest departments in Idaho government.
As Clark Corbin of the Idaho Capital Sun reported Wednesday, what started as an effort to deny journalists access to public records has led to an office with no staff, which can’t pay its bills and where even McGeachin herself is likely to go without pay for part of the year.
In the midst of what is the worst budget crisis any department of state government has faced in recent history, McGeachin hasn’t even bothered to provide timely responses to questions from state budget officers.
The saga began with McGeachin’s McCarthyite indoctrination task force, which charged itself with investigating teachers to root out secret commies and critical race theoreticians infiltrating their ranks.
It found absolutely nothing of significance, but it did solicit public comment. When reporters requested access to that public comment, McGeachin denied the request. She says she did it to protect private citizens, though it seems more likely she was trying to cover up the fact that the vast majority of the comments were critical of the very existence of the committee.
After multiple attempts to obtain the records, the Idaho Press Club sued McGeachin and won. That series of frivolous decisions led to McGeachin receiving a tongue lashing and a civil fine from the judge — and a judgment for about $29,000 in attorney fees. That amounts to about 16% of McGeachin’s annual budget.
True to form, McGeachin refused to take responsibility for anything.
The lieutenant governor repeatedly claimed the attorney general’s office was to blame for her disastrous decision-making. That, it turned out, was either a bald-faced lie or evidence of a total inability to understand legal advice: The attorney general’s office had advised her to release the files immediately, and she chose to shop around for an attorney who would tell her what she wanted to hear.
Think of this as a household budget. Imagine your family’s budget is $60,000 per year. What would you do if you suddenly incurred an unexpected $10,000 expense, and you had nothing in savings? After the shock wore off, you would probably be desperately looking for expenses to cut so that you could be sure you would make your rent or mortgage payments for the rest of the year.
McGeachin first took another option: She asked someone else to pay off her debt. McGeachin asked the Legislature to simply raise her budget by $29,000 this year. There was no appetite on the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee to pay off the money she’d lost through legally frivolous attempts to deny access to public records.
Once it was certain no bailout was coming, McGeachin appears to have become an adherent to the ostrich school of accounting: Bury your head in sand for a while and hope it all works out.
It didn’t.
McGeachin no longer has anyone on staff. The state has halted payments to vendors she contracts with. In February, Moody’s upgraded the state’s bond issuer rating to AAA. If the lieutenant governor’s office got a separate rating, it would certainly be in junk status.
On top of all that, Corbin reported Wednesday that McGeachin missed her deadline to present a plan to deal with the budget shortfall. Now, it’s likely the state will dock her pay. It could drop her from the state insurance plan if she doesn’t come up with her own money to pay both the contribution that would normally come out of her paycheck and the portion paid by the state.
None of that is such a big deal to McGeachin personally. She owns multiple businesses. She’ll be fine, while she burns one of every six dollars the taxpayer sent her last year.
But it shows her to be unfit for the job she’s seeking.
McGeachin has demonstrated that she’s completely incapable of managing her office’s budget — which is less than $185,000, one-twentieth of what the state spends on cattle brand inspection every year. How could she possibly be trusted to manage a state budget that’s some 25,000 times larger?