NorthwestFebruary 12, 2004

Bob Fick

BOISE -- Key lawmakers poked multimillion-dollar holes in Gov. Dirk Kempthorne's 2004-2005 budget Wednesday, singling out unmet demands in education, mental health, natural resources and public safety.

"You didn't tell us where to get the money, but you let us know there are issues out there," House Appropriations Chairman Maxine Bell of Jerome said after the chairman of House and Senate policy committees laid out their spending concerns.

Republican Sen. Skip Brandt, the Kooskia conservative who heads the Health and Welfare Committee, also told budget writers they should not focus their search for extra cash on social services unless they want to eliminate entire programs.

"If you want to cut more employees from the department, it's going to get down to the point of cutting entire programs," Brandt told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee. "We have come to the conclusion that the department is running as lean as it can at this time."

The presentations wrapped up four weeks of hearings and came the day before the House-Senate panel begins drafting the new $2 billion general tax budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Kempthorne's proposal is the starting point for lawmakers who generally believe it is both inadequate in critical areas and overly optimistic in its total spending commitment.

The governor and his staff have repeatedly defended their decisions as responsible in light of the still sluggish economy and the fact that last year's penny sales tax increase expires in mid-2005, stripping $180 million from the cash that will be available for financing the 2005-2006 budget.

But the chairmen of the House and Senate education committees urged budget writers to ignore the governor's plan in at least two crucial areas -- technology assistance and tutoring help for students who fail the soon-to-be-mandatory high school graduation test.

Kempthorne eliminated $5 million that the state had been funneling to school districts for the past 10 years for computers and other technology and declined to include $5 million that State Schools Superintendent Marilyn Howard said was needed for remedial education. There would still be $3.4 million available for technology.

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House Education Chairman Jack Barraclough, R-Idaho Falls, said scaling back "tends to send a signal that the Legislature is not as interested in technology as it was before."

Both Barraclough and Senate Education Chairman Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, warned that pulling back state support might cause the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation to rethink its $35 million commitment to a computerized school management system.

While Schroeder said the Senate committee did not put a dollar amount on either issue, Barraclough urged budget writers to allocate up to $4 million each for technology and remedial education.

Schroeder said that money and another $250,000 for an independent validation of the Idaho Standards Achievement Test would be cash well spent to give the state a solid defense of making the test mandatory for graduation. Other states that have failed to fully justify mandatory tests have paid millions of dollars in legal costs defending them against parents whose children have failed to pass, he said.

"We don't have that kind of money to throw away," he said. "Every dollar we have is important."

Brandt urged the budget panel to find another $5 million for community mental health services that could be an alternative to more expensive incarceration, and the chairmen of the resource committees called for reversal of Kempthorne's proposal to siphon $500,000 from the Snake River water rights adjudication to other programs in the Water Resources Department.

They warned that inadequate support could slow down the effort to prioritize more than 150,000 water right claims throughout most of the state and stall the process that is now within only several years of completion. It is the largest water rights adjudication in the nation's history, already taking 17 years and costing more than $60 million.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Denton Darrington, R-Declo, pointed to needs for additional probation and parole officers, State Police troopers and people to coordinate state and county juvenile corrections programs, although he said they could probably wait for another year.

But the state's financial situation only worsens a year from now because of the loss of the temporary sales tax revenue and expectations for just a moderate economic recovery.

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