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It's arguably the most important committee at the legislature, and it was at the center of negotiations on how to budget moving forward.

This week, the co-chairs of the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee share how those negotiations shook out and how that affects state agencies and Idahoans.

I'm Melissa Davlin.

Idaho Reports starts now.

Hello and welcome to Idaho Reports.

This week, House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel shares her concerns over some of the sessions proposals.

Then Representative Wendy Horman and Senator C Scott Grow, co-chairs of the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee, discuss changes to how the budget committees will vote in the future.

But first, let's get you caught up on the week.

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Rules and Administration Committee passed a bill that would criminalize providing gender affirming medical care to transgender youth, including hormone therapies.

The vote came after lengthy testimony from people who were concerned about treatments that aren't FDA approved.

As well as stories from transgender youth and their family members about how much hormone therapy has helped them and how critical it is for their mental health.

We do not allow minors to get tattoos, smoke, cigarettes, drink alcohol, sign legal documents.

Why would we allow them to make decisions to cut away healthy bodily organs and to start down the road to chemical castration at age 12?

We've had testimony in this building by a girl who went through that starting at age 12, 13.

Since I started estrogen almost three whole years ago.

My mental health has gotten significantly better.

I've been able to get myself off of a cliff that I wasn't sure if I would ever find myself off of.

I feel so much better and more complete with myself.

In less than 24 hours.

I will be going on a plane to go to a consultation for SRS or sexual reassignment surgery, which is planned to be taking place in a little over a year.

I see this as my final step into the body that I should have been born into.

This bill threatens to not only bar me from receiving this care, but also from accessing the hormones that have singlehandedly not only improved but saved my life.

It threatens to mark some of the kindest, most loving and caring people I've ever met.

My endocrinologist and every other medical professional that has helped me through my transition as criminals and sentence them to up to ten years in prison.

20 years from now are we losing children because of remorse for what happened in when they were 16?

I mean, we don't know.

And that scares me.

You know what we do as adults, that's on us.

But what we do to our kids, that that's on a parent and that just scares me.

And we had a lot of discussion about teen suicide, which again, is just I can't go there it’s terrible.

But there was not convincing testimony that this would slow that down or change that.

The full House is scheduled to consider the bill next week.

On Monday, the House narrowly approved the Idaho launch grant program expansion by one vote.

The program would give $8,500 for graduating seniors to pursue job training or higher education within Idaho for certain in-demand careers.

The legislature approved funding for in-demand career training during the September special session, but at the time didn't attach any policy to it.

Proponents argued the program will help Idaho's go on rate while addressing Idaho's economic and business needs.

While opponents argued this meddles with the free market and restricts students.

The bill is now in the Senate's hands.

The House passed a bill on Thursday that would change who is in charge of the Office of Performance evaluations.

Majority Leader Megan Blanksma sponsored the bill.

take issue with the idea that there would be a loss of credibility just because a council of majority Republicans would do something.

I think that that is casting aspersions and don't agree with it simply.

I also think if you look at Leg Council, it's not even reflective of what we have sitting here in our supermajority.

The only difference between Leg Council and JLOC is that in which when you talk to participation by Republicans versus Democrats is it's completely equal, except for the speaker and the pro tem.

OPE are the only ones that would lean one way or another.

That said, everybody else has equal participation.

And I am not in any way bashing on OPE that is not the point of this, because it is not about OPE what this is about is changing the administration so that it is more reflective of what this body looks like.

House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel is the co-chair of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee, which currently oversees the Office of Performance Evaluations.

Representative Blanksma’s bill would eliminate the committee.

Associate producer Logan Finney sat down with Representative Rubel on Friday morning to discuss her opposition to the bill, as well as plans for the rest of the legislative session.

You've been a member of that committee of JLOC for a long time.

You spoke passionately on the floor this week against the change.

Can you run me through some of your concerns?

I think this bill is one of the most dangerous, if not the most dangerous, thing, making its way through the legislature right now.

And part of what makes it so dangerous is lack of public awareness.

So I'm very happy to be here helping to inform the public on this.

The Office of Performance Evaluations does.

They're kind of our watchdog and state government and as all watchdogs should be.

They have neutral, nonpartisan oversight.

They are overseen by a perfectly balanced bipartisan committee called the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee with four Republicans, four Democrats.

That has worked remarkably well.

This has been our system in place for 30 years, and it has worked like a dream.

It's been a model in these hyperpartisan times.

This has been a model of bipartisan collaboration and cooperation.

And the result has been the Office of Performance evaluations has yielded incredibly impactful, important and informative studies.

And really, so many of the things that have happened in state government came out of these, I'll call it OPE reports.

The reason we're talking right now about fixing school facilities is because of an OPE report that showed $870 million in school building repairs needed roofs, plumbing.

The reason we're talking right now about paying school classified personnel, special ed folks, etc.

more is because the study by OPE showed that the state is only covering 60% of their salaries and local taxpayer local property taxpayers having to pick up the rest.

They illuminated very serious problems in our state mental institution, many violent attacks, that dead patients were being reported as just fine.

They have uncovered really important things that have driven critical legislative changes.

And this bill, if it goes through, would end neutral oversight.

It would put it under basically Republican leadership control, but it would completely gut the mission of OPE.

They would not be able to do these deep dives evaluations anymore, really, under what they're proposing.

Sure.

Tell me a little bit more about that, because currently JLOC requests reports from OPE and they do a number of these evaluations each year.

Yeah.

What would the bill change about that audit and evaluation scope?

Yeah, they would completely change their mission.

So right now, as you noted, they do about between three and five evaluations a year.

There's only eight people that work for OPE, so it's a pretty small agency if you can even call eight people an agency.

But they are small but mighty.

They do amazingly impactful work, but they really only have bandwidth to do three or five of these 3 to 5 of these deep dive analysis easier.

What this bill proposes is that their mission is completely altered, that they now are supposed to review every contract for every government agency every year.

That alone would be impossible for these eight people to do, and there's no proposal of adding staff and that they're supposed to provide just general oversight of the performance of every executive agency.

That is nothing like what they do now.

This is you're talking a 20,000 foot overview.

I think realistically, in terms of what eight, eight people can do in overseeing every single agency, in every single contract.

Plus, we already have an audit function under the Legislative Services office.

So it's you know, it almost seems a bit redundant of that, but it's it's nothing like what they do now in terms of really doing deep investigative evaluations.

A majority of Republicans voted for the bill.

It was not quite a party, not quite a party line vote.

Very close.

Have you talked to your counterparts over in the Senate about how it will fare over there?

Well, interestingly, I did hear from some of my counterparts in the House.

A number of folks came up to me and said, you know, we have real concerns about this bill.

But leadership made it clear that we had to vote for this bill.

So I think there was some very heavy pressure applied behind the scenes to pass this bill.

The due date for whatever reason, they don't like OPE and they don't like JLOC and this is getting rammed.

I am going to be commencing conversations with on the Senate side and I certainly hope, you know, so many people have benefited from these studies over the years, those in, you know, those suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia.

That was one of the impactful studies really.

Anybody in the education or health care sphere should be speaking up to defend OPE and the JLOC.

So I certainly hope all those people will come out of the woodwork and speak up to the Senate and maybe this can be stopped in the Senate.

I hope the public will speak up, too.

Last week, when we had Speaker Moyle on the show, he said he was waiting to see how the bill fared in the Senate before he appointed the House members to the Legislative Oversight Committee.

What reports are currently pending that JLOC can't take up before those members are appointed?

Yeah, there's actually a very important report right now that was requested by the developmental disabilities folks on compensation of care providers that they they need that report now.

This is this informs policy.

That's why we have these reports so that we can have the facts.

We need to make decisions about funding and policy and all these other things.

And we're in the heat of it right now.

They have come to me desperately, almost every day saying, where's our report?

And it can't be released because Speaker Moyle won't allow the committee to meet.

So we're really pushing to see if he will at least let us meet for this limited purpose of allowing this report to be released.

But, you know, it is it is needed now.

One final topic I want to touch on.

The Judiciary and Rules Committee passed a bill regarding gender affirming health care for transgender youth.

It's made it out of committee, has not yet been taken up on the floor of the House as we're talking Friday morning.

What are your caucus's concerns with that legislation?

Yeah, I suspect that bill will be up on a vote this morning on the floor.

I am so deeply concerned.

I have friends I'm going to lose, I think, from from the state if that bill goes through wonderful, loving parents whose kids need this care.

And I think it's very misunderstood.

I think everybody looks at this and they're like, oh, they're mutilating children and we've got to stop this.

That is so not what's going on here.

You know, these are really well trained professionals with a very well developed body of of skill and norms.

They're not going to run in on some kid who just decided last week that they're transgender.

These are this is only going to be care.

And a lot of it is really hormonal and puberty suppressors to give a kid, you know, time to not have to go through the permanent, irreversible changes that happen with puberty.

But again, if you're transitioning from male to female, your lifelong success in that transition, whether you do it pre puberty or after, is going to be very impacted.

If you wait until you're six feet tall with an Adam's apple and broad shoulders, you will never be able to transition in the same sense that you could pre puberty.

But they only do this with kids that have known since birth that they were trans.

These parents have agonized about it for hundreds of hours with counseling from therapists and doctors and you name it.

And they have concluded that this is the only path that will save their child from suicide.

And to deny them that path puts them in a horrible, horrible quandary where they really have to, I think in many cases look at moving out of state to save their children's lives.

And I hate to see this state make felons out of loving parents or force them to become refugees out of the state of Idaho.

he I think that's what this bill will do.

As we're seeing such hot button topics or excuse me, hot button conversations nationally around topics like transgender, health care, sex education, concerns about grooming of children.

Do you think that there's room to have a nuanced discussion about this, or is this an issue that's become too politicized?

I mean, I think the nuanced discussion has very much already happened within the parent and medical community.

It is absolutely not the case that people are rushing in and recklessly doing surgeries.

I mean, surgeries.

I don't know that they happen at all in Idaho, frankly.

Certainly bottom surgery is not happening on minors, period.

Really what we're looking at overwhelmingly is these hormones, this hormone treatment.

And in all these cases, they have spent so much time going through the medical details and the particulars of that case and the psychological implications.

I mean, every one of these cases has had six months of agonizing by parents and professionals and the kids.

There is nothing reckless or or unduly dangerous happening right now, period.

It has been solved by parents and by the medical community.

They do not need the heavy hand of government coming in and overruling the best decisions of parents and doctors.

And we would never do that in any other area, you know, no matter how many doctors in the world said your kid ought to get a vaccine.

The Idaho legislature would never come in and order parents that they have to get their kid a vaccine.

You know, there's no other medical procedure imaginable where the legislature would come in and order parents over their own best judgment and the best judgment of doctors and tell them what they have to do or what they cannot do.

This is really an outlier and an unfortunate one.

All right.

House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, thanks for your time this week.

Thank you.

We have more with Minority leader Rubel online, including her views on the Idaho launch program and the Democrats impact on important House votes.

You'll find the link at IdahoPTV.org/IdahoReports There you'll also find all of our online content.

And there's a lot after this busy week at the legislature.

You can subscribe to the Idaho Reports newsletter to get a roundup of our stories delivered to your inbox every Wednesday and Friday.

Last week, House Speaker Mike Moyle told Idaho reports that he was pushing for a change to the way the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee votes.

That debate on combining the House and Senate votes, that's how JFAC has operated for decades now.

Why the change?

Why the change now?

It makes it tough.

Imagine if you're a senator.

We'll use the Senate side and the House passes a budget.

And you had one senator that voted with the House members to send that budget to the floor.

And you got to carry it on the floor.

That's that's a that's a tough row to hoe because your your whole committee but one member said this isn't what we want to do.

And you saw it about, I think, three times last year.

It's not it doesn't happen very often.

But my concern is when those bills come out of that committee, if you saw last year in the House, we had problems, they killed some bills, there were some issues.

And I would rather have that debate as speaker, have that debate happen in that committee than than on the floor.

On Thursday, lawmakers announced they had reached a compromise on the way the budget committee will vote moving forward.

Joining me to walk through those changes, as well as the budget picture for the legislature this year are Representative Wendy Horman and Senator C. Scott Grow, co-chairs of the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee.

Thank you so much for joining us this week.

ative know you're busy Representative Horman, can you walk us through the compromise?

Sure.

Following last session, there were some concerns about budgets coming to the House floor that have not enjoyed majority support of the House Appropriations Committee.

And that's been going on for a few years.

You've you've seen it.

And so one of the ideas that came was that we could vote separately, and that was an idea our clerk had supported anyway.

And so moving through that process, we arrived at a compromise this week and are looking forward to getting to work on voting on some of the supplementals and other actions we'll need to take in coming weeks.

Are you still going to vote together like you have been for the last several decades?

We will be voting together the changes that we will also announce, and that will be the vote that stands.

But we will also announce the House vote and the Senate vote separately.

And if a bill fails to pass, either the House or the Senate side, we have agreed we've been united through this thing, that we will refer that bill to the House where it did not receive majority support.

Now, if we can keep it in committee and come to a compromise before that happens, great.

It can be held at the desk or some other thing like that.

But that is the agreement moving forward.

So for Idahoans who are watching, how might.

Let me comment on that please.

Oh, please, go ahead senator.

Totally supportive of this idea empathetic with the situation that they had.

Pretty tough for them.

For Wendy, for example, to go back and try to encourage the House to vote for something that her group didn't really vote for in committee.

FAC other thing we're going to try to do is make sure that, you know, we'll send it each direction, as it says.

But what we really want to do is work it out in JFAC together and we think we've got the team to make that happen.

So it doesn't have to become an issue.

So for folks who are watching across the state, how might this change be beneficial?

Because it sounds like for most Idahoans that this is pretty in the weeds, but what are the benefits here?

Well, the benefits are that each house gets to say its piece and feel comfortable when when co-chair Horman carries it on the floor that she's got the full backing of her side.

And if I carried carry it over on my side, I've got my group with me.

So I think it's best for everybody because it won't be an issue on the House floor or the Senate floor if we can take care of it in JFAC and that's our hope.

Additional benefits are that we keep the committee together.

We find efficiencies by listening to all the hearings jointly rather than splitting into two separate committees.

That's that saves taxpayers money by being more efficient.

So we don't have to grow our staff tremendously.

And, you know, no other bill in any other committee advances out of the committee without majority support.

And so even though we are a joint committee, we are made up of two separate committees.

And so we we hope that this facilitates stronger passage of budgets on the floor.

That remains to be seen, though.

Our teams are working really, really well together bicameral, bipartisan.

In spite of this conversation around voting, the committee is working really well together.

And I'll just make that comment, too, that it really hasn't slowed down our work.

We had about six weeks of listening to all the agency folks come in and tell us what their bills are going to be and not until next week would we begin to vote really on the budgets for those agencies anyway.

So we've been able to work around.

It hasn't been a big issue.

One of the things that we haven't seen yet from your committee are the supplemental appropriations.

Basically, bills that came in after the budget was already set for the fiscal year.

Where are we on those supplementals?

Yeah, let me help people understand.

We're actually working on two years budgets at the same time.

We have the fiscal 23 that ends in June that we did a year ago.

And then agencies will come and say, Yeah, that was great, but we need some more money here, needs more money there.

We have 115 requests.

You think about that, 115 requests to open up last year's budget.

That ends here in June and stick more money into it.

So?

So that has been something we've started working through those.

I work on the health and welfare side of things and my co-chair, Wendy, works on the education side.

We have 29 supplemental requests just in health and welfare.

So we've been working through those.

We have four that have come out as being favorable that we'll start working on this next week.

So we have a total of 19 actually ready for Wednesday or Thursday next week on supplemental.

So we'll start working those through.

And then as she was saying, our subcommittees are doing a great job this year.

We're very pleased with them and then they will start bringing forward recommendations on the actual budgets as well.

Let's talk about this upcoming fiscal year that you're going to start budgeting for.

We keep hearing it's more challenging to budget when you have more money than less.

Is that proving true right now?

In my eight years of experience in JFAC, absolutely proving true.

It's the question is going to be for the committee with this very, very large surplus, do we return it to the taxpayers?

Do we invest it in a one time basis on things like parks and recreation, improving facilities that will pay down dividends for generations or do we invest it in ongoing things that will grow government in ways that may be difficult for us to sustain in the future?

As we've heard many times in in this work, it's not the bad years that will kill you.

It's the good ones in setting budgets that you can't pay for in the future.

We're seeing very it we're seeing indicators right now of a recession.

Certainly announced layoffs here in the valley, the Boise Valley, with some major employers announcing layoffs.

So those are things I think all of our committee members will be taking into account as they set the budgets.

One of the things the governor is trying to do with that surplus of over a billion that we still have, that we're going to determine what happens with it.

And I hope we get a bunch of property tax because that's what I'm pushing for, relief for the homeowners.

But the governor's also he's got $300 million going for maintenance.

We have a lot of deferred maintenance that hasn't taken place.

So it's pretty wise, really on his part to try to take care of things.

You won't get credit for doing maintenance work, but he's trying to get a lot of that done.

You know, speaking of that, that's one of the smaller budgets.

One of the budgets that has gotten a lot of attention is the Medicaid budget.

There were a lot of questions both in your committee and the policy committees, the House and Senate health and welfare committees, about not just the $4.7 billion that you're looking at for this fiscal year, but looking forward and how that might grow.

Can you give us an idea of how those talks are going?

First of all, each health and welfare committee on the Senate side in the House, they were required by law to give a recommendation by the 31st of January, which they did.

Both of the.

On whether expansion would stay in place.

To stay in place.

And so they both recommended that.

Then the big question comes now that they've recommended that what happens with us, because as we go through all these different budgets, we'll be determining are we really going to keep all of that there or are we going to make some changes and we're so new into this voting, we haven't seen any votes yet out of any of our people.

And so it'll be interesting to see what kind of responses we get from them.

Now, the letters from both chairmen said that they wanted they thought that Medicaid should stay in place with some caveats, with some aggressive cost reduction.

On Friday, House Health and Welfare Chairman John Vander Woude introduced a bill to repeal Medicaid expansion after his committee had initially recommended keeping it in place.

Will that debate affect how your committee approaches the budget?

I haven't seen that bill yet.

I just saw on social media this morning very briefly that that was being introduced.

So I don't I don't know what's in it.

But I do know, as Senator Grow said, that the it's on an unsustainable trajectory right now.

So we've got to make some efforts around cost containment.

We know that there are possibly up to 150,000 folks on Medicaid in the state right now.

About 450,000 people are on Medicaid, which is almost 25% of Idaho's population.

Which is amazing when you think about that.

It's a lot of folks and we do know it's doing some good.

I heard some stories this week of some folks who had life saving treatments, honestly.

And so really, our job is is to weigh the benefit of continuing on an unsustainable trajectory or trying to change that trajectory.

And we met with Director Jeppeson this morning.

I think we're we're all very committed to doing what we need to do to reduce costs.

Have you been satisfied with Director Jeppeson’s answers on what the department is doing and willing to do to reduce those costs?

We have not gotten into the details of that.

I have not.

I'm working the education budgets.

I’m doing health and welfare.

He's doing the health and welfare budget.

So we haven't gotten into the details.

We have an interim report that we funded last year that's come back with some preliminary recommendations.

But that certainly those are things we'll certainly be talking about here in coming weeks.

certainly going to be an ongoing discussion, not just this session.

I’ll just mention last year that the Medicaid budget, well, the health and welfare budget as a whole increased by about 15%.

That's a lot of money when you start a base with a few billion dollars in it.

And so I've I've been concerned, you know, if that thing extrapolates off into future years, that's a big problem.

So we've got to do something cost containment is the issue.

That's as Representative Horman said.

And since you are carrying or working on the public education budget, can you give us an idea of how those discussions are going?

Very fluid.

I would say there are different budgets from the superintendent this year compared to the governor.

And so we have differences in those that are more substantial than in in years past.

So that's what our workgroup is weighing.

Also, the the transfer of the $330 million.

Typically my first eight years we used to fight to get $100 million in.

Last year we invested $260 million.

This year we know it will be in the $300 to $400 million range, depending on which proposals move forward.

So the group is doing terrific work right now.

In fact, I had to go out of an education budget group meeting this week because you can only have five members in there and not violate a quorum rule.

So I stepped out of the room because so many people are interested in learning those budgets.

And this is what happens when you have so many new members on a committee.

They want to learn.

We want them to learn.

We've really tried to offer as much training as we could in and so very fluid, but we're making progress.

What policy bills are you waiting for to make some of those big education decisions?

Certainly.

Well, I'm bringing a funding formula bill that would change the way we fund working on that still.

I don't know that the ESA question is really delaying that.

That's a question because.

The education savings account.

Yeah.

Yes.

The school choice bill a lot of different names for that because those are not coming from the public school budget necessarily.

And so that I don't think that's a piece of it.

But the launch bill certainly has had a lot of controversy so far.

And I think there may be some new ideas around that money forthcoming.

And so we have we have a preliminary schedule for budget setting, and we're pushing the public schools budget toward the end.

Got it.

Got it.

We have about half a minute left, but I wanted to ask you, do you foresee any other big or little sticking points in this year's budget discussion?

t one of the things we've talked about is the compensation issue.

And there's a question.

For state employees?

For state employees.

We're looking at all of the statewide allocations across all of the budgets right now.

I'm not aware of any major sticking points other than Education and Health and Welfare.

Lucky you two.

You two know how to pick winners right?

I'm sure some some will pop up.

Yeah.

well, stay tuned.

We’re going ot have to leave it there.

Senator Grow, Representative Horman, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for watching.

We'll see you next week.

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