The Legislative Council is meeting today, and the bipartisan panel that handles legislative matters between sessions has unanimously , approved a motion from Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, to add one more attorney bill drafter to the Legislature’s budget request for next year, at a total cost of $105,000, including salary, benefits, equipment and training. “I have been, as this committee knows, concerned about staffing levels in LSO (Legislative Services Office) for some time,” Horman said, “and tried to think of ways to do it without actually increasing FTP (full-time positions), but repurposing them. I think the time for that discussion is behind us.”
A year ago, Horman set off a furor by calling for repurposing some of the venerated Office of Performance Evaluation’s research staff to provide more budget analysis, including quick-turnaround analyses of whether state budget investments are paying off. At the time, she said the budget-writing Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, on which she serves as House vice-chair, has the same number of staffers as OPE, and it needs more. The independent OPE, overseen by a bipartisan committee, conducts deep studies on the performance of state agencies at the Legislature’s request and has won national awards for its work.
“I think it’s time to start getting our staff up,” Horman said Friday. “My motion is a modest motion for one staff. I’m certainly open to others who may want to increase that.”
Horman said she asked LSO to research its staffing over the years. In 1993, when the division was created by consolidating several sub-divisions, it had 64 FTP, she said. “During that same year, for the rest of the statewide FTP, it was 15,763 for all FTP’s for the state – executive, judicial, legislative,” she said. “In the FY ‘21 budget cycle, we now have over 25,000 – 25,423 employees. That’s an increase of over 61% for the past 26 years, or about a 2.3% annual increase. In the meantime, LSO for RY ‘20 authorized 65 FTPs. So that’s a one-staff increase over that same 25 years. That’s less than one-tenth of 1% annually. So I do believe it is past time to start making sure that our staff has the support they need to support us.”
The Legislature currently has five attorney-bill drafters.
“This will be the first new drafter position since 1993,” Horman said. “There are approximately 850 draft pieces of legislation each year, and each one of those takes a significant amount of research even before you can get to the drafting part.”
House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, R-Star, said, “I support the motion, though I would change it a little bit and take it out of the governor’s budget, but that’s me.”
He offered an additional motion to direct LSO to prioritize drafting of legislators’ proposed bills before those from executive branch agencies or proposals from state constitutional officers. “I think that our stuff should come first,” Moyle declared.
That motion passed with just one “no” vote, from Sen. Grant Burgoyne, D-Boise. He said if there’s not enough staff to draft the needed bills, the Legislature should consider adding more bill-drafters. “I do not think that a full-time Legislature is where Idaho would benefit at all,” he said. “But I think in order to keep a part-time Legislature this Legislature has to be adequately staffed so that the Legislature can do its job. … I certainly do not perceive this as a contest with the executive branch of government; it is not.”
Several council members said LSO needs a lot more staffers. The final decision will be up to the Legislature and governor, through the budget process, when lawmakers convene in January.
The council also unanimously approved a motion from Sen. Carl Crabtree, R-Grangeville, to add up to $250,000 to the current year’s budget for closed captioning for the hearing-impaired of all legislative committee meetings, including both during the session and in the interim. The Legislature already pays for closed captioning for all floor sessions, and this year began doing closed captioning for interim committee meetings by tapping federal CARES Act coronavirus aid.
“It’s a legal requirement to do this,” Crabtree said. “It’s not a matter of whether we want to.”
Betsy Z. Russell is the Boise bureau chief and state capitol reporter for the Idaho Press and Adams Publishing Group. Follow her on Twitter at @BetsyZRussell.
