Molly Messick was StateImpact Idaho's broadcast reporter until May 2013. Prior to joining StateImpact and Boise State Public Radio, she was a reporter and host for Wyoming Public Radio. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Mike Ferguson heads the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy.
Mike Ferguson was Idaho’s chief economist for 26 years. He left the post in 2010, and heads the new Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy, a non-profit that analyzes state tax and budget policy. StateImpact asked Ferguson to review the governor’s budget proposal, and the policy priorities it contains.
Q: This seems like a different budget than those we’ve seen in recent years. Do you agree?
A: Well, it has the beginning of a recovery. Instead of dealing with an ever-declining revenue stream, we’re seeing revenues recover. I think one could potentially question how the resources are allocated within that budget.
Q: Right. We start to see what the governor’s spending priorities are now that there’s money to allocate, right? Continue Reading →
The Idaho Legislature convenes January 9th. In advance of the session, we interviewed several legislative leaders and asked them about Idaho’s economy and what the state could be doing to boost growth and job creation.
Rep. Mike Moyle (R-Star) is Majority Leader of the Idaho House of Representatives. Moyle farms and manages farm ground, and is part owner of a storage facility, among other business interests. He was first elected in 1998.
Q: What are your personal priorities for the upcoming session?
A: I’d like to see us incentivize job creation in the State of Idaho, and that includes looking at our tax structure and how we tax individuals and corporations within the state. We need to make some changes there so we’re more competitive with surrounding states. I’d like to see us try to move down that road a little bit.
Every surrounding states have got a better climate to do business with, or to live in, or a lower tax structure on the income side than Idaho, which is not a good place to be when we’re trying to get businesses and jobs to come here. Continue Reading →
This is a boom time for agriculture, and Idaho’s upswing far outpaces national growth. While total U.S. net farm income soared from 2010 to 2011, rising by 28 percent, a report released today shows the state’s net farm income rose by 88 percent in the same period.
Report co-author Paul Patterson, an agricultural economist, says there’s a simple explanation for the disparity. “If you look at the crops that we have in our mix compared to the U.S., we have better overall price increases for the crops that we produce in Idaho compared to the nation as a whole,” he said. Continue Reading →
Idaho Department of Insurance Director Bill Deal speaks at this morning's AP Legislative Preview.
In order for Idaho to pursue a state-run exchange, the Legislature must sign off this session on spending federal grant dollars. Â Idaho Department of Insurance Director Bill Deal, Rep. Vito Barbieri (R-Dalton Gardens) and the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry’s Alex LaBeau presented their views of the exchange this morning, offering a preview of the health insurance exchange debate that’s likely to dominate the upcoming session.
The state Department of Insurance is moving forward with plans for a state-run exchange, operating on the assumption that an upcoming Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act will not affect the health exchange component of the law. The department’s most recent draft bill is available here.
The Idaho Legislature convenes January 9th. In advance of the session, we interviewed several legislative leaders and asked them about Idaho’s economy and what the state could be doing to boost growth and job creation.
Rep. Maxine Bell (R-Jerome) is co-chairman of the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee. JFAC is the committee that crafts the annual state budget. A retired farmer and school librarian, Bell was first elected to the Idaho House in 1988.
Q: Are you approaching the session with a strong sense of what the main issues and discussions will be?
A: I think, as a rule, the issues come along once you get there and people start talking to each other about what they’ve learned out in their districts. And then if you look at some of the issues that failed last year or didn’t come to fruition, you can almost assume that some will be back. Continue Reading →
The Idaho Legislature convenes January 9th. In advance of the session, we interviewed several legislative leaders and asked them about Idaho’s economy and what the state could be doing to boost growth and job creation.
Idaho Legislature / State of Idaho
Minority Leader Rep. John Rusche (D-Lewiston) was elected to the Idaho House of Representatives in 2004. A retired physician and former health insurance executive, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for Regence BlueShield of Idaho and Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah.
Q: What are your priorities for the upcoming session?
A: Personally, there’s a lot of issues involving health care, everything from the catastrophic healthcare fund, which I’m on the board of, to Medicaid and funding for various health care services that we’ve cut over the last few years. Then, of course, the big one is the health insurance exchange and cooperation with the Affordable Care Act. I think that’s going to occupy a fair amount of my time. Continue Reading →
The Idaho Legislature convenes January 9th. In advance of the session, we interviewed several legislative leaders and asked them about Idaho’s economy and what the state could be doing to boost growth and job creation.
Idaho Legislature / State of Idaho
Rep. Lawerence Denney (R-Midvale) is the speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives. He has also served as Assistant Majority Leader and Majority Leader, and he was first elected to the legislature in 1990. Denney says he believes in “as little government control in our business and personal lives as possible.”
Q: Looking ahead to the upcoming session, what are your priorities, and what would you say will be the major topics of discussion?
A: Of course, my priorities are to run the session efficiently and get through it as quickly as possible. I think the session will be as it has been in the last two or three years. The top issues are going to, in most cases, come down to money. Even though the economy has improved some, we’re still down from the high point in revenue collections in 2008. So there are still some very challenging issues that involve the budget.
I think one of the major issues that we will be discussing in this upcoming session is the insurance exchange idea, and I think that will take a considerable amount of time, whether or not we actually accept the federal money to set up the state-based insurance exchange. Continue Reading →
Idaho is among the states where employment has dropped most significantly compared to its pre-2009 peak level, as this interactive graphic from The New York Times shows. The accompanying article points out that the drop in employment has been most dramatic in some of the states that experienced the greatest fluctuations related to the housing boom.
One fact that stands out is how far employment has fallen in some of the same states where the residential real estate prices rose the most during the boom and fell the most during the bust. – The New York Times
The Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers also put Idaho toward the bottom of the list in terms of the change in employment the state has seen since its job figures hit their low point. Idaho falls in the middle of the pack in terms of employment change since November 2010, with .8 percent growth.
Prominent legislators agree the Idaho Legislature is hard to predict. “You know, the interesting thing about the legislature is you never really know what the big issues are going to be until you get there,” said House Majority Leader Mike Moyle (R-Star), when asked what he thinks will be the defining debates in the 2012 session. “You get down there and there’s something that pops up that’s a big issue and you never thought it would be.” That said, there is consensus that whether or not Idaho should create a state-run health insurance exchange will be one of the biggest questions before legislators in the months ahead.
Idaho Legislature / State of Idaho
House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, from Star, says Idaho should not create its own health insurance exchange unless it is given enough leeway to tailor the exchange to state needs.
Health insurance exchanges are a primary component of the Affordable Care Act. By their most basic description, exchanges are new organizations — marketplaces — created to make available health insurance options more clear and more competitive. In the health insurance market, individuals and small businesses don’t have perfect information or a great deal of bargaining power with insurers. A health insurance exchange would lay out the private and public health insurance options, explaining plans in terms of benefit levels and costs.
Under the Affordable Care Act, states can create their own exchanges or wait for the federal government to do it for them. Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter supports the creation of a state-run exchange, and Idaho has moved forward to receive a series of federal grants. Many Idaho legislators, however, are not convinced the state should establish its own exchange. Continue Reading →
In Idaho's tight-knit community of real estate brokers and buyers, no one would share Charlie Bryan's name with a reporter. Drive past his office, though, and there it is, on the sign.
While reporting our recent story about Idaho farmland prices and investor interest in cropland, I ran across a quirk of Idaho law that posed a bit of a challenge: sales prices aren’t public information. Idaho is one of ten states that are known, in the real estate business, as “non-disclosure states.” For a better understanding of what that means, I called up the Idaho State Tax Commission’s Property Tax Policy Supervisor, Alan Dornfest.
Dornfest says “non-disclosure” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not that Idaho prohibits disclosure. It’s that the state doesn’t mandate it. “There is no disclosure law,” he said. “We simply don’t have a requirement, like most states do, for one of the transactors in that land sale, or building sale, or whatever it was to tell a government entity the sale price.” Continue Reading →
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