By Melissa Davlin, Idaho Reports
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare has identified 12 administrative rules chapters that it says are no longer needed — and is bracing itself for a potential huge workload in upcoming months.
During the Thursday IDHW board of directors meeting, Tamara Prisock, Division Administrator for Licensing and Certification, said IDHW currently has 83 chapters of rules. After the 2019 Legislature didn’t reauthorize administrative rules at the end of the session, Gov. Brad Little instructed each department to review its existing rules and make recommendations as to which the state should keep. (Read about that fight here.)
Over the last month, IDHW reviewed each of the existing 83 chapters, and found 12 that were either redundant, as they were addressed elsewhere in statute or other rules, or no longer needed, as they were written for programs that no longer exist. Click here for a list of those chapters, as well as the justifications for eliminating them.
The process doesn’t allow for going through the rules with a fine-tooth comb and eliminating individual lines. Instead, departments had to consider entire chapters.
“In the reauthorization, it had to be all or nothing,” Prisock said.
But that isn’t the end of the work, Prisock said. At the beginning of June, each agency will publish two notices: One that lists all fee rule chapters, and one that lists all non-fee rule chapters, that the state wants to reauthorize. Though many of those rule chapters have been in place for decades, they will all be listed as temporary proposed rules.
As temporary proposed rules, each will be subject to a 3-week public comment period. During that comment period, if 25 or more people request a public hearing on an individual chapter, the department is required to have one, Prisock said.
“There could be a significant amount of work that comes out of publishing those two notices in June,” she said.
