by Logan Finney, Idaho Reports

The Idaho Senate adopted a resolution Monday that would reinstate rules for the joint committee that crafts the state budgets. The House would also have to adopt the resolution for it to take effect.

“For the last two years, we’ve been in – let’s call it negotiations, for a lack of a better word,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Winder, R-Boise, who sponsored the measure.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 118 would adopt the rules for the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, but only for the rest of the 2024 session and the interim before the next session.

“The goal then would be to get the two bodies to agree to what the rules would be for the next session,” Winder said. “This is really a stopgap for the end of this session and the interim.”

JFAC, as the name suggests, is a joint entity consisting of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Appropriations Committee. The committee has dramatically overhauled its process for crafting budgets this year, which included partisan disagreements in January over whether the two-thirds threshold in the JFAC rules to reopen budgets would apply to early “maintenance budget” bills.

“It’s a very unique committee, as those of you who have served on it realize,” Winder said. “It needs some rules in order to operate properly. It’s unlike any other joint committee that we have.”

The new maintenance budget process has been the most widely discussed detail out of JFAC this year, but the disagreement over procedures and rules for the joint committee originates with the election of Rep. Mike Moyle, R-Star, as Speaker of the House in 2022.

Moyle sponsored HCR 23 earlier this session, which passed the House but hasn’t received a hearing in the Senate. That resolution would amend the Legislature’s rule on joint committees to specify the House and Senate budget chairs serve as co-chairs of JFAC, and that they alternate each day which presides over the joint committee – a provision already in the JFAC rules that Winder is pushing to re-adopt.

“We’ve attempted to reach a consensus between the two houses as to what the rules would be, and we’ve been unable to do that,” said Senate Finance chair Sen. C. Scott Grow, R-Eagle.

The Senate adopted the resolution in a unanimous voice vote. It now moves to the House.

Grow told Idaho Reports after the floor vote that the lack of rules has not kept JFAC from completing its work this session. He said the committee has functionally been following the old existing rules, even though they have not been formally adopted.

Winder, on the other hand, told Idaho Reports that without adoption of those rules, JFAC does not have the authority to operate as it does. That includes considering bills without taking public testimony and advancing bills from one legislative chamber to the other without a second committee hearing.

“We could object to everything they’ve done,” Winder said. “They have things to do during the interim, including the rules, and I want to put the pressure on.”

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