House bill was a reasonable compromise

This is old news now but as one of the sponsors of House Bill 439, the sales tax credit on food purchases, I was disappointed that the bill did not make it out of committee. Even though other legislative proposals are being worked on, the reality is that any legislation that goes beyond House Bill 439 in reducing revenues in the upcoming fiscal year will have difficulty in getting approved.

House Bill 439 was a reasonable compromise between no grocery sales tax relief and complete elimination of the sales tax on groceries. The legislation would have provided varying relief to all Idaho citizens with the larger credit going to lower income citizens, but yet providing some relief to all Idaho citizens. This compromise was considered by many to be affordable this next fiscal year and provided a "beginning to an end" of the grocery tax for Idaho citizens. Again, given the failure of this compromise legislation to pass in committee it is doubtful that we will see any legislation pass this year that will provide grocery tax relief.

The affordability of grocery tax relief leads me to a discussion of revenue expectations for the state that is the basis for agency spending appropriations for the upcoming fiscal year.

The Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee, of which I am a member, is currently listening to presentations by the various state departments relative to their budget requests for fiscal year 2009. At the same time we also review Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter's budget proposal for each of the agencies which is oftentimes different from the agencies' request.

The committee then develops its appropriation recommendations based on this and other information and forwards the recommendations in the form of appropriation bills to the full legislature for consideration. Any appropriation bills that are not passed by the legislature or not signed by the Governor have to go back to the Joint Committee for reconsideration.

At the time of writing this article the committee was provided information indicating that our revenue estimates may be too high given the current economic condition being experienced nation wide.

Given this, there is beginning to surface among committee members real concern about the amount of revenue that we can expect to receive in the upcoming fiscal year. This is going to be reflected in the appropriation bills coming out of the committee, meaning that some increases in agency spending that would have been proposed will probably be reduced, including funding increases for education and state employee salaries, both of which are apparent priorities for the legislature this year.

We begin setting the budget on Feb. 18 and I will be able to provide more information as this process progresses.

(George Eskridge, R-Dover, represents District 1 in the Idaho House of Representatives)