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By the Friends of Idaho Public Television.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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With chippy debates over policy and budgets and public fights over process and rules, the 2026 legislative session is going out with a bang.

I'm Melissa Davlin.

Idaho Reports starts now.

Hello and welcome to Idaho Reports.

This week, House State Affairs Chairman Brent Crane and Senate Minority Caucus Chair Janie Ward-Engelking joined me to discuss their concerns with how the legislative process ran this year.

Then pundits joined me to look back on the session.

But first, on Wednesday, the U.S.

Department of Justice announced it is suing Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, for declining to turn over full voter registration information to the Trump administration.

According to the Idaho Capital Sun, in February, McGrane told the Justice Department he didn't believe there was a clear legal requirement for Idaho to provide a copy of unredacted voter data.

Idaho is the 30th state the DOJ has sued over election information.

In a statement, Secretary McGrane said in part, quote, I'm confident in Idaho's elections and the efforts we've led to ensure secure and accessible elections.

This includes our extensive voter roll maintenance efforts leading into the 2024 presidential election with Governor Little's Only Citizens Can Vote Act.

We have worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security to review all registered voters in Idaho to guarantee that only citizens vote in our elections.

The Secretary of State's office also confirmed that the Idaho Attorney General's office will represent Secretary McGrane in the lawsuit.

Idaho Reports will continue to follow the story.

In the legislature, lawmakers spent Wednesday and Thursday working to clear legislation from their calendars so they could adjourn for the session.

A task that required marathon floor debates and even longer periods of waiting for the next vote.

We're out of here.

Yeah.

While most of the end of year debates focused on policy, Idaho reports caught up with a few lawmakers on Thursday who were still mulling the bruising budget debates from the last three months.

I think so far it's been a good session.

It's been a hard session because there have been some really hard budget decisions to make.

And that is always hard because you want to fund everything.

But at the same time, you have to be fiscally responsible and, you know, take care of the people who pay the taxes.

Those hardworking men and women who work all day, go home to their families, pay their taxes.

So it's a delicate balance.

I served on JFAC, so there were times it was very, very frustrating, as you probably heard.

But I think in the end, we've done a we've done a good job for the people of Idaho.

I think we have a balance.

I know we have a balanced budget and, we've done some good things.

Places we probably cut too far.

Which I didn't like.

But in the end, I think it's a it's a pretty good budget.

I voted for, I think all but two of the maintenance budgets.

Right.

And so those are the budgets that keep the agencies whole.

That should provide them everything they need.

Enhancements are supposed to be what is in addition to the maintenance budget.

So on a year like this, it's hard to understand why we even need to make enhancements.

our people at home with inflation and cost of living, they have to make adjustments.

So there's really no reason why our agencies shouldn't have to make like adjustments.

I didn't like how we went out and gave-asked the agencies, the directors, to say, you go and do all the cutting, That was the legislature's job.

That was our job to do.

And so I did not like that.

And so a lot of things were cut.

Were stopped that shouldn't have been.

And then we've had to come back and restart those put money back in.

And the problem with that is that then it looks like new money.

And you got people voting against it because, oh, that's new money.

We're going government.

No, we were just putting it back the way it was.

And sometimes that's really hard to understand when you're sitting here and you've got maybe two minutes, five minutes to be able to understand that so that that part of the process is, you know, I was very frustrated with.

Meanwhile, the House debated multiple controversial policy proposals, including legislation that would require county sheriffs to enter into formal agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Idaho Sheriffs Association has strongly opposed the bill, saying Idaho sheriffs already cooperate with Ice, but mandates in this legislation go too far.

Bonner County Sheriff Darrell Wheeler wrote that the proposal is, quote, the most egregious constitutional violation ever faced by Idaho sheriffs, unquote.

Boundary County Sheriff Travis Stolley posted on Facebook, quote, what matters is that the decision to participate in the program or to step back should rest with the elected sheriff, who answers directly to the citizens of his or her county.

Not with politicians in Boise who don't patrol our roads or manage our aging jail.

Still the House passed the bill.

We'll have an update next week on the fate of the legislation.

Governor Brad Little has signed a slew of bills in the past week, including a clarification on Fourth Amendment private property rights, codifying a requirement for government agents to have permission or a warrant before entering private property, restricting certain flags from being displayed in front of government buildings and adding fines for breaking the law.

Restricting public bathroom usage to biological sex.

Banning transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.

That bill is punishable by up to one year in prison for the first offense, and up to five years for the second.

A framework for AI use in classrooms and a special education funding bill.

And that's just a small sample of the policy bills that have made their way to the finish line.

We'll have more with our pundits later in the show.

Idaho reports also caught up with Representative Stephanie Mickelsen for her take on the session.

my biggest priority this year was to make sure that we did not have data centers, socializing rates across regular Idahoans.

And that bill is going to be signed this afternoon.

So we're pretty excited about that.

That has taken almost two years worth of work so that, you know that that's probably my greatest achievement.

This whole legislative session was to get that bill done.

The debate over power use data centers and the impact on existing users isn't new, and it's more nuanced than you might think.

Producer Logan Finney has more.

With the explosive growth of massive data centers across the country, many Americans are convinced that artificial intelligence and the infrastructure needed to run it are what's to blame for rising electric bills.

And in some places, that's true.

But while Idaho doesn't have the same caliber of data center incentives that a state like Virginia has, it's still an appealing location to build a new data center, both for the relatively low cost of electricity and for the state's friendly business climate.

The reliability, predictability and just the pragmatic, business climate.

Idaho checks those boxes from a business perspective.

It happens to have very favorable environmental, conditions as well.

Data center company Valor C3 provides services to mid-tier businesses that have outgrown an internal server room, but don't need a full data facility of their own.

CEO Jim Buie said Valor C3 appreciates the community just as much as, if not more, than, the low cost of power.

The company is redeveloping an existing data center facility in Boise and building a second one at the same site.

In the Idaho Power Scheme, where a typical industrial medium scale business similar to a processing plant similar to a factory.

Since Idaho Reports visited in November.

The facility is expanding even more.

The second building Valor C3 is constructing near the existing site hasn't even opened yet, and Boise Dev reports the company has already applied to build on an expansion, but Valor C3 is still small potatoes compared to Meta.

Who's planning with Idaho Power to install hundreds of megawatts of solar power generation in Ada County to help power its Kuna data center?

The new Gemstone Technology Park, being planned right next door to the Mata site, is expected to consume something like 600 to 800MW.

That's something that has us very worried.

And what we've seen is a lot of data centers looking at Idaho, or even big manufacturing, such as Micron looking Idaho and saying, hey, this could be a great place to go to.

Andrew Mickelsen is a potato farmer and the son of state Representative Stephanie Mickelsen.

She's been a leading Republican voice at the statehouse about the need to regulate data centers.

Because of the way the PUC socializes out those rates.

How are you going to to tell grandma it's okay for her on a fixed, limited income, that she's going to subsidize the next major AI plant somewhere?

It is great to see businesses coming to the state, and we do want to encourage that growth.

But at the same time, should the cost be borne by everybody else?

As farmers, we've been here.

The power usage has been here for the last 50 years.

Why are we having to pay more all of a sudden?

Idaho Power is proud of the fact that its rates are competitive, especially compared to other parts of the country.

Executive Vice President Adam Richins told Idaho Reports that reliable service and keeping rates from rising too quickly are the company's top priorities.

Over the last 15 years, our rates have average gone up 1.2% a year.

That's quite a bit less than inflation now.

We don't love that 1.2%.

It's something we're trying not to do.

But when you look at CPI compared to that, it's still pretty low and our rates generally are 20 to 30% below the national average.

But local power bills are still rising, which has electric customers worried.

This last year we did have a rate increase.

It ended up being settled at about 7%.

So that may be what some folks are talking about.

That rate case did not have any dollars related to large load infrastructure, because they pay for that all upfront.

Idaho has been very strict on this mantra of growth pays for growth.

So if you're going to come for our service territory, that's great.

We have really low rates.

You need to pay your way and make sure those costs aren't spread to other customers.

Idaho Power may be a big shareholder owned company, but it deals with inflation just like any one of its human customers.

Inflation generally has been significant in the energy business.

It has been outrageous.

Poles, transformers, the things that maybe you see out in the world, they're all at least twice as expensive as they were five years ago.

Some are 300% more.

Some are 400% more.

So as costs increase, Idaho has a system to oversee how quickly utilities like Idaho Power can increase rates.

They operate as regulated monopolies under the Public Utilities Commission, which reviews contracts and agreements in a mostly public fashion.

It's a public process.

Any party that wants to intervene that has representation can intervene.

Every time we look at a rate increase, they do all these studies and they come in and they say that this group is costing this much.

This group is costing this much.

This group is costing this much.

And so then they propose increases based upon that.

So it's not necessarily the irrigators or residential customers or even Idaho Power that decides what those rates should be.

And are these customers paying their fair share for the system?

There is evidence that's put forward.

The commissioners review that evidence, and then they make a decision based on what they're seeing in terms of what the rate should be.

Lawmakers continued negotiating this year debating whether to regulate large load users like data centers, more strictly than the existing Public Utilities Commission process.

You see legislation coming in other states because they don't have this no harm process.

Idaho does have it, so why interfere with that?

It's been really successful so far.

If you look across a map, our rates are the lowest in the nation in Idaho.

These processes have been a part of that.

So let's keep these processes in place and rely on them as we move forward.

Idaho reports reached out to the governor's office, and as of Thursday afternoon, he had not yet signed the bill.

This week, Logan Finney also sat down with Representative Britt Raybould to discuss her bill on data centers water usage that's available right now on the Idaho Reports YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Some of the most contentious debates in the last week haven't been over policy specifics, but over process and rules in the legislature.

And those concerns are bipartisan and bicameral.

House State Affairs Chairman Brent Crane and Senate Minority Caucus Chair Janie Ward-Engelking joined me on Thursday to discuss more.

Thank you both so much for joining me today.

Representative Crane, I want to start with you.

You've had some concerns that have popped up in the last week.

One of them yesterday was in a debate over procurement, which is a wonky issue about how the state spends taxpayer monies and enters into contracts.

But ultimately, you were concerned that this was a bill that went to a different committee than it normally does.

Can you talk about why that matters to the public?

Well, first of all, you got to remember these contracts are state taxpayer dollars.

And so you'd better send those bills to the committees that have worked on those bills and understand that process.

So with regards to procurement, that's been in my committee for the 20 years that I've been there, we have always handled procurement.

We know procurement.

I think representative Raybould has brought 2 or 3 bills this year dealing with changes to procurement, all to - through me - all through the State Affairs Committee.

We had a bill that came to the House from the Senate.

And the speaker assigned it instead of to state affairs.

He assigned it to health and welfare.

And I went and confronted him, and I said, what are you doing?

And he said, well, I was told to send it to health and welfare.

And I said, no, that's been in my committee for years.

And so that was part of my debate on the floor, is, you send it to a committee like Health and Welfare, who's never seen procurement, and they have no idea with what they're dealing with.

And so you end up changing the laws in a drastic way.

And on that particular issue, I think there's a lawsuit that's in play.

And so, you know, there's a lot of implications to it.

And obviously, when you deal with procurement, every year, you would you would know that there's a lawsuit in play, and you would know what they're, oh, that's what they're trying to do when they're when they're bringing that bill forward.

So, yeah, I debated against it.

And I think we're seeing that a lot more this year, where people are shopping a committee where they think it might get through easier, and instead of putting it in the germane committee, the committee where it needs to be.

We saw that with, anti teacher union bill.

It was all about teachers.

It didn't go to the Senate Education Committee, which, you know, stakeholders would be there.

It went to a Commerce committee.

And you can loosely argue that that would be okay, but it's not how it is normally done.

And for people who aren't familiar with that process, why should the average voter care?

That this is a process that normally goes this way, but people who shop for committees to find one that's maybe more favorable to this specific proposal?

Why does it matter?

Well, I think I exactly to Representative Crane's point, we know those bills.

We've seen them before.

We've seen an iteration of them before, or we've seen what's been done in the past, how we've reined things in.

And maybe we do need to do more, but we know how we got there.

And that's the problem.

When you put it in a committee where there's no history and people are going, well, I don't I don't know what's happened in the past.

And it matters.

People don't trust government.

There's already a distrust towards government.

And when they see things, what they perceive are games that are being played, although legal.

Right?

I want to point out that the speaker in the House, I don't know how it is in the Senate, but in the House side, that's the greatest power that the speaker has is the assignment of bills.

But when you take a health and welfare bill, for example, and steer it to business, or you take a state affairs issue and you steer it over to health and welfare, the individuals that work those issues are going, what in the world is going on?

One, the committee members don't understand the issue, but two, it creates unpredictability and distrust.

And my thought the entire time that I'm there is I want people to have trust in their government.

I want them to understand how it works, and I want them to trust their government.

And when they see these games being played, it creates more distrust.

And it's not good for the process.

And the reality is we want public input.

And here's the problem.

When you put it in a committee, that they're not watching it, they're not watching that committee, they have no idea.

They know they care about education issues.

They know or they care about commerce or they.

But when you put it in a totally different committee that they're not monitoring every day, they're not there.

They can't testify, they can't help us get this right.

Well, and that relates to another concern that we hear about every single year, at the end of the legislative session, which is bills coming up and moving through the process much more quickly than they would in the first 85 days of the session.

We saw that Wednesday night in the House State Affairs Committee after 7:00PM, where you were meeting, and you had one member of the committee testified that she had been hiking in the foothills and had rushed back from her hike so she could have input on this bill because she happened to check the agenda.

This, to be clear, is all within the rules of the legislature.

You can fast track a bill, but just because you can do it, should you do it?

I don't like it.

And you'll notice on my committee, since I've become chairman, we meet every morning, 9:00 AM.

Why?

Predictability.

For citizens, for individuals that want to engage in the process, everybody knows it's 9 a.m.. And one thing that you can do is go subject to the call the chair, meaning that you can meet at any time.

The problem is, again, it creates confusion for the for the individuals that would like to engage on that.

So this particular issue comes to my committee from the Senate.

They're like, hey, you need to put it on your agenda tonight.

We got to move this bill tonight.

It could have been moved this morning.

We could have taken action on it this morning, again, had predictability.

I think the problem is we're not holding to the transmittal deadline.

So we have a transmittal deadline.

That is huge.

Yeah.

Well, some people are held to it.

The minority, you know, we have to get our budgets in and transmitted or we don't get a hearing.

And for people who aren't familiar, what is the transmittal deadline?

It's a deadline that's set right before session starts.

That all bills are supposed to be transmitted from one body to the other body.

And if they're not transmitted, then they're not supposed to move.

And in recent years, the transmittal deadline is a joke.

It means absolutely nothing.

I guess unless you're the minority party.

Minority, yeah, we get held to that standard.

But the reality is the majority party can suspend the rules.

And the last week and a half, we've been suspending the rules every day to do something that's supposed to be- that suspending the rules is supposed to be in an extraordinary situation.

But we've been doing it every day, and it means that things go very quickly and we can't get the input that we need.

We don't even, sometimes we don't even get the experts to call us back in time to ask, how's this going to play out?

How is this going to work?

And we don't get the information we need.

And the irony of that is, often the end-of-session bills are some of the most consequential.

We've seen that so many times, year after year after year.

There have been proposals in the past, I don't think any of them have even been introduced or printed.

But, you know, three-day notice for public hearings.

Is that something that you think is a reality with this legislature?

I don't know that you have to go a three-day public notice hearing, you know, notice it up at three days in advance.

I think if you would stick to the transmittal deadline, and then allow things to move through after that process, you would be fine because you would have plenty of time to get it done.

But when the transmittal deadline is total- there's willful disregard for the transmittal deadline.

It's almost a joke.

What's the transmittal deadline?

No one pays attention to it.

When you violate those type of processes that have been set up, this is what you get.

You get chaos.

And what does chaos lead to?

Distrust.

And that's what frustrates me about it.

I want to make sure that people trust their government and understand it works.

I have much more with Senator Ward-Engelking and Representative Crane online.

You can find our full discussion at youtube.com/idahoreports.

Joining me to discuss the last hopefully few hours of the legislative session is Kevin Richert from Idaho Education News and Dr.

Stephanie Witt from Boise State University's School of Public Service.

Kevin, I want to start with you.

Lots of education legislation moving in the last week.

There is a whole lot.

And we've been watching a lot of moving parts.

And I know at Idaho Ed News you had the final actions on the school budgets.

You had final actions on digital learning, on the Idaho Digital Learning Alliance and cuts to that online school platform.

You had a far-reaching civics education bill passed the House on Thursday.

But right after that, you had the House pass a really startling bill that came along in the last days of the session, a last-minute bill that will restrict how, assuming it goes into law, that would restrict teachers' unions and teachers' union activities.

And it was, it's remarkable, partly because of the policy itself, the proposal itself, and partly because of how it came up in the final hours of the legislative session.

Right.

I think the proposal itself and the parts of the bill are not terribly surprising, because lawmakers have debated about this for a couple of years.

The idea of prohibiting schools from using taxpayer money to support unions, whether that is using the payroll systems to collect union dues or to allow teachers paid time off to participate in union activities.

Those proposals are, they've been through the legislature a couple of times.

The House passed a version of a bill like this earlier in the session.

Nothing new there.

But what was new and startling was that, the Senate took an education bill that really had nothing to do with unions and attached all of this union language into it, and passed that on Wednesday and the House turned around and passed that on Thursday.

It's an arcane process that's colorfully called radiator capping at the statehouse.

And this is one of my favorite nerdy terms at the statehouse.

It's called radiator capping, because the idea is you take an old car into the mechanic and they switch out everything except for the radiator cap, and they give it back to you.

They do the same thing with legislation, but not very often in recent years, and not very often on policy bills.

I mean, we've seen radiator capping before on the Senate side of the rotunda.

This is how the Senate has tried to write tax legislation for years and years, because all tax bills have to originate in the House.

So the amendment process is really the Senate's one shot at writing tax policy.

But we're seeing it now in the policy.

And we saw it on the on the union bill.

We saw it on the House side as well.

It feels like going to maybe a different world where this is perhaps going to become more commonplace in future sessions.

Just based on what we've seen this week.

We heard some concerns about the process earlier in the show with Representative Crane and Senator Ward-Engelking, but Dr.

Witt, there's also policy, totally a side, and transparency and a public participation aspect to this as well.

Yeah.

Well, we were talking about, you know, there are a lot of bill trackers you can get on, and see what happened to that bill.

But, when one bill becomes another, you know, with a complete and total topic change in the middle of the process, that sort of goes against the citizens being able to track that, unless you're there at the moment that one bill is substituted for another.

I think it does go against the norms we have, about transparency for bills being testified about in front of the public.

This circumvents that.

And it also kind of turns on its head maybe the role of committee chairs, because what has been central in this whole debate about the teachers union bill, when the union bill passed the House and came out of the Commerce Committee on the House side, it was sent to the Senate Commerce and Human Resources Committee.

The chair, Senator Dan Foreman from Moscow, held the bill.

He says he's trying to negotiate with the teachers union.

He's trying to work out, work on the relationship between the legislature and the teachers union.

What you saw with this radiator capping was, something you don't see in either the House or the Senate very often.

You saw a chamber basically override a committee chair.

I mean, committee chairs have this prerogative of holding bills or advancing bills and by and large, the House and the Senate at large has deferred to these committee chairs and given them kind of the latitude to do that.

You really saw, in this case, the Senate rising up and saying, we want this bill and we're going to get it one way or the other.

But one of the other things that we've talked about several times over the years, in addition to committee process, is also the expansion of legislative power.

And this push and pull between the legislature, the federal government, but also the local entities, whether we're talking counties, school districts, cities, pest abatement districts this year, all of it.

What were some of these legislative expansions that stood out to you this year?

Well, I think what we're seeing is a continuation of a trend we've been seeing for many years in a row here.

And that's just an increasingly long list of city or county powers that are being preempted by local governments.

Right?

Whether it's what flag you're flying in front of City Hall, or whether you can prohibit guns in courthouses or who can have a concealed carry permit in a courthouse, or whether you can- Your building code can include electric vehicle charging stations.

Last year, there were 15 different preemption bills that went through.

And I don't know what the count is for this session so far, but we see it just a continuation, the biggest one possibly being an attempt to override local planning and zoning rules about density, right?

To force cities to allow duplexes in apartment buildings more easily.

So, the intent is a good idea to try to ease the housing shortage, but I'm not sure the way to do that is to steamroll over mayors and councils.

We have less than a minute left, but as we are entering the final hours of the legislative session, what are the big questions that you are waiting to get answered?

Kevin.

I think the biggest question really goes beyond sine die, whether that happens Thursday or Friday or whenever.

The biggest question is, is this budget going to pencil out?

You know, do all of these fund transfers and the cuts and the unknown cost of the one big, beautiful bill-- Does Idaho end up right side up at the end of this budget year by June 30th?

Are they right set up heading into the new budget year?

Plenty to watch as we move forward.

Kevin Richert of Idaho Education News.

Doctor Stephanie Witt of Boise State University, thank you for joining us, and thank you for watching.

We'll see you right back here next Thursday.

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