BOISE, Idaho — It’s in the State Constitution: Idaho must pass a balanced budget.
Democrats are concerned about how to get there, but Republican Idaho House Speaker Mike Boyle says he’s not too worried.
"A very small impact. Five percent."
That’s the number House Speaker Mike Moyle thinks is the hole lawmakers must fill to balance the budget, and he says at the end of the day, they will get the job done.
“But I do want to clarify something that is kind of bothering me. You keep hearing that the Legislature did a bad job last year and that they overestimated revenues and all that crap. You hear it from the Democrats all the time. Listen to me— a bunch of garbage. We left town with 430 million on the bottom line. We cut taxes, what, 400 million. We increase budgets. We did a good job of covering all the state’s needs.”
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The three big issues Speaker Moyle says to keep a close eye on are Education, Medicaid, and Corrections.
'Sacred' education budgets and the hunt for fraudsters
"The education budget is sacred in this building. We all support education, and we’ll do our best to see that the impacts to the education budgets are minimal."
“We will protect education, we always do. But we’re going to start looking for waste and fraud and things like Medicaid, and you saw some of this stuff going on. And concerns about you know, about daycares and that— we’ll make sure that’s not going on in Idaho, you know, we’ll get some of that stuff and we’ll make some budget adjustments down, and we’ll go home, and it will be good.”
Idaho prisons becoming overcrowded
“We’ve got a prison that’s full of a lot of people, and we’re shipping people out of here because we’ve got so many people incarcerated in the State of Idaho, and there’s a cost to that. And that’s one of the budgets that you know you’ve got to pay for 'em when they’re there, and those are the three that you’re gonna want to watch at the beginning of the session. Those are the three— I think driving issues.”
Being House Speaker comes with many responsibilities, but I asked Moyle what if he had never gotten into politics.
Asked if Mike Boyle wasn’t a politician, what would he be?
"Just what I am, a farmer. I love being a farmer," smiled Moyle.
