The Idaho Spending Index serves to provide a fiscally conservative perspective on state budgeting while providing an unbiased measurement of how Idaho lawmakers apply these values to their voting behavior on appropriations bills. Each bill is analyzed within the context of the metrics below. They receive one (+1) point for each metric that is satisfied by freedom-focused policymaking and lose one (-1) point for each instance in which the inverse is true. The sum of these points composes the score for the bill.
Analyst: Niklas Kleinworth
Rating: 0
Bill Description: Senate Bill 1123 provides a supplemental appropriation of net-zero fund transfers to the Office of the State Board of Education, Department of Lands, State Historical Society, Military Division, and STEM Action Center for fiscal year 2023. It also appropriates a $1,000,000 supplemental to the Division of Veterans Services.
Does this budget contain hidden fund transfers or supplemental expenditures that work to enact new policy or are not valid emergency expenditures? Conversely, are fund transfers only made to stabilization funds or are supplemental requests only made in the interest of resolving valid fiscal emergencies?
Senate Bill 1123 affects the expenditure of $401,800 in funds appropriated to the Office of the State Board of Education, Department of Lands, State Historical Society, Military Division, and STEM Action Center through the American Rescue Plan Act. These funds were accidentally appropriated from the wrong account, preventing them from being spent by the respective agencies. This bill corrects the error, pulling the funds from the ARPA State Fiscal Recovery Fund instead of the ARPA Fund.
Senate Bill 1123 also includes a supplemental appropriation of $1,000,000 to the Division of Veterans Services. The division experienced a similar error to the budgets described above; however, this error was made in their supplemental request for the 2022 fiscal year. The supplemental provided for in SB 1123 corrects the error, allowing the agency to spend these funds.
Being that the provisions in this legislation merely correct an error from last year’s budget-setting activities, this legislation will be rated neutrally.
(0)
