Main Street Town Hall Episode 3—Senator Cook & Rep. Mickelsen
Watch on YouTube
Click Play Below
…
Listen On Apple Podcasts
Click Play Below
Listen On Spotify
Click Play Below
Follow Along With The Transcript
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (00:00):
Welcome to Main Street Podcast, an opportunity to talk to Idaho's elected leaders about the issues that matter to you. Welcome back to the Idaho Main Street podcast. I'm your host, Brennan Summers. In England, they have a term they use kind of a s slang term. They say chuffed. Well chuffed. And it means you're very pleased or very happy. And today I'm well chuffed to have two really good friends, people that I've known for years back on the podcast to talk about some issues. We've got Senator Kevin Cook and representative Stephanie Michelson, both out of district 32. Senator, thanks for joining us today.
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (00:39):
Oh, thank you. I'm excited,
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (00:42):
Representative. Good to see you. How are you?
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (00:45):
I'm doing better. Got a little colder laryngitis this week, so if I sound scratchy, it's not intentional.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (00:51):
Okay, noted. Yeah, you sound good. It's coming through. Well, we we're really excited. The idea of this season of the podcast is we've got two people on the inside of the State House right now, you two that can talk to issues. We've had Senator lent on, and if you haven't listened to his episode, any of our listeners out there, he talks about school facilities and get on and listen to that. But this is kind of like insider baseball for nerds. We get to talk about the proposals and the issues that are coming up and we're really excited to talk about those. Education is an issue that we talk a lot about on the podcast and it seems to be an issue that the legislature spends a lot of time with. Senator Cook, I'm going to come to you first. Why is it that you think that education issues kind of take up so much time and attention in the State House these days?
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (01:39):
Because it's the number one priority in the state. I believe it's our future, our children, that's where it's at. They're going to be here after we go. They're the ones that when we get old and they're laying around, they're the ones that are going to be taking the torch and moving forward. So we need to take care of 'em, make sure they're educated, they know the history and what's going forward. If we don't, we'll all be sorry.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (02:06):
Yeah. So it's justified you're saying the time that we spend on education.
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (02:10):
Absolutely. Yep. It needs to take a majority of our time.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (02:15):
Representative Mickelson, when you first ran for office, you talked about being a former art mom that was spent a lot of time in the classroom and throughout your first session in the legislature you worked on a lot of education issues and you came out very quickly in favor of supporting choice in schools in Idaho, the choice we have, but strongly against the idea of a voucher program or sending private dollars, or excuse me, sending public dollars to private institutions. There's been a proposal that's been talked about recently. We'd love to talk a little bit about today that would give a tax credit, educational tax credit to students attending private schools through public funds, the tax credit of IT representative, why don't you talk a little bit more about what this proposal will do and then your initial response to it.
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (03:03):
So I've met with the sponsors of the bill and they kind of outlined some of the proposals. They wouldn't give me an actual copy of their bill, but so far from what I've learned, they're going to have $10 million. It would be for grants upfront for low income families. That is a means tested, but they would have $40 million that would then go to families through a $5,000 per child grant or not grant, but educational tax credit. So it would come right off the bottom line on their taxes and one of the committees I serve on is rev and tax. And so to have that come right off of their taxes and then it affects the way that Jfa can then in future years go budget money because the tax credit comes right off the top and then future allocations of the general fund come after this tax credit. So that part of the proposal really concerns me along with several other options that are in there.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (03:59):
Okay, perfect. Senator, one thing we love about you is you're very thoughtful in the way that you kind of weigh pros and cons of legislation. And we know there's not bill text yet, there's not a bill number. So you haven't seen a bill in front of you, but as you look at the philosophy of public dollars for private institutions, what are your initial reactions to this proposal? How are you feeling about it?
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (04:23):
Excuse me. First off, I am for school choice and we have school choice in Idaho. And in fact in Idaho Falls we have a wide array of choices, which not everybody in Idaho has what we have in Idaho or in Idaho Falls. So as a member of jac, I'm a little concerned about that your tax credit takes effect before JAC ever gets to see that money. It's gone. It never enters the general fund. It's gone. And so for a member of JAC to say, okay, now we want to go ahead and budget it, well it's gone. It's not there. It's not part of our revenue after that point. And we've had other bills that have kind of done the same thing or tried to do the same thing. And for the most part we says, no, we're not going to do that because it really does take it off. And JAC will never see that unless you go back and revisit it, but it won't show up as a revenue, it's
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (05:30):
Gone. Well, I think it's a little disingenuous if I can jump in this conversation for somebody to say this won't affect budgets. Because the reality is if that money comes up off the top and you have a downturn in the economy and you have to start making cuts throughout the budget, these guys, this tax credit will come before anything else. So when you say it won't affect anything else, it's going to affect your police protection, your transportation funding. It could affect funding, building funding, any other things that come out of the same pot of money. And so this misinformation campaign that's going on that it doesn't cost public education is not true because it's going to come out of the state budget and the state budget is the state budget. The coffers are the same whether you siphon money off here or you siphon it off there, the amount of money that they have to spend remains within this pot of resources.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (06:31):
Yeah, exactly. So Senator, you bring up the point that Representative Mickelson carries on that with the money is kind of earmarked before it's appropriated. You don't have the ability to budget it. What else, Senator is at risk in the general fund that you are deciding as J fac to fund? What other programs are funded in Idaho out of that pot of money?
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (06:56):
Oh, basically everything. So your department of land, your agricultural, which is huge for Idaho, your agricultural, your regular public school, your higher education, wealth welfare, Medicaid, all of that stuff, it's lowered. The amount of money that you have to work with is going to be lowered because that came out before we ever get it, get to see it, get to appropriate it to any other budget.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (07:32):
Representative Mickelson, you've mentioned before that other states have done similar things. What have we seen as the byproduct of states like Arizona, Wisconsin who have passed similar legislation?
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (07:44):
So what we're seeing across the board in other states who have adopted ESAs, educational vouchers, tax credits, whatever you want to call them, because at the end of the day it's all this movement, a federal movement or a national movement to basically discredit, defund and then dismantle public education. And so what happens is they come in with just this little line item and say, we're only going to spend this much and it's going to stay that way. But then quickly they get all these people buying into it and pretty soon it just outpaces their budget. Right now they're going to have a $400 million shortfall in Arizona and they're spending a billion dollars on these tax credits or vouchers, whatever you want to call 'em in Florida. Within a three year time, they went from spending 130 million to 1.3 billion. Indiana is the other state that came in and has given us a presentation and they said it went three times with they're planning and then it went seven times with their planning.
(08:52):
And I think another interesting point to bring out in this is you're bringing kids into the system that you're paying for that had never been in the system. These were families that were wealthy families and they get their nose in the door saying they're doing this for the poor kids or for the socioeconomically challenged children. But at the end of the day, it's really an entitlement program for the wealthy people to get their taxes back. And we have a responsibility as state legislators to look at what's best for our state. And there's a couple of specific problems that we have legally with it, and there are two constitutional problems with it. The first one is the blame amendment. The blame amendment. They refer to it as the blame amendment, but it's basically the amendment to our constitution or a part of our constitution that said, we will have separation of church and state.
(09:46):
They were particularly worried in the 18 hundreds when they put this in about the Catholics in the Mormons and they did not want to see any particular religion controlling the state. And so they put that in there as a protection. And we have honored that and we have not pierced that bell of the blame amendment. There's been several articles in education news and other places that have pointed out that we haven't yet. But once we do, then if we pay for private schools, we have to pay for parochial schools, for religious schools. We could be paying for the School of the Satanic Cult. We could be paying for the school of the neo-Nazi skinheads or the School of the Sharia law. And so you get into a very slippery slope once you go down that pattern. That's the first constitutional problem with it. The second one is we have, as part of our constitution, it says that we believe that for the benefit of all society, we need an educated electorate.
(10:44):
We believe in common, thorough free public education. It does not say private education. And like Senator Cook said, he said he supports school choice and I do too. And last year we voted on a bill to make that possible that you can go to any school that you want to in the state of Idaho that's a public school or a public charter school, but when you start funding people's private decisions with public tax dollars, we have a sacred trust to use those in the way that fits the constitution that we have to follow. So that's a real concern for me. I don't know what Senator Cook thinks about that, but
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (11:21):
Let me just add one of my other concerns if that's okay. Brennan, please. Again, I haven't seen this bill that's coming up and you might think, well, why haven't you? I says, well, it hasn't come to the Senate side yet. As soon as it does, I will make time for it. But we had a similar bill with the idea of the state's going to put some money in here and you have no accountability. And in fact, that was one of the allegations that the central committee came out against me about for voting against that bill simply because if I am representing you, I'm taking your tax money and I'm going to give it to somebody that has no oversight of how that money is spent. I don't know about you, but that would be the last person that I would vote for as a taxpayer myself and as representing you as taxpayers, I believe wherever I put that money, we better have some kind of oversight and be able to see what's going on there. Again, I don't know if this bill has that, but my guess it probably does, but we need to have an oversight of where the money's going.
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (12:38):
Help us. I think there's two prongs of oversight, so lemme jump in here. The two prongs of oversight are tax dollar spending, but it's also oversight in curriculum and content content and kids actually progressing. So there's two ways that we need to have some sort of accountability and I'm told by the bill maker that they'll have it because the state tax commission can audit you. Well, I don't know about many of you, but I don't want the IRS in my back pocket auditing me and we're saying we're going to open it up so you can be audited for a school voucher, but yet we're not going to have any accountability to the school. And the thing I've heard from multiple people is they want accountability for the schools that they're having kids progress, and yet we're going to with these educational tax credit entitlement programs, we're going to turn around and just give them 5,000 bucks and we're not going to expect any kind of outcome for the amount of money we're spending.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (13:32):
Representative. Help us understand how in a lot of these states what the projected cost of this was ends up increasing so much. So what they thought it was going to be, why is it that they see in a matter of years such exponential growth in the cost?
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (13:52):
Well, for one thing, what they saw in Arizona was as soon as they issued tax credits, then people or the schools would then raise their tuition and then they would also have what they call strip mall schools that would just pop up in strip malls. They would take people's money then they didn't even necessarily have to finish providing an education, took people's money and then they could even disappear. Then you've got a kid or a parent that's got to take a kid back into the public school system or then pay for another system. And then you also did what they called stacking of vouchers. And so you could get, not only could a parent have a tax credit, but you could have businesses theoretically speaking could apply for it as long as a hundred percent of that went to the kid for their education. As a business owner, I could then say, I'm giving out a million dollars in scholarships, give out these tax credits.
(14:48):
I look like I'm a great business. I can give tax credits or I can give out vouchers for schools or scholarships and the cost goes up exponentially and then they don't think about the participation. But once privately educated parents, privately educated kids, their parents figure out they can have a way to have the taxpayer pay for it. They're all in. Part of the problem with this bill, from what I've been told from the sponsor is that it's going to be a $40 million first come first serve. So you know what that tells me? It's the person with the best accountant. That's the first one in the door that's going to get their money. But anybody later on down the list, it's going to be out of luck. And I don't think that's good tax policy either.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (15:32):
Sure, sure. Senator, you talk about accountability and the importance of that and it's clear that you take your role as safeguarding public funds very seriously. What is it that your constituents, the taxpayers have told you about this type of proposal, but also there are other priorities when it comes to education funding?
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (15:54):
Yeah, people want to know where their tax money's going to. They want to make sure it's going to something good and something that they can say, yeah, I can hold up my flagpole and say I'm on board with that. And that's not always the case. Sometimes it gets spent somewhere that's not my priority, but might be my neighbor's priority. So that doesn't always happen. But boy, we need to be able to show what the money's being used for and how it's being used. And are we being successful? Are we educating kids? Are they moving forward? Today in J fac, we had a federal grant come up and we want to know, okay, we're spending money. What are we getting for that? Is it being successful? Do we know what success looks like to begin with? And how do we audit that and prove that? Yeah, it's being successful.
(16:55):
It doesn't mean just, oh, look at everybody that signed up for it. Just because they signed up for it doesn't mean it's success. What's going to happen on a year from now or two years or six months? What's going on behind that? So that's important, but again, there's limited money in the state of Idaho, you can't do everything you want. And my number one priority is figuring out ways to do facilities. I think that's important. And I think the majority of Idaho is interested in getting some facilities on board. You've got a school in, you always hear the bad sad stories. And it is sad in salmon where they've got sewage running underneath the open sewage, running underneath the school, met with six superintendents across the state for the different regions this morning for a half an hour talking about facilities and what we could do.
(17:50):
And one of the things that I was telling us, it would be nice to have a cookie cutter standardized facility plan for elementary, middle school, and high school wasn't a big Taj MA hall, but we put the money in the classroom, not on the outside. And we build this standard school and we get really, really good at it. We vet it and we put that across the state. And I would like to see that be part of the governor's plan for facilities. And it might not be part of it this year, but hopefully next year maybe. But I think facilities for me, number one priority, we got to get that.
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (18:31):
Well, and the Supreme Court has said that the state of Idaho is responsible for the building of those schools. That's what the Supreme Court said. And so I think that we try to kick this can down the road, but I'm with Senator Cook on this one. We need to focus on having buildings. And like he says, we'll have to have plans for small, medium and large sized school districts. But that's one way we can really make inefficiency in the system is by doing things like he's talking about. And then if the community wants to come in and build a Taj Mahal of the gym on the side of their plan, great. We don't care. Right? No, that's local control
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (19:09):
And that's important. As representative Mickelson said, we're not saying the state come in and supply all the money and build the school for 'em. Now there still needs to be skin in the game. Local control still needs to be there, but I do believe that the state needs to step up a little bit, otherwise we're going to face a suit and again, waste the money. So we don't need that, so we need to do something with it.
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (19:36):
One other thing that was important with the Arizona system, what they found by the time they were in it, just a few short years that spending on vouchers went from rural areas to the urban areas, and on average was costing $300,000 per school building in the state of Arizona. That money didn't go to that program at that particular building. That's per building, not per district, per building. Can you imagine what would happen if we did that across the state of Idaho within say four or five years? We had that same scenario. Think about local property tax owners. They're going to have to go past bonds to levies to just keep their doors open. Other school, if we go down this road, I think it's financially, physically completely irresponsible and for people to say they're conservative and support this, I think it's a total contradiction myself.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (20:33):
Yeah. So we've spent the majority of the time here talking about the issues that we have philosophically and fiscally with public dollars going towards private institutions. I don't want this to seem all doom and gloom. It's pretty clear that both of you would have issues with that idea. I want to wrap up today talking about maybe something a little more optimistic about what gets you excited about education yet, Senator, you talked about what we can do with school facilities and representative, you came in on that too, of how important this is our constitutional obligation. What else when it comes to education policy do you see on the horizon that gets you excited? Let's start with you, representative.
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (21:13):
Man, that's a loaded question. I guess as I visited with local schools within my district, probably the poorest one within my district, they have a problem that has happened after Covid, and that's that parents are having to use their older children for childcare for their younger children. And we have huge deficits in some of these poor socioeconomic class schools. And sometimes some of their ideas were maybe we need to lengthen the day of the school for these children in certain areas because the socioeconomic class pays a big role in it, and attendance has become a huge issue. So we've got to figure out, and Jac rightfully so, has now tied funding to average daily attendance. But now school districts and even the state, we've got to figure out because they've done some serious studies on this and the absences are causing tremendous problems and learning losses for children.
(22:19):
I had somebody tell me just yesterday, a superintendent, they had one kid and they were in a new semester and they've already missed 40 days out of it and they're going to lose credit. But the reality was the young man had to go to work to help support the family. So when we talk education, we've got to make sure that we get the youngest of the young, we get them learning to read, get 'em engaged in realizing that school is their job every single day, and we need 'em to do a great job at their job and then get 'em excited and feel like school is a safe and happy place for them.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (22:53):
Fantastic. Senator, what comes to your mind as you look on the horizon of education policy in Idaho that you look forward to?
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (23:00):
Well, I am still excited about launch. I just think this is a great bill and we're still getting a little fallout from it. There's still the knife in the back and twisting it a little bit that we're getting. But I am really excited about what the possibilities of what that can do. We have a different generation. We can say, well, I paid for everything and worked hard. And then partially that's true, but we often forget, well, how much did the state pay for your tuition, your university career or your high school? A lot of times we forget about that. There is money all the way. You didn't pay it all by yourself. But this launch program, as a technical person, I look at for a century, America led the technical piece in the world. We were on top of it. China over the last decade is catching up with us.
(24:02):
And we can sit back and say, you just let those kids, you let those kids find their own way and pay their own way. And that's a great idea. But another couple of years, I'm not going to be able to go out and fight to save my liberty. And it's going to be a different way. It's going to be fought through hacking into banks and electrical grid systems and everything like that. And I'll tell you what, we need some smart, sharp kids. And part of that is going to come through education. We need nuclear energy. We need kids that can fit engineers that can come and figure out how to build nuclear plants and improve upon that. Everything we look at points back to technology. You can't pick up a newspaper who doesn't newspaper anymore. You can't read anything on the internet except for something about ai. AI is something new. And it's exciting what we can do with that. And in my opinion, launch is going to help us get to that point where the next generation is going to keep America free, going to keep our liberty and our rights. And it comes with education. And that's a cost that all of us need to do, and it's worth it.
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (25:23):
And I'll add that CEI has seen huge jumps in all their enrollments across the board. They have all their major programs are completely full, and they could open up a whole nother section on several of them and have those completely full. So kids are really taking advantage of this tremendous opportunity that they've been given. And I think we should all be excited about what Launch can do for keeping our children back in the state of Idaho rather than sending them, shipping them out of state permanently.
Senator Kevin Cook, District 32 Idaho (25:52):
And maybe just add another thing. There's a lot of people that are really, really don't want it and are ticked about it. There needs to remember there is a sunset on this. If it doesn't work and it might not, okay, then it comes to an end and we don't fund it anymore, and we find out another way. We try another way. And that's what we as Americans do. We try something, if it doesn't work, we try something else, and that's where we're at. But boy, I'm excited to see where we're going. And the start has certainly got every indication that it's going to be a great success.
Brennan Summers, Main Street ID Executive Director (26:29):
Yeah. Inspiring comments from both of you as we look forward to the future. Now, you two don't go anywhere. We've got a few more things we need to talk about, but for this episode, that's all the time we have. So to our listeners, thanks for joining and we again appreciate Senator Representative Stephanie Mickelson, district 32 joining us today. Thank
Representative Stephanie Mickelsen, District 32 ID (26:47):
You. Thank you.
