Legislative Update

Dear Friends,

Below are some recent activities and highlights taking place in the Idaho Capitol. I hope you enjoy the information. For more details, you can log onto legislature.idaho.gov where you will find bills, committee recordings, and live stream videos of our House and Senate floor sessions.

For FY 2020, the legislature appropriated $109 million in additional new General Fund dollars over the current year appropriation. This equates to a 6.1 percent increase and new funding, including:

A $49.7 million increase from the General Fund to fully fund year five of the five-year phase-in of the career ladder compensation system for Idaho’s educational instructors.

$7.3 million for a 3 percent base salary increase for administrators and classified staff, which are categories outside of the career ladder.

$21.8 million in discretionary funds. Of this amount, $7.2 million goes toward maintaining the current year funding per support unit at $27,481 and $14.6 million to include the discretionary amount to $28,416 per support unit for FY 2020. This equates to a 3.4 percent increase in discretionary funding over FY 2019, which includes funding for health insurance costs and other general operations.

Fully funding the Governor’s K-3 literacy initiative recommendation at $13.1 million for FY 2020.

Additional increases and decreases in several other distributions net a $109 million General Fund increase over the current year. The FY 2019 appropriation was based on 15,339 full-term support units and the FY 2020 appropriation is based on a projected 15,601 full-term support units, which is a 1.7 percent increase year-over-year. In addition to the amounts noted above, House Bill 153 increases the minimum starting teacher pay in FY 2020 to $38,500 and in FY 2021 to $40,000. The fiscal impact of that legislation for FY 2020 is $3,796,200 from the General Fund.

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