The Legislature may understand ranked choice voting, but that doesn’t mean they follow it. The Legislative Executive Board this afternoon passed over the top vote-getting interim study proposal and picked the second- and third-ranked topics to assign for its summer homework.
As I reported yesterday, the 68 legislators who responded to a survey on fifteen summer study topics ranked mental health and safety in K-12 schools, access to mental health services, and the extraordinary cost fund for special education as the subjects that most interested them for review.
As Rep. Karen Soli suggested in her written comments to the survey, Executive Board members today considered combining the two mental health topics. Chairman Senator Brock Greenfield recognized the logical overlap of the two topics—legislators willing to serve on either interim committee would likely be interested in both topics. But Senator Jim Bolin said that the K-12 topic was already too broad to produce fruitful discussion in an interim committee that would meet just five times at most. Bolin maintained that interim committees need narrow topics to produce focused, passable bills. Rep. Hugh Bartels said K-12 and statewide mental health services are “vastly different” issues dealing with different populations.
Senator Jeff Partridge suggested narrowing the mental health topic to focus on using savings from the coordinated care agreements the state has been working on with Indian Health Service. Rep. Spencer Hawley felt that suggestion narrowed the topic too far, excluding the mental health needs of non-IHS populations. Senator Greenfield agreed that looking solely at uses of coordinated-care savings would do a “disservice” to the issue raised by the K-12 mental health/safety topic.
Yet in the end, the Executive Board voted to drop the K-12 topic entirely. The board first approved a motion from Speaker Mickelson to assign the extraordinary cost fund for special education to one interim committee (and note, this fund is not the entire special ed budget, just an additional $4 million in leftover money for which schools can apply for unbudgeted needs each year).
The board then took up Speaker Mickelson’s second motion, to approve the general mental health services topic for summer study. Senator Billie Sutton noted the oddity of choosing to study the second- and third-ranked topics and not study the most popular topic, K-12 mental health and safety. Maybe we should have seen this coming after the full Senate declined to take up Sutton’s surprise resolution this morning on school safety, but the board chose to avoid the specific discussion of school safety. The board also did not discuss why it was dropping the top preference of the surveyed legislators; it simply approved Mickelson’s second motion (unanimously, Sutton, too!), placing statewide mental health services alongside the extraordinary cost fund for special education and leaving school mental health and safety unaddressed, at least in the 2018 interim.
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In one minor bummer for Legislature nerds, Chairman Greenfield said the policy from now on will be to publish the total points interim study proposals receive in the annual survey but not the individual rankings or comments submitted by each participating legislator. Senator Greenfield said he was not aware those individual votes and comments were being disseminated… even though they’ve been published in past years. Senator Greenfield said something about such information maybe affecting topic choice, but every other vote that legislators make is a matter of public record. Why would we make an exception for legislators’ preferences for summer study topics?
Besides, don’t you guys see how much fun I have running the spreadsheet in your votes? Leave that data public so we can at least check your work, if not have another useful gauge of your policy priorities!