Senator Camille Blaylock

Here we have Idaho is sponsored by First Class Cleaning, Tom Luna and Victor Miller.

Welcome to Here We Have Idaho. A local show focused on celebrating Idaho and all it makes Idaho

great. Here we have Idaho will highlight important issues and events that impact Idaho's

citizens and families. Each week we will visit with those people who are writing Idaho's

story and keeping the spirit of Idaho alive and well. Just like our state song says,

there's truly one state in this great land of ours where ideals can be realized.

The pioneers made it so for you and me, the legacy will always provide. Here are your hosts,

Victor Miller and Tom Luna. Welcome to another episode of Here We Have Idaho and Tom Luna with my

co-host, Vic Miller and Vic. The first part of March spring is definitely here. We're seeing

snow in the mountains too, which brings us water. But it's another beautiful day in Idaho.

We just are so blessed to be here, aren't we, Tom? By the way, do you know our guests well at all?

Yeah, I know a little bit. I've known her for a long time. I'm a proud father today. We're

interviewing Senator Camille Blalock, my daughter. She's in her first term serving as the Senator

from District 11. That's a called well area. I just got to tell you, Vic, when Camille is the

fifth of our six children, and she definitely got bit by the political bug. We'll ask her why she

ran in a moment. But I will tell you this, when she was growing up, if there was a presidential

debate coming on that evening, she would send out some message like, big debate tonight,

pizza and wings at my house. I mean, it's like the Super Bowl, right? And so I just love her so much.

I'm so proud of her. But officially, welcome to here, we have Idaho Senator Camille Blalock.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate the chance to be here. And yes, you are the most proud

person. I think of me being here. Yeah, thank you. We're going to jump right in and talk about

a number of issues. But before we do that, you know, you're younger to be here. But I remember

when you called and said, Dad, I want to run and help me walk through this. And I remember saying,

I'm not going to talk you into this because I know what you're getting into. But I would advise you

to step it. Talk to the people about why did you run? You've got two beautiful young children.

You know, you're a very busy person. But talk about why you chose to run.

Yeah, you know, I thank you for asking the question. And I do have kids that are in a charter

school out in Caldwell. And I love my community. And I wasn't super happy with some of the

representation at that time. And I kept looking around like, okay, someone should really, you know,

run against this guy. Someone and I realized that someone could be me because I grew up in a family

obviously. My dad is politically involved. And but I remember being a kid and going to, you know,

the school board meetings and rolling around in the back, why they were up there meeting and

doing their thing. But that's what you did. My parents were a great example. My mom was very

involved in Boy Scouts. Like you give back to your community. You serve your church. And so I

realized like, oh, shoot, I am an adult now. And like, maybe that's what I'm supposed to do. And

so this was kind of my entrance into that of serving the community that I love and giving back

to the state that has given me so much. And it is uncomfortable putting yourself out there and

letting people that don't know you have such a strong opinion about you is not natural for me.

And, you know, I had to really consider if I wanted to run for reelection. We're up for reelection

again this year. The elections in May. And, you know, I learned a lot last year. My first session,

I got a lot done last year. But I am way more effective this year. And I understand so much more.

And so just having that knowledge, I am going to run for reelection just to put that to work for

another two years. I think I'll, I think I can do better work now that I've kind of got my

feet under me. I feel like last year I was kind of learning how to walk in this year. I'm definitely

running. So, yeah. And let's, before we get into some of the things that you've worked on and

what's currently happening in the legislature this year, I remember one, one of the conversations

that you and I had was that you see people that are making decisions that have an immediate impact

on you and your family. And many of them are older. And the decisions they're making are going

to have far more impact on you and your generation than they are on the generation of those

making the decisions. And that opened up your eyes to your generation better step up.

Yeah, that's right. Especially, you know, when it comes to education, you just think of how

how kids learn nowadays has progressed so much. And, and you're right, I wanted my millennial point

of view to be represented. And in the legislature and even since I've been here, there's times I have

great relationships with with everybody in this building from, you know, the far left to the far

right. I make sure to get to know everybody. And some of those older legislators who I respect and

they have great knowledge of, of our institutions and, and experience here, I do, I, I always make

it a point to push back on some of the, some of the thinking if it's kind of rooted in, well,

this is how we do it. Well, let's talk about why we do it that way. Is it still serving the end

goal? And just making sure to like push back where I can and kind of bring that newer younger

perspective. Same approach you took in before you got involved in politics in your business

life, you were, you were helping institutions and companies realize that they needed to look

towards the future for new types of solutions and processes and not be so bound to the way they've

always done it. Yep, that's right. And, and is what you're doing is it actually solving the problem

that it's, that it's intended to? And is that problem even a problem anymore? Some of the things

that we have put in place were problems, yeah, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, but that's not really,

you know, culturally a problem anymore. That's not really. And so just, you know, one of the things

that we just did was repeal the Idaho Women's Commission. It didn't have any funding behind it,

but it was, this was something that we had, it had sat on the books. And at some point,

it was funded and they had a whole board behind it. And, and for me, I, I was like, oh, yeah,

this is a no-brainer, of course. And I even stood up on the floor. Well, well, before we took the,

the vote on the floor, my seatmate who sits next to me on the floor leaned over a man and said,

hey, am I allowed to, am I allowed to vote yes on this? As a man. And I said, yes, you have my

permission to get rid of this, you know, to, to get rid of the women's commission. And so then I

stood up and just said, hey, I have had every opportunity. I have never felt a disadvantage from

being a woman. I understand the differences between being a man and a woman. And I relish in those

differences. And, and I just said, and then I gave every man on the floor. I said, and if any man

needs permission to, to kill this thing, you have my permission. As a woman and, you know, a millennial

woman that grew up in this state, it is no longer needed. And I think that's a testament to maybe

what the work that that group did do is, you know, my experience growing up in, in this state.

And then share with them, share with them. You need to share with them how you close that debate.

It was classic. Oh, I did say, you know, I've never been for equal pay because I know how to advocate

for myself. And I don't want to make as little as the men do. And that got a couple laughs on the

floor. All right. Let's, I want to now shift and take with the approach you just mentioned

about looking at things differently and talk about one specific thing. Obviously, I'm going to start

when it comes to education that's still the number one passion of mine. And something that has been,

the state has been struggling with is we know we have more needs at the local level for special

education funds. And it's not like Idaho has been stingy with funds for education over the

past 10 years. They've increased almost twice, you know, a doubled. But talk about the bill that,

that that you brought forward. It just passed the Senate. But not just what it accomplishes,

but I want to get into the approach to finding the money because I think that is part of thinking

outside the box. Yeah. So the bill is specific to high need special ed kids. And so in the state,

there's been some studies done of our gap of funding for special education. And as special

education, I mean, the number of kids that qualify on an IEP has grown significantly in the

last 10 years, IEP. Yes. And, and so this isn't necessarily funding for just the average kid that

has some ADD and needs, you know, some extra help in class or whatever. This is for high need kids

being any student whose expenses are over $30,000 a year. Can this, this their district can then,

you know, qualify to get something reimbursed. Okay. I want to pause right there. I think there's

some people listening that are shocked that there are some students. And this isn't negative to

the student, right? This is, this is not drawing attention to them specifically, but that there are

those kinds of costs associated with high need special education children that districts bear

because they get pretty much the same funding for that child as they get for every other child.

Yep. That's right. Our funding formula doesn't differentiate between the kid with, you know,

some ADHD and needs a little service to a kid that is in a wheelchair and has a feeding tube.

And it's difficult because we are required by federal law to educate every child that walks

through a public school door. And that, in my opinion, is a great thing. It's one, you know, in

America, we educate everybody. It's the big equalizer. And so we are required by federal law to

provide these services to this child so they can get an education. And one thing that, you know,

when it comes to, if a child's death, let's say, and they come to a school that's not covered by

Medicaid, that cost, and they have to have an interpreter. And it can be electronic or it can be

in person, but that can get expensive. So let's say it's $60,000 to educate that child in the school.

And the school districts now have to either pull money from their operational cost.

They have to, you know, cut within their spending. They don't do maintenance on their buildings.

Some have ran levies, so raising property taxes to help cover these costs. Because again,

they are federally required. And this has been tried in the courts many times. And if you're

sued for not providing this, you will lose. It's been done multiple times. And so this fund basically

says, if you school district, you put in the first $30,000, your skin in the game to help fund

this child's IEP, anything additional to that, you can get, you know, 100% up to 80,000, and then

up to $100,000 total for the child, that they can get reimbursed and just help offset some of

those costs. And hopefully avoid school districts having to go out and pass a levy to be able to

to educate their kids. The nice thing, or I think that I'd like to give credit to our

superintendent is she did get creative with where the funds came from. She pulled cobbled together

some of the funds as the largest chunk coming from driver's ed education.

This was a fund balance city.

Correct. Yep. There was a fund balance. And so she was able to pull, you know, 4 million from

there, another million from some interest that had grown on a different account. And so she really

got creative, which in a year that we have fun, you know, budget constraints, that's exactly

what you need to do. And I appreciated her doing that, not just coming in here and asking for new

money, new ongoing funds. She pulled to get this together and said, hey, let's just do this as a

one-time fund. This will get us through, give some relief back to the districts, and sorry,

I appreciated that approach. Again, welcome to here we have Idaho, just

grateful to have Senator Camille Blaylock here and my good friend and co-host Tom Luna.

And so let's pivot from education issues and talk about the budget because you are on both

the doge effort and you're also on health and welfare, which are both dealing with the reality

of the budget. So last year, the legislature left about 450 million dollars of cushion, you know,

for the bottom line. We saw that there was some changes in the direction of some of the revenues

from tax, the tax cuts that we had done last year, the 450 million dollars in tax cuts.

The big beautiful bill comes along, we didn't expect what that would be and that's $155 million

in fiscal year 2026, which is reduced revenues that we expect to take in from the state.

And so just we're setting the, we're setting the stage here for this year's budget.

The governor did the Idaho Act last year which cut across the board 3% other than education.

And now we're here in this year and so I want to chat with you about the doge effort that you've

been doing and how doge is helped maybe contribute to the solution of the budget realities that we

have this year. Let's start there and then I want to talk about health and welfare.

Yeah, the budget is definitely the hot topic around the capital. I don't know if I would say doge

has done a lot to help with the budget side of things. We spend a lot of time going through

the different agencies. I mean, there are so many agencies and commissions and boards and I was

very surprised, especially you know, constitutionally, I think it was in the 70s a initiative had been

passed by the people that we can only have 20 government agencies. And so we have 19 government

agencies and then we have one called the agency of self governing, the self governing agency or whatever.

And then under that is about 200 different. So that's how we get around, you know,

following the constitution. And so that was eye opening and just like, okay, maybe we need to

consolidate and restructure. But obviously those are longer conversations. My hope is that

those efforts and digging into that continue. A lot of what has come from doge is a lot of code

cleanup. So every agency submitted, obsolete, at a date, just you know, when when bills go into

effect or are voted on, there's usually implementation, information, whatever. So all of the agencies

submitted that to doge. We reviewed those. Those are the bills that you're seeing go through the

through both bodies now. None that really had a significant savings on money. I mean, a couple,

you know, commissions that combined. So it saved a couple hundred thousand here and there.

But but the budget is interesting. I mean, yes, the governor took his the 3% cut during the

interim. And to be honest, I wasn't super happy with the way that that was done. Not that I,

obviously we needed to cut. We have a we have to balance our budget in the state. And so that's

he needed to cut. I think it was a missed opportunity to be a leader to go in and say, let's

look at the departments that have really grown in the last five to 10 years and go in there and

really dissect our what the money that we're spending here. Is it providing the outcomes that

we're expecting? Is it serving the purpose that we want it to? And cutting from those those

agencies, what I don't appreciate about it across the board cut is you get what you incentivize.

And we're incentivizing these agencies to always carry some extra fat in case a cut comes, right?

And instead, you know, we say we want efficiency and we want these these agencies to run, you know,

lean and efficient. But when you do a cut like that, you actually you're telling them that you

actually don't incentivize them running at max capacity. And so I didn't appreciate that coming

into the session. I see the legislature now doing the same thing. We added a 1% cut to the

2026 budget. And now we're going to take another 2% off of 2027, which again, I'm fine if that is

setting the target number that we need to cut, you know, 1% from the total budget. And then that's

the number that we're cutting to. But to just go across the board cuts like that, it just doesn't.

That's not what you would do in business. What you would do is you would dissect your budget.

You'd cut out programs that aren't needed. You would lay off staff that aren't needed.

Only at the end of the day after you've done all of that thoughtfully, would you say, okay,

team, we're all going to link arms. We're going to take this hit together. And we're going to weather

this. But that's not that's not where we're at. And so that's that is disappointing to see. And I've

definitely, you know, pushing back on that. So there has been some detractors that have said,

you know, we could we should use a scalpel. And really, why are we rewarding the agencies that

maybe have too much budget and we're disincentivizing those who've been great stewards who are running

kind of lean and mean. And it sounds like that you would agree with with that approach. Yeah, that's

exactly right. And I had an intern poll every agency, their budgets, their maintenance budget,

right? That's what we call it maintenance budget from 2015 to 2025 just to see just flat growth

across our agencies. The first budget bill that we're going to hear on the floor is for this,

you know, safety. And that includes corrections, juvenile corrections, juvenile corrections in

the last 10 years has only increased 16.9% right in their budget. Inflation during that same 10-year

period is 35%. We also have had a half a million people move into the state in the last 10 years.

And so if you do the population inflation adjusted, right, however you'd name that, you're closer

to 50%, right? So any agency that's 50% growth in the last 10 years is pretty much flat, you can say.

They haven't really taken an increase because of population growth and inflation. So they've

taken a significant cut, right? If you look at that. So why would we treat that the same as a health

and welfare or the governor's budget, the governor's has increased by 140%. Lieutenant governor, I

called him out on the floor for this was 90% increase. You have some programs that have increased by

a thousand percent. So why would we go and cut everybody the same when you have growth at a level

that is not not equal? So let's talk us specifically about health and welfare. So the Department of

Health and Welfare's budget is in two significant pieces. The first is the Department of Health

and Human Services itself. And that in 2026 was about 235.4 million. The governor asks that that

budget get cut to 224, about 11 million dollar cut. Jay Fack is looking more to 24 million

dollar cut. The other part of health and human service, I mean, health and welfare is Medicaid

and Medicaid in 2026 was $994 million. And the governor wanted to see 1 billion 47 so an increase

and Jay Fack is actually saying no, we want a decrease of 25 million. So talk about that is the

second largest part of our government behind education. Talk about how you can work within the

budget constraints when you're talking about Medicaid. Yeah, Medicaid is, it keeps me up. It keeps

me up at night. I will say the cuts that are being proposed to Medicaid and some of the services

there. We use the word cuts because it's a reduction, right? We're cutting. It doesn't, but I think

there's been some misconception that things are going to be cut completely. Services are cut

completely. And I'll give you an example. So I have a friend with a daughter who has severe autism

and she's on a couple. She has some services that are provided. It's paid for by Medicaid.

She had concerns when she heard that this service was going to be cut, right? That sounds like

it's going away. So I had her come in. I had her bring her her the plan that her daughter's on

and we went through it together. And what it really ended up being was it was going to go from

about four, four services a month to three. So instead of once a week, it was like once every

10 days is what her daughter could go and get this therapy. And once I explained that to her and

showed her that this is just a reduction, she was like, okay, I mean, of course we would all love

for her daughter to have it four times a month or more. Yes, but that's not the situation we're

in. And I think she had an understanding was like at peace once we walked through it. And I was

like, this isn't a cut. This isn't going away. Your daughter's still going to get the services

that are needed, but we're just going to reduce it so that more people can have access to

some of those services. All right, folks. And if you're just joining us who are visiting with

Senator Camille Blalock from District 11 in the Caldwell area and Senator, that's odd to call

you, Senator, since you're my daughter, but I will respect that with Senator. Let's talk about

your home district. It's an ag community. There's not a lot of front burner issues on ag, but Caldwell

is one of the centers of ag productivity in the state. What are some of those things? I mean, water's

always a concern and things like that. But I want to talk a little bit about that committee

assignment because it's not a front burner issue right now, but it's still a very important part

of our economy. The biggest thing facing when I think about my district specifically

and ag is the level of growth that we're experiencing out in that area and protecting the land,

right? I mean, when you're given soil like we've been blessed with out in that county,

there's like a responsibility that comes when God gives you something like that. And I worry that

with the growth happening at the rate that it is, that's my biggest concern is making

sure we don't push out into the Agland bill. We grow along the freeway and within the municipalities.

What I would like to see is growth to push out towards the the Boisey foothills where we can't

grow anything. You know, people will say water's the issue. We can figure out the water issue out

that way. We can figure out the water issue out to the Boisey foothills. You can't figure out how to

replace the soil that we have in Canyon County. So that's the biggest thing. That's probably a

bigger, bigger than what we take on in the Ag Committee. That's a lot of reports from our different

industries that still, I mean, Ag is still the number one industry in the state. And so it's

interesting to me that that is such a sleepy committee with it being the largest producer in our state.

Yeah, and we've got a couple minutes here and I want to get into a transparency.

That's not a new concern of yours, you know, and you talked about it even long before you became

a senator. But everybody wants transparency unless the light is shining on them. Then there's some

pushback, a little resistance. Talk about here, you're the current efforts going on when it comes

to transparency. We've got a couple minutes here. Yeah, you're exactly right. And why does the

light make them uncomfortable? That's what I want to know. And there's this Joe Roganski,

you've probably seen it, but I think it's so, it's so true when he says, you know, before COVID,

I would have said that vaccines are the greatest invention of mankind. And after COVID,

I'm not sure we went to the moon, you know. It's like, but it's so true. There's just this level

of distrust everywhere in all of our institutions, but especially in government. And so, you know,

thinking, how do we counter distrust? How do we get people to have confidence in our organizations?

And the only thing I can think of is transparency. More sunlight, more access to information,

and put it all out there and give the people everything. And we have nothing to hide. And that's

the only thing I can think of. And so yeah, we've, we've got a couple bills that are coming that

strengthen whistleblower laws for people that work in the state, sunshine on any agreements,

contracts, things that the state enters into any of the agencies. And, and the work that the

controllers doing with transparency, Idaho is a fantastic step of of creating the technology base

to be able to just continue to grow that transparency. But yeah, that's, that's a big push of mine.

What about state employees, like just being able to access?

Yeah, that's an interesting one. Having state employees, when you ask for information or some

insight on their job and their, their tentative to talk to, you know, their, they are hesitant.

That's the word to talk to you about things or share information. And that was an eye opener.

So one of the bills that I have this year is completely opening that up. That if a person that

works in the state for any of the agencies in good faith is partnering with a legislator on

something that that is, that is fine. And they're protected to do that. And they don't have to get

some kind of, you know, approval. All right. Well, Vic, we've been so blessed to have

Senator Camille Blalock as our guest. And I started the show by saying I'm a proud father. Now,

you know why? And everybody knows why you had a chance to listen to this, to this, to the show

today. But Senator Camille Blalock, thank you for being on here. We have Idaho. And let's do this

again soon. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Vic, as we always wrap up the show. God bless the

great state of Idaho. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today on here. We have Idaho.

We hope you enjoyed today's show and we look forward to visiting with you for a half hour each

Wednesday and Friday at 4 p.m. on Kspd 790 a.m. and 94.5 FM. Till next time, God bless the great state of Idaho.