JFAC staff roll out SharePoint, session record for members and public

BOISE, Idaho — Staff for the Joint Finance and Appropriation Committee demonstrated a new SharePoint repository and the legislature’s public session‑record site during the committee’s Jan. 8 orientation, describing how members and the public can access the legislative budget book, agency presentations and archived hearings.

The presentation, given by Keith Bybee, Division Manager of the Budget and Policy Analysis Team at Idaho Legislative Services, showed members how to download agency folders, save working copies and use a naming convention analysts will follow for presentations. "Think of SharePoint as that same mechanism" he said, likening it to OneDrive used by House staff.

Why it matters: the SharePoint repository is intended to let committee members and the public find materials before hearings, reduce the need to print the 850‑page legislative budget book, and provide a searchable archive of recorded hearings and presentations.

Bybee told members to select files and download them to avoid read‑only copies, and described a new naming convention that groups related documents (for example, using the same five‑digit agency code followed by suffixes such as "A" for analyst presentations and "B" for agency presentations). He demonstrated the front page of the budget book and pointed to a new sales‑tax table and multi‑year charts added to the book’s front end.

Committee leadership also stressed public access. Chairwoman Horman said the SharePoint repository is "simply a repository of all publicly available documents. There is nothing in there that the public, the media, [or] citizens can't see." Bybee walked members through the path to the public session record on the legislature’s website: legislature.idaho.gov → Legislative Services → Budget and Policy → Session record by agency.

Staff flagged additional practical points: saving files to a local folder (rather than leaving them in the browser) so PDFs can be annotated; the availability of a limited number of iPads and Surface Pros configured for annotation; and that staff can provide printed copies on request. Bybee and other analysts offered one‑on‑one follow‑up help for members who need individualized instruction.

What’s next: analysts will publish agency hearing materials and analyst and agency slide decks in the SharePoint repository and link those files into the public session record, which will include video and audio of hearings and an archive of interim and orientation meetings.

Speakers quoted in this story are those who presented and were recorded in the Jan. 8 committee transcript. The committee’s SharePoint and the session record mirror publicly posted legislative materials and are intended to provide the same documents in a format usable at committee work sessions.