House appropriations panel advances bill to remove vacant positions from agency budgets, expand travel reporting

The Idaho House Appropriations Committee voted to send House Bill 413 to the House floor after a brief introductory hearing in which staff described provisions to formalize reporting of vacant full‑time positions and to expand travel‑expense transparency.

The measure would require agencies to identify vacant full‑time positions (FTP) in their annual budget submissions; vacant FTPs identified under the bill "shall be eliminated and the amount budgeted for the payment of salary and wages including associated fringe benefits of such limited FTP shall be reduced in the Department's annual budget submission," as Division Manager Keith Bybee summarized the bill text to the committee. The bill also would require more detailed reporting on state employee travel for professional development to the Director Condiff, proponents said.

"The first section of House Bill 413 really formalizes a process that we currently have with budget submission," Keith Bybee, Division Manager of Budget Policy Analysis, told the committee. He said the intent is to reconcile agency salary projections with available FTP and to identify agency resources that could reduce the need for additional line‑item funding. Bybee said current practice is similar but less formalized and that Section 2 builds on recent Legislative Services Office practice of asking traveling staff to report back on what they learned and whether travel was beneficial.

Representative Petzke asked whether the travel reporting required by the bill would duplicate information already available through Transparent Idaho or LUMA. Bybee replied that the travel data is available in more aggregated form but that the bill would require detail at the professional‑development level that is not currently published: "it is available, but not at the kind of detail that you would see. So it's more aggregated… not office expenditures for this kind of professional development travel."

Representative Furness raised concerns about agencies such as the Department of Labor that may need rapid flexibility to staff up during an economic downturn. Bybee said the bill governs how agencies submit budget requests but does not prevent the Legislature or the Joint Finance‑Appropriations Committee from funding positions at a different level when adopting appropriations: "This statute would only formalize how the budgets are submitted to the legislature. The legislature still has the opportunity to fund the Department of Labor at a different level than the budget has been submitted at." He explained the timing as prospective to the next fiscal year's budget submission.

Representative Tanner moved to send House Bill 413 to the floor with a "do pass" recommendation; Representative Manwaring seconded. The committee approved the motion by voice vote; members were not recorded individually in the transcript and numerical tallies were not provided. The chair declared the motion carried.

The hearing was introductory; staff answered committee questions but no further amendments or committee referrals were recorded in the transcript.