“We are anticipating next week to have a lot of paperwork coming to our desks,” Taylor said. “Committees wise, we are almost finished reviewing all our rules, which is a positive thing. We are going to start having our real committee meetings next week...This last week was a really good week to get a feel for what’s coming up.”

Some of these standing committees are beginning to send routing slips out for print—basically, drafts of potential legislation, identified by a number.

The slips may or may not become bills, and cannot be posted online until they achieve official bill status. All draft legislation is the property of the requesting legislator and is confidential until formally considered by the standing committee to which the legislator has taken the draft to request approval for introduction, according to the Legislature’s website.

If the committee agrees, the slip is approved for printing and begins the process through the Legislature as an official bill. If the committee does not agree or takes no action, the slip dies in committee. If the draft is withdrawn by the legislator before formal committee consideration, the draft remains confidential and is not a public record.

“[Routing slip forms] really provide private time that you can adjust, change or even tear [potential bills] up if the committee chair allows it,” Rep. Jack Nelsen, R-Jerome, said. “You’re taking it to committee chairs or whoever you please and it can still be changed adjusted or pulled back as people can rebut it or support it.”

House Minority Caucus Chair Rep. Ned Burns, D-Bellevue, said he is focused on the Legislature’s yearly update to the tax code as tax season approaches. Each year, Idaho passes a law conforming its tax code to the latest federal tax code “to create an ease of process for tax professionals,” Burns said.

“It’s critical we get this done, and there is no other way to conform to tax code than to do it every year since tax codes change so often,” he said.

Burns said that he keeps specific attention to the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, where members of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Appropriations Committee meet to analyze available revenue and state agency budget requests in order to set a balanced state budget each year.

JFAC takes the first few weeks of session to discuss the goals for money appropriated the previous year before specific committees present their individual budget requests.

“What happens in the first couple weeks of the session, historically speaking, is that the JFAC folks will present their high lever goals and how they will allocate money that they were appropriated last year,” Burns said. “They are still going through their agency review and in the next week to two weeks they will receive budget requests from the specific committees. Each member of the committee will work individual budgets after that.”