Local lawmakers reflect on 2019 legislative session
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IDAHO FALLS — The 2019 Idaho legislative session had wins and losses for east Idaho.
The Idaho Falls Chamber of Commerce hosted its annual Legislative Review Luncheon on Tuesday. Chamber of Commerce CEO Chip Schwarze said the best thing to come out of the 2019 session was to see all the freshman legislators work together as a team with other eastern Idaho legislators.
“To me, that was the biggest takeaway. We have a team, here in eastern Idaho, that works together,” Schwarze told EastIdahoNews.com.
While seeing east Idaho legislators working together is good, Schwarze was disappointed that they failed to get Rep. Wendy Horman’s, R-Idaho Falls, school funding legislation passed.
“She put three to four years of work of putting together new school funding, and we couldn’t get it passed,” Schwarze said. “I think it would have made great steps to helping education.”
He was happy to see what the Legislature did to help workforce development.
“It’s really nice to see the governor’s putting money into workforce development,” he said. “Not everybody needs to go to college. There’s (sic) great jobs out there that you can have — making a great living wage without college but with some technical training and some skills.”
Find out what each of the 14 east Idaho legislators who attended the luncheon had to say about the 2019 session. Click here to watch the videos.