Vaccines, the judicial nominating process, emergency medical services, and education funding were a few of the topics discussed at Washington’s legislative briefing. Republican Representatives Jarad Klein and Joe Mitchell, along with Democratic Senators Kevin Kinney and Rich Taylor were all in attendance for the briefing Saturday. Last week, 2.3 percent state supplemental aid funding was approved. In regards to educational funding, Taylor said he’d like to see more dollars, “A lot of that is sited, ‘Well, we don’t have the money.’ And we do have the money, we just don’t have our priorities quite right, and I’ve said that for a long time. It was mentioned, well you know, we spend 55% of our budget on education. Well, we used to spend about 60% of our budget on education. And I’m wondering why we’re going down instead of up on that, because it’s the most important issue that really, that there is in the state. One place that we can get some money, and I’ve been doing a little bit more research on this, is in our tax credits, the money that we’re handing out to people is sometimes good, sometimes for no reason at all, and sometimes to people that really just don’t need it.”

Another concern presented by a constituent, was holding criminals accountable by following up with jail time and parole. Kinney said prisons are full and case loads are heavy, but serious criminals need to be held accountable for their convictions and rehabilitated, while lower level crimes could be dealt with community-based corrections. Klein added there is legislation regarding this, “So right now there’s, oh, it’s a big reform bill. Senator Dawson from Council Bluffs has been working on an omnibus reform bill for the criminal code to address some of these concerns, some of the lower level, get them out of the way, get them back in the community. But address, make sure the high level stays in prison to serve their term. This has been a long, on-going issue, but that’s going to be a significant step to free up court time, free up jailers.”

Additional support for emergency medical services and not advancing philosophical exemptions for vaccines were supported by all four legislators. While there was a party-line split for changing the judicial nominating process. The next legislative briefing will be March 16th at 10 a.m. at the Washington County Courthouse.