According to John Chatburn, administrator at OER, most of the money for the program has been spent and OER considers the program a success. “To date, over 16,000 Idahoans have received appliance rebates. As of June 20, approximately $1,254,000 has been paid out. We are still processing some rebate applications.”

The rebate program nationally as of the end of March 2011 had processed 1.6 million rebates at a cost of $239 million. The Congressional Budget Office, in assessing the cost of the program, said eliminating it would save the taxpayers the money paid out for the rebates at a time when budget considerations are a primary challenge to members of Congress.

The federal program, while administered by a state agency, began as a joint effort spearheaded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy intended to protect the environment through the use of more energy efficient appliances and to save consumers money. Specifically, money for the Energy Star program came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly called the stimulus act.

Chatburn said around 90 percent of the rebates given consisted of appliances, which include clothes washers, refrigerators and dishwashers. The remaining 10 percent were HVAC and water heaters. According to eere.energy.gov, annual savings from energy efficient appliances is $34 per appliance, water heaters $76, and HVAC around $91. Nationally, major appliance were responsible for 88 percent of the rebates, HVAC 10 percent, and water heaters 2 percent,

Not surprisingly, in Idaho the more-populated areas received the most rebates including Boise, Meridian, Nampa, Idaho Falls, Coeur D’Alene, Pocatello, Twin Falls, Caldwell, Eagle, Lewiston, Post Falls, Hayden and Blackfoot.

As far as the OER and Chatburn are concerned, the program went on without any major hiccups. “There were no major problems. In cases where a rebate customer didn’t have e-mail/Internet access, we would initiate the rebate process on their behalf from our office and have the customer mail in the proper documents to our rebate processor.”

Chatburn did say there were things the program could improve on the future, though, he added, “I’m not aware of any federally funded appliance rebate programs planned for the future.”

But if there should be another program, the keys to a more efficient program, Chatburn said, are “communication with the public and the retailers regarding the availability of rebate funds on an ongoing basis, providing easy access and quick response to customers/retailers’ questions and concerns when called upon, and to answer those concerns as quickly as possible. Last, have a good relationship with the rebate processing company.”

Texas, for the seventh consecutive year, was recognized as the best state for business growth. North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Georgia were the other states in the top five. On the other end of the scale, the bottom five states for business growth were California, seventh year in a row for the worst state for growth, followed by Michigan, New Jersey, Illinois, and New York.

One CEO, who wished to remain unnamed, said the key to business development is not complicated: “Make sure your tax scheme does not drive business to another state. Have a regulatory environment and regulators that encourage good business – not one that punishes businesses for minor infractions. Good employment laws help too. Let companies decide what benefits and terms will attract and keep the quality of employee they need. Rules that make it hard, if not impossible, to separate from a non-productive employee make companies fearful to hire or locate in a state.”

While living environment plays a significant role in evaluating a state’s feasibility for new business, overregulation and poor tax schemes counteract its significance, according to the survey. Businesses simply do not want to be too regulated and overtaxed.

How can the state stop its slide on the list and become more viable for businesses to set up shop and start creating jobs in Idaho?

According to Alex LaBeau, president of the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry, said there are some good ideas and plans for creating jobs and growing the economy in the Gem State. “Part of what you have to do is go back through those Project 60 policies that were recommended and worked on by the governor’s office and then transferred to the Legislature. I think that there are a lot of really great ideas. When you ask businesses what it is that they want to make them successful out of government that is the first place to go.”

Project 60 is a three-step plan to grow both rural and urban economies throughout the state of Idaho. Its name is also its goal – to grow the state’s gross domestic product (GDP) to $60 billion annually. For 2010, the estimated GDP for the state was $54.4 billion.

Step one is to “Foster Systemic Growth.” This includes keeping existing companies in Idaho and preserving the current workforce in the state. Also included in this step are “workforce training,” “workforce recruitment,” and “technology transfer.”

The second step is “Domestic Recruitment.” A business attraction strategy has been implemented that consists of top executives for companies throughout Idaho pooling resources and recruiting other companies to expand or establish themselves in Idaho. Also included in this step are “Synergistic Industry Clusters.” These are industries the state has set its sights on bringing to Idaho, such as alternative energy, recreational technology, manufacturing, aeronautics, and technology. Marketing and public relations are also part of step two.

The last step, step three, is “Inward Foreign Direct Investment.” According to Project 60, foreign investment “plays an extraordinary and growing role in global business. It can provide a firm with new markets and marketing channels, less expensive production facilities, access to new technology, products, skills and financing.”

Although Idaho has slipped to 19^th on the magazine’s list in the past year, being inside the top 20 indicates the state still offers a lot to potential business growth. Oregon, for example, ranked No. 33. Idaho is 14 places higher due to a lower income tax rate than Oregon, plus Idaho is a right-to-work state.

Companies look for a variety of things when they ponder setting up a business in a state, and, depending on the business, not everything is looked at equally. According to LaBeau, “Some of them are going to be looking at the availability of the labor market, some of them are going to be tax policy, some will look at what the resources are here, what’s the transportation like, do they have customers here, what’s the education like. It’s going to vary from company to company and it’s really not a one-size-fits-all type of thing. So what you really have to do is focus in on the entire infrastructure of the state, which is largely what you see in a lot of the Project 60 stuff.”

The report by the Office of Performance Evaluations (OPE) offers recommendations to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (DHW), which oversees the Medicaid program, and Molina Healthcare, a private company that runs the state’s Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS), which processes Medicaid claims from health care providers.

The analysis from OPE comes after problems with Molina’s new claims program, which went online last June and triggered payment delays for doctors, hospitals, and other Medicaid providers. That issue led Gov. Butch Otter to promise fixes to the system and the payments.

The recommendations from OPE include having Molina do better tests and measurements on its system and encouraging DHW to delay payment to Molina to make sure it meets all its requirements, and formalizing the conditions of any interim payments to Medicaid providers in the future to reduce challenges with recouping payments.

The state has already paid Molina and Unisys, which initially won the MMIS contract and was later bought by Molina, $18.6 million for the system and Molina has billed the state another $9.1 million for more than half a year’s operating costs. Schultz said DHW is discussing with the Idaho attorney general’s office when and how to make those payments and will discuss any potential penalties to Molina for past problems. The MMIS contract runs through 2014.

Medicaid provides insurance to more than 200,000 Idahoans who are children from low-income families, have a disability, are elderly, or are pregnant and low-income. Molina’s MMIS system handles 125,000 claims every week, making an average of $25 million in payments to providers. Typically, health care providers provide services to people on Medicaid, then bill the state for those services.

The delays last summer led DHW to issue $117 million to providers in interim payments to providers that would be paid back as providers submitted Medicaid claims in subsequent months. So far, almost $50 million has been repaid to the state. The OPE report says more than $16 million is unlikely to be repaid by a June 30 deadline, and that DHW is having trouble collecting more than $2 million from providers who have gone out of business or are no longer asking for Medicaid dollars.

Idaho is also losing funding due to delays in the MMIS system because the federal government, which pays for most of Medicaid costs, is lowering its share of payments. The federal government agreed to pay a higher share of Medicaid bills—79 percent—in the 2009 federal stimulus plan, but that percentage dropped to 76 percent in January. On April 1, it will drop to 74 percent, and on July 1, it will hit the previous standard level of almost 69 percent.

The timing of those payments means Idaho could lose some federal funding if those claims aren’t paid before federal funding drops. According to the OPE report, Molina’s system had almost 20,000 claims waiting more than a month at the start of the year. By paying those claims in 2011 rather than 2010, Idaho’s Medicaid program gave up 3 cents on every dollar. As of last week, there were almost 19,000 such claims from providers for $16.2 million in Medicaid money. If all those claims get paid in after April 1, the state would miss out on $324,000 in federal money.

A DHW estimate, based on claims that have been pending for 60 days, found the state could lose up to $182,000.  DHW spokesman Tom Shanahan said via email that amount is a high-end estimate.  ”This does not take into account that some of these claims will be finalized before the 31st,  some that will legitimately deny and should not be paid, and some will be adjusted to the correct payment,” Shanahan said.

Molina is hitting DHW’s target of processing 92 percent of claims within 30 days. DHW Deputy Director Dick Schultz said the Molina MMIS system is designed to flag more claims for potential problems, which can lead to delays in payments.

“The system in its design is going to cause problems,” Schultz said. “It’s a stricter system.” Schultz said there have been claims that some providers have gone out of business due to the new processing system and rumors of lawsuits from existing providers, but DHW has no hard evidence of either yet.

The OPE report found that the issues with the new Molina system stemmed from several problems, including many Idaho providers not being part of the new system when it went online in June. There also may have been inadequate pilot testing for potential problems.

“When the system began processing claims, it hadn’t flushed out all the bugs,” said Amy Lorenzo with OPE.

Sen. Elliot Werk, D-Boise, called the issues with paying providers in June and July a train wreck, while the OPE called it a perfect storm. The new Molina system in June coincided with a DHW policy to delay some payments to providers in an effort to keep its budget balanced, since June is the last month in the state government’s fiscal year.

Molina has responded to the problems last summer by nearly doubling its support staff for Idaho health care providers. The number of pending claims has dropped by more than half since September and providers calling Molina about issues are spending less time on hold and less time on the phone.

Officials with both DHW and Molina say they support the OPE report and its recommendations, though there’s no timetable for implementing the recommendations. Idaho lawmakers overseeing OPE recommended a follow-up report in six months.

The agreement included letting libraries, such as those in the Boise Library District, who choose not have filtering for adults continue to do so. Also, librarians may disable the content filtering if they are requested to, but they are not obligated to. Both sides agreed that these amendments would give much more local control than the original version of the bill. Should the bill make its way into law, the effective start date for it would be Oct. 1, 2012, giving libraries throughout the state ample time to make the necessary changes in policy and implementation.

Shirley patterned his legislation after CIPA, which Congress enacted in 2000. CIPA stands for the Children’s Internet Protection Act. The act aims to protect children from accessing offensive content on school and library computers. In order to receive funding from the federal E-rate program – which is a program making certain communications technology is more affordable for eligible schools and libraries – schools and libraries must prove they have sufficient Internet safety policies and protective technology measures in place.

Although many libraries in the state already have some sort of content filtering in place, Shirley and the bill’s supporters argue children are still at risk.

Opponents of the bill agreed on two things. One, although Rep. Shirley claims there will be no cost, there most definitely will be. Two, these filters aren’t a catch-all. They sometimes don’t block everything they should, while other times they block things they shouldn’t.

Shirley said that while this legislation isn’t perfect, it is the best option. “This legislation is constitutionally sound and there has been no clear or better alternative.” He also said that while many libraries do already have filters, there is nothing in state code that mentions it. He believes this completes the Idaho statute similar to that used in public schools. “More and more of our children will be going to our libraries to follow up and work on school material,” adding, “we’ve all heard of the adverse affects pornography has on our society.”

Jared Smith, a student at BYU Idaho, spoke in support of the bill. Smith testified to having seen pornographic images on three different occasions on computers at a library he worked at in high school. Seeing those images and not knowing how to deal with them at a young age turned him into a porn addict. “I had thoughts of suicide, and I was in my own personal hell,” he said. Smith claims that research has shown that overexposure to pornography damages the brain. According to Smith, he has had counseling and continues to improve. He predicts it will take around 10 years to fully recover from his addiction.

Genie Hessman, also a proponent of the bill, said pornography caused her husband to commit suicide. Hessman said her husband was addicted to pornography for a long time and she had no idea. He was a loving husband and a great father. She said eventually it became too much for him. “When he finally told me about his addiction, he said it had gotten so bad that he had thoughts of raping me. We went to counseling and tried to work through it, but it didn’t matter.”

Patricia Younger, director of the Meridian library district, was upset at the way libraries seemed to be portrayed. “It seems as though everyone is portraying the public library as a dark place where people just come to hang out and watch porn,” she said. “We already have filters in place that we pay for. Some of the research databases we spend money on we can’t access because the filter sees something.” She also noted a potential problem with the law: “This law would not allow us to open them for any students if they are under 18, even if it is for research.”

Gina Persichini, a networking consultant for the Idaho Commission for Libraries, also believes the bill is a bad idea. Persichini says free software is never completely free, comparing it to a “free kitten.” Basically, it may be free upfront, but maintenance and care down the road are going to cost something. She also told a personal story of how the filters don’t always work correctly. “A friend and I decided we wanted to go out to eat in the (Boise) downtown area. We picked a restaurant and looked it up online. Our filter blocked the menu for adult content. When we finally looked at the menu we could find nothing, not a word, that could be construed as adult content.”

PERSI has $11.7 billion in assets and a $1.39 billion unfunded liability, Drum told lawmakers on the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee (JFAC) Wednesday. PERSI’s investments have been particularly good in the beginning of 2011, earning a 17 percent return on investment so far this year.

Drum said PERSI funds now account for 88 percent of its obligation to current and retired workers, which is a 10 percentage point improvement from July. The strong recovery has allowed the board that oversees PERSI to delay for a year a 1.5 percent rate increase paid by the state to the fund for its workers.

“The fund seems to take care of itself, and it really does because of the legislation that you put in place and the management of the (PERSI) board,” Drum said. PERSI monthly payments to retirees are the 11th lowest nationwide, at an average of $1,342 each month.

However, Drum said the computer system PERSI uses to make those monthly payments is now out of date, and should be replaced at a cost of $13 million. That money would come from one of PERSI’s dedicated funds, not state tax dollars.

Drum said the old computer system requires PERSI employees to manually adjust some of the payment formulas, which can lead to delays in preparing payments.

“Anything that delays that process can be problematic,” Drum said. He said PERSI was several hours late in making its payments to retirees on Aug. 1. The payment was completed before banks opened, but Drum said some banks had finished their daily sweep of accounts before the money was credited to retirees.

Drum said phone calls from PERSI members doubled to more than 2,000 in the week following the late payment, but that the agency worked with more than 800 banks and financial institutions to resolve the issue. Drum said the banks waived all potential fees for retirees due to the late payment.

Drum also asked lawmakers to shift $75,000 in the PERSI budget to help the agency pay the salary of Bob Maynard, PERSI’s chief investment officer. One-quarter of Maynard’s salary is tied to the performance of PERSI investments, based on benchmarks that include comparisons to other states’ retirement funds.

Maynard is the highest paid state employee not employed by a college or university, earning $192,483 a year, according to the state controller’s Rainbow Report. Drum said Maynard’s pay is in the mid-range for his peers. He also said that he’s done well for Idaho state employees, helping the fund recover from the economic recession.

“We’re getting a pretty good return on our investment in his salary,” Drum said of Maynard. The PERSI fund gained $3 billion since 2005.

“Our staff is doing more with less working under heavier caseloads with stress,” said Robert Luce, the administrator of the Division of Family & Community Services for the Department of Health and Welfare (DHW).

Luce told state lawmakers Monday that the state’s foster care program has several areas of risk, including a drop in foster parents during the past three years, an increase in caseloads for state social workers, and a potential risk of children needing to be placed in foster care.

Idaho had 1,346 foster parents in June 2010, a drop of 105 from 2008. Luce said one potential reason why the state isn’t retaining foster parents is because of the low monthly stipends. Idaho is the third lowest in the U.S., paying foster parents an average of $300 a month, with foster parents of older children receiving larger payments.

“Everyone knows you don’t become a foster parent to make money,” Luce said. He added that Idaho would need to double its monthly payment to meet standards recommended by the National Foster Parent Association, a non-profit representing foster parents.

The child welfare program is also responsible for adoptions and child protection orders. DHW statistics show there were 18,484 child protection referrals and 313 adoptions in 2010.

Child welfare makes up a slim portion of DHW’s total spending. The next proposed budget for foster care would remain the same, at $25.2 million. The state would pay $11.3 million of that budget, increasing slightly from the current budget due to a drop in federal stimulus funding.

Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, asked if there was a silver bullet that other states are using for funding foster care and other child welfare programs. Luce said there wasn’t but asked lawmakers to fund the programs at the current level.

About half the money  the board is requesting of the Legislature in 2011 through the Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle (GARVEE) program would pay for construction of a new section of Idaho 16 between State Street and Chinden Boulevard in Boise, including a bridge crossing the Boise River; the project is part of a plan to eventually connect Highway 16 with Interstate 84. An $80 million widening of 12 miles of U.S. 95 from Chilco to Granite in north Idaho is also included in the latest request.

“As western Ada County and eastern Canyon County develop, the ability to move traffic north and south is critical to the area’s economic development,” said transportation board Chairman Darrell Manning.

GARVEE funding is requested annually; the first legislative authorization of $200 million came in 2006. The funds can be spent on six corridors:  U.S. 95 from Garwood to Sagle, U.S. 95 from Worley to Setters, I-84 from Caldwell to Meridian, I-84 from Orchard to Isaacs Canyon, Idaho 16 from I-84 to South Emmett, and U.S. 30 from McCammon to Soda Springs.
 For its upfront GARVEE spending, the state expects to pay back $60 million a year for the next 20 years.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Under the GARVEE program, the state sells bonds with the backing of funds anticipated to come in from the federal government in the future. The requested $162 million for 2011 is supposed to be the last GARVEE draw and bring to $855 million the total amount brought in through the program since being approved by the Legislature in 2006.

While lawmakers have overwhelmingly supported GARVEE, some, including Rep. Joe Palmer, R-Meridian, have maintained from the start that spending money before it’s in hand is a bad move.

“It’s going into debt,” Palmer said. “I don’t vote for debt.”

Palmer also said the state shouldn’t expand its highway system until it can maintain what’s already in place. The Idaho Transportation Department says it needs $240 million more per year to keep up with maintenance. Palmer said he will vote against the 2011 GARVEE request.

To Palmer and others on the same page, Sen. John McGee, R-Caldwell, sponsor of the GARVEE legislation, says 70,000 motorists who drive from Canyon County to Ada County everyday are glad for the program.

“If we didn’t have the GARVEE program we’d have virtually no road construction going on,” McGee said. Besides improving traffic flow, “it has produced thousands of jobs in a bad economy,” he said.

Deepest in the hole is Boise-based Idaho Banking Company; the bank has failed to deliver the feds dividend payments for five consecutive quarters, according to a U.S. Treasury Department report. Under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the government bought $6.9 million in bank stock with the bank agreeing to pay back five 5 percent of the amount each year. According to the report, Treasury officials will observe future board meetings of the bank, which owes $470,000. With one more missed payment (the next is due Nov. 15), Treasury can appoint two of its own to the bank’s board. A senior bank official did not respond to IdahoReporter.com‘s request for an interview.

While Idaho Banking Company has missed the most payments among the state’s TARP participants, the biggest outstanding debt — $1 million — belongs to Intermountain Community Bank. The bank, which has a number of branches in cities west of Boise and operates as Panhandle Community Bank up north and Magic Valley Community bank in Twin Falls, received $27 million through TARP and has missed three consecutive dividend payments. Boise-headquarted Syringa Bank ($8 million bailout) has missed four consecutive payments and owes 436,000. Officials from both banks did not respond to interview requests; however, Idaho Banking Company President Jim Latta in July told The Idaho Statesman, “If you look at community banks, we lend in the community we serve. The Treasure Valley economy is hurting.”

D.L. Evans Bank, based in Burley, is the only TARP-participating bank headquartered in the state to have kept up with dividend payments to the feds. Chief Financial Officer Brenda Sanford said D.L. Evans, which sold $19.9 million in stock to the Treasury Department in 2009, has perhaps fared better than others because it has a lower percentage of assets tied up in foreclosure-slammed Treasure Valley.

“We’ve taken some losses on loans but we’re very fortunate to be spread out,” she said.

Idaho’s community banks behind with the feds are by no means alone — nationwide about 150 banks, mostly regional and community operations, are delinquent on dividend payments. But only 42 have missed four or more payments, according to the report posted at www.financialstability.gov. The government has so far profited from the TARP, but community banks that haven’t been able to buy back stock or meet dividend obligations are a strain. Some have restructured, like Spokane-based Sterling Savings Bank, and paid back the feds pennies on the dollar.

One expert following the plight of community banks said missed dividend payments are likely to increase, even as most larger financial institutions have already bought their way out of the TARP.

“The number of institutions missing their dividends will tend to go higher,” Linus Wilson, a finance professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, told the Washington Post. “You have the really strong institutions leaving the program, and the not-so-strong ones tend to get worse.”

The institute, slated to be housed at Boise State University (BSU), will bring together the state’s three major universities – BSU, the University of Idaho, and Idaho State University – to focus on finding ways to maximize efficiencies in the process of electrical transmission and user conservation.  Also involved with the project will be Idaho Power, the Idaho National Laboratory in the Idaho Falls area, and several other business interests.

Otter, speaking at the Boise Centre on the Grove, said that the center will find new ways for consumers and businesses to conserve energy each day.  ”We understand that the production of energy is important … so is efficiency … so is our ability to conserve,” said Otter.

Here’s a clip of Otter’s full remarks on the new institute:

Paul Kjellander, director of the Idaho Office of Energy Resources, said the institute would help the Gem State keep its energy costs low, thereby attracting business interests to a stable and low production cost environment.  ”Today, we are taking a significant step to use our energy resources wisely,” said Kjellander.  ”Through the creation of the energy research institute, Idaho will become a leader in the area innovation as well develop and deploy energy efficient technologies.”

Here’s what Kjellander said about the new center:

Ric Gale, executive vice president of corporate responsibility for Idaho Power, said that every stakeholder in the energy industry is dedicated to finding new ways to conserve power and preserve natural resources.  ”There are  not many universals in the energy discussion, but there is one close to universal and that is that cost-effective energy efficiency is the most desired resource there is,” said Gale.  ”And that is from an environmental perspective and an economic perspective, and from a risk-mitigation perspective.”

Here are Gale’s remarks:

Following the event, Kjellander told IdahoReporter.com that the center makes sense because not only will it conserve resources, but it will also help Idaho’s energy consumers keep more of their own money in their pocketbooks.  ”It’s not being green for the sake of being green,” he said, “it’s being green for the sake of greenbacks.”

Some hail the spending, saying it will boost schools’ standing in the research world and help students compete in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Others, including U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, say any benefits realized do not justify heaping debt on future generations.

Just this month, Boise State University scored a big grant: $1.9 million to upgrade laboratories and utilities at the Micron Engineering Center. The award brings to $23.8 million the total Idaho institutions have received to pay for 31 science projects, including building construction, program development, and research.

The spending supports 37 jobs, according to the federal government’s stimulus tracking website, www.recovery.gov; however, three projects worth about $4 million have not yet been recorded on the website, which relies on recipient reports. The awards not on the recovery site are listed on other government websites that do not include information about jobs.

“The stimulus really created new opportunities,” said Mark Rudin, BSU vice president for research. This month’s award is BSU’s second for a building project. A $4 million grant — the largest science-oriented stimulus award in the state so far — is for construction on campus of a 9,300-square foot home for laboratory animals called a vivarium.

“It’s a watershed moment at the university,” said Rudin of the project. “It allows us an opportunity to expand to get additional resources.”

The vivarium, according to Rudin, will help the school become a premier biomedical research institution. The government shows the project providing no jobs, but construction work will surely result.

Stimulus money, including $2.5 million (five jobs) to establish a national geothermal database, has helped the school bring in more research money this year — an estimated $50 million as of August — than in any year before, according to President Bob Kustra.

The College of Idaho is also looking to expand research capabilities by improving a building. In September, the private school in Caldwell landed a $1.3 million National Science Foundation grant to renovate its 42-year-old Boone Science Hall. U.S. Rep. Walt Minnick voted against the stimulus package but celebrated the award, which he helped secure. In September, he called the project “critically important,” and said it helps the school “meet the growing needs of Idaho students who must compete in a global economy.” When asked to explain Minnick’s support, in light of his “nay” stimulus vote, Minnick campaign manager John Foster said in an e-mail: “Like the rest of the delegation, he felt he had an obligation to help his constituents … in cutting red tape and in getting a fair shake from the federal bureaucracy.”

A dissenting voice comes from U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, who also voted against the stimulus. He said he can’t endorse the science spending, despite the sorts of benefits claimed.

“While I am sure stimulus supporters can point to a number of areas where stimulus spending has created some positive benefit, the merit of any specific project or group of projects cannot justify the irresponsible debt the bill has piled on our children and grandchildren,” he said in an e-mail.

As for stimulus-funded research, $6.9 million is funding 25 projects, and 25 jobs. The projects include:

• Study to determine how to help post-menopausal women not drink too much and to find out how alcohol effects the thinking of women taking hormones — $81,000, 1.49 jobs, Idaho State University.

• Monitoring volcanoes in Alaska to learn how to better predict eruptions — $134,195, .13 jobs, BSU.

• Study of how climate change is affecting cities in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and northwestern Russia — $173,697, .58 jobs, University of Idaho.

• Examining properties of clouds over Greenland, to better understand climate change, through installing various analytical instruments — $898,138, .73 jobs, UI.

• Analyzing movement of moose and caribou in north-central Alaska — $93,602, .07 jobs, UI.

• Studies to learn more about mountain pine beetles, invasive plants, cancer and diabetes.

UI’s biggest award, $1.6 million (6.6 jobs), is aimed at developing the Idaho INBRE (IdeA Network of Biomedical Research) — much of the money was distributed to other institutions, including $443,000 to BSU. The largest award claimed by UI alone is $903,503 (5.2 jobs) to pay for study of diseases that can pass from animals to people. ISU’s largest science award — $910,000 (2.5 jobs) — is meant to “provide support” for a program using electromagnetic probes to study protons and neutrons at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator, according to the project description.

Two of the largest awards are for equipment: $710,000 to UI to build an advanced spectrometer and $610,000 to BSU to buy a “tunable femtosecond mode-locked laser system.”
 The spectrometer — which, put very simply, measures light wavelengths and intensities — will let researchers conduct an array of experiments not now possible at the school. In addition to facilitating new research, BSU’s laser will serve as a foundation for development of a new quantum optics and nanotechnology graduate program, according to the project description.

Total jobs resulting from the two equipment expenditures: 0.

“Some of the projects might be worthwhile,” like those aimed at combating disease or protecting people, said Jim Hollingsworth, a Tea Party-leaning political activist and contractor from Coeur d’Alene. He said some projects could lead to new jobs in the future, but added that government can’t be counted on to spend with maximum return in mind, as a business might.

“In the final analysis, if it really makes sense, the free market will pick it up,” Hollingsworth said of the research projects. “If it really makes sense, private industry will do it.”