A busy year in Boise?

COEUR d’ALENE — Health care, liquor licensing, victims' rights and education are just a few of the issues Idaho State Reps. Luke Malek and Paul Amador intend to tackle in the upcoming legislative session.

The Republican legislators held a town hall meeting Saturday morning at the Coeur d'Alene Public Library to share their goals with community members and hear what's on the minds of their constituents.

"We’re just here to listen to what you have to say and what you think is important and how we can best represent you," Amador said during the introduction.

A variety of topics surfaced from the roughly 30 attendees during the session, including robust conversations about regulation and industry, Medicaid expansion in Idaho, reassessing funding for SAT testing, and transparency in the pharmaceutical industry.

Malek said he feels the next session will feature several bills regarding health care. He said he worked with several members of his caucus last year on a bill "that we deem is a very conservative solution, a locally based solution, to say, ‘Here, let’s address the factors that are affecting the increase of health care.'"

He cited scarcity of physicians and competition in the insurance marketplace as two issues in this realm. Cost is also a major concern.

"We created this smorgasbord of ideas and put it into one bill saying, ‘Here are conservative ideas, locally driven, that will bring down the cost of health care,'" he said. "Part of that is making sure people who need access to health care have access to health care."

Malek said he also plans to work on a bill regarding the procurement of liquor licenses in Idaho.

"The reality is, I believe in a free market and competition," he said. "I believe that a state liquor license is something that everyone who meets the requirements should have equitable access to and not have this secondary market where people are buying them off each other for $200,000 or $300,000 throughout the state to get their business started. That’s a pretty complicated issue."

Regarding victims' rights, Malek is the co-sponsor of Marsy’s Law, a proposed Idaho Constitutional amendment that would ensure victims and their families are afforded equal constitutional rights as the accused or convicted.

"There is an institutional problem with how we treat victims inside the system," Malek said. "We view victims as an asset in a case almost, because our job is to represent the state as a prosecutor and to defend the rights of the accused as a prosecutor … but we’d never really articulated the rights of the victim.

"We have some statutes that kind of delineate victims' rights, but the reality is, and I can tell you firsthand as a prosecutor, is that’s not something that we view with as much importance as we should."

Amador's focus will be on children's issues and education.

"Strangely enough, Idaho is the only state in the country that doesn’t have any protections for breastfeeding mothers, so I’m working on a bill to provide some protection for that," he said. "One of the difficult things is women aren’t necessarily being arrested all over the place for public indecency, but I think it’s a statement issue that we value that and we think that’s an important aspect of our families and bringing up our children."

He is actively working on a bill that allows for anonymity while reporting child abuse and a bill that gives language to the consequences of leaving children unattended in sweltering vehicles.

"We have no law specifically in the state of Idaho that says you shouldn’t leave your child in a hot car," he said. "It seems kind of obvious, but we know it happens, so (this will) provide some protections for the children in that sense."

Amador will also be examining Idaho's higher education and how its schools can better collaborate ,and a "pay-for-performance" system that awards academic institutions by performance rather than headcount.

Ethan Eisenberg, 28, of Coeur d'Alene attended the town hall to get to know who's representing him in the state legislature.

"I’m part of this new generation that’s trying to get involved and trying to help guide the future the way that we want it to be,” he said.

He said he liked the intimate, question-and-answer format.

"There's a lot more focus on federal government vs. state government, at least in the media," he said. "I like the format a lot, I think it was a good way to have a discussion."

Idaho's citizen legislature convenes annually at the State Capitol in Boise in early January and usually adjourns in late March.