Rep. Kerby: ‘It just had to be fixed - now we have a good bill’
Rep. Ryan Kerby, R-New Plymouth, who was among the nine votes to table SB 1067, the child support enforcement bill, on the final day of this year’s legislative session, confirms that he and several others have signed off on proposed amendments to the bill after helping craft them. “They’re what we would have done if we’d have had time during the session,” Kerby said. “It just had to be fixed. Now we have a good bill that protects Idaho.”
Kerby, who said he worked with Reps. Lynn Luker and Tom Dayley, both Boise Republicans, and Rep. Janet Trujillo, R-Idaho Falls, along with state and federal officials, the Idaho attorney general’s office, legislative leaders and more on the amendments, said, “You’re going to see some very good amendments. … They’re important to a lot of Idahoans.” He said they’ll address “the same issues we had then, just with data breaches and due process and administrative process – the same thing the other states did.”
Kerby said he’s concerned that some are suggesting opponents of the bill want to do away with child support in Idaho. “I don’t know about anybody else, but the four of us had no intention of that whatsoever,” he said. “We thought we would get an extension of a year, or we thought the governor could handle it some way or Health & Welfare would give us some more time. And we always knew we’d have a special session to fall back on; I didn’t think it’d come to that.”
Said Kerby, “It just had to be fixed. Now we have a good bill that protects Idaho.”
Kerby said many of his constituents are concerned about issues like due process and use of personal data. “So we built in safeguards. We have some extremely well-written, and I believe they will be well-executed, safeguards to make sure that data is properly used from our citizens and that there are good due processes in place. Now some people are dismissing these as insignificant. Well, they might be insignificant to those folks, but they’re not insignificant to the people we’re trying to represent. We need to represent all of Idaho.”
