Posts published in “Idaho column”

Hang around political people long enough, and you’ll become struck by how personal much of it is. Personal relationships matter a lot in places high and low.

In places like a state legislature interpersonal relationships can sometimes swamp all other considerations, leading to results even many constituents can puzzle over. So how do we figure out when something is personal and when it’s a matter of real difference over public policy?

Take a look at the Ada County Highway District, which recently has seen a squabble on its commission, and try to tease it out.

The debate goes back to midsummer and a proposal before the commission to allow a vote (on the November ballot) on whether to raise car registration fees. Of the five commission members, two - Jim Hansen and Kent Goldthorpe - voted against the idea, and three - Sara Baker, Paul Woods and Rebecca Arnold - were in favor. The measure will appear on the local ballot.

A couple of weeks later, Hansen sent an email to Goldthorpe and Woods, saying he might be persuaded to support the ballot issue if the commission supported some transit ideas he was proposing. Because that discussion involved business before the commission and because the communication involved a majority of the commission (three of the five members), Hansen violated the open meetings law. Goldthorpe in turn sent the mail to other commission members as well, compounding the situation, though he said he did that because he interpreted the Hansen note as a matter of district politics, not debate of formal board action.

The violation still seems clear enough; now, what to do about it? The state attorney general’s office was contacted for an opinion, and Deputy AG Paul Panther promptly delivered one. Yes, the law was violated, he said, but Hansen (and Goldthorpe) could resolve - “cure” - the problem simply by admitting publicly to the communication.  Both of them did that.

He did not recommend further action: “Our office is vested with the public’s trust ... These responsibilities are not served by pursuing a civil action against public officers who have admitted their mistakes and who have sought as individuals to remedy any potential injury caused by their improper conduct.”

That might have seemed like the end of the matter. It was not.

The commission’s president, Sara Baker, sent an angry letter back to Panther. She called on the attorney general’s office to “prosecute [Hansen] to the fullest extent” and “make an example of Commissioner Hansen.” (She gave Goldthorpe a pass because, she indicated, his motives were better than Hansen’s.) The commission voted 2-1 (since Hansen and Goldthorpe both abstained) to send that letter to Panther. In effect, that official commission statement represented the view of less than half of the commission, but Baker pushed it through, as such, anyway.

Panther again declined to take further action.

When we get into the subject of motivations, we wander onto tricky territory because we never can delve inside a person’s mind and conclusively determine what they’re thinking, and why.

But it doesn’t seem a far reach in this case to see at work something more than simple concern for the open meetings law, something more personal. And some of the elements involved with it - the insistence on punishment and making an example, of pushing through a minority opinion masked as that of a majority - may offer some of the indicators worth our watching in other places as well.
 

John McCain, the senator and former presidential contender who died last week, said this in the last paragraph of his new and final book:

“What an ingrate I would be to curse the fate that concludes the blessed life I’ve led. I prefer to give thanks for those blessings, and my love to the people who blessed me with theirs.”

My fellow columnist and long-time Idaho politics writer Chris Carlson, who died just about a day after McCain, likely would have been glad to second that sentiment. In fact, with only slightly different words, he often did.

For Carlson, as for the senator, the view toward the end of the road was a long time coming.

I knew of him long before I met him. When I went to work at the Idaho State Journal in the mid-seventies, I often read his writings for that paper about Idaho politics from a half-decade or so before. He worked for Cecil Andrus during the governor (first run) and interior secretary years, and became so close to him as to be almost a member of the family. He was a founder of the consulting Gallatin Group along with Andrus, whose prominence and connections gave it a powerful initial push.

I got to know Carlson as he moved toward retirement, easing out of Gallatin after he was diagnosed with Parkinsons disease in 1999 and an aggressive cancer in 2005. For many people that might have been a setting into quiet retirement, the end of an active role in regional (Washington state as well as Idaho) public affairs, involvement in political campaigns, issues battles and much more. Fighting back and holding at bay his medical issues might for most people have been more than enough to occupy what time was left.

But for Carlson, in the dozen and more years that remained to him, that seemed to be only the beginning.

As he battled for health, he took a lead role in the “no” campaign on Initiative 1000 in Washington state, on physician-assisted suicide. He wrote a biography of Andrus that, while highly laudatory, filled in many of the gaps remaining in Andrus’ own memoir. He started writing a political column which ran in many Idaho newspapers (and on my web site, ridenbaugh.com) up until a few weeks ago. He also wrote three more books (two of which, Medimont Reflections and Eye on the Caribou, I published), the most recent published only month ago.

And that was hardly all he did.

In 2013, Carlson and I took a long road trip around Idaho, talking about books we both had recently put out. Carlson was the lead organizer of the trip, and we stopped in on people all over the state - people he had worked and organized with, sometimes argued with. We talked and listened about Idaho and its politics, and about how things could be made better. And for Carlson at least, the talk was always just step one. He’d get on the phone and make things happen.

Once, he ran across a little-known novel written years ago by a now-deceased but highly influential University of Idaho professor. From that he launched and kept rolling a chain of events that led to the re-publication (I was drafted into this as well) of three of the professor’s books, and their distribution and visibility around the state.

He did a lot of that sort of thing.

In his last column, Carlson wrote, understating his impact in his later years, “I was able to see two beautiful grandchildren born who have extraordinary talents, as well as all our children mature and happy with fulfilling employment. I also decided to get back on the stage of Idaho politics by writing a weekly public affairs column carried by five of Idaho’s newspapers. In addition, I wrote four books …”

Sounds a bit like a reflection McCain might have had.

Take care, Chris.
 

Back in the mid-80s, when the big, nasty, ferocious political battles in Boise had to do with shopping centers, the subject of eminent domain reared its head.

The issue (one part of it anyway) was development of a regional shopping mall, which ultimately was built and now is called Boise Towne Square. The development of a regional mall preoccupied Boise politics and a lot of public debate for the better part of two decades, and now the end of the battle seemed in sight but for one final issue:

One of the biggest road bumps at the end of that long trail was a family which for decades had lived on a tract in a key segment of where the mall was intended to be built. The family didn’t want to sell. And the battle went on for a while.

Along the way, the idea of eminent domain was raised.

Eminent domain is defined as “the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation.” Normally, this is done with the idea that the land is needed for an important public purpose, like a highway or a major public utility, and traditionally only a critical and important public need can justify the taking. We are after all talking about the forcible taking of property (in Britain they call something similar “compulsory purchase”), albeit for payment.

But there’s been mission creep, in which - in some cases - governments have seized property and used it for less than critical needs, or turned it over to private developers, with the idea that the new use would be higher and better, and more profitable, than the old one. It’s not hard to see how such an idea, if allowed to go unleashed, could become nightmarish.

In the Boise Towne Square case, workarounds and compromises eventually were found. But the idea of using that kind of power in the interest of building a shopping center made more than a few people uneasy.

Some of this comes back to mind with the prospective use of eminent domain in the case of Boise State University, which wants to build a new baseball stadium. The State Board of Education has given BSU eminent domain authority to condemn and purchase land for the facility.

BSU long has been crimped by its location in the middle of Boise, which means expansion is difficult - and BSU has been a fast-growing institution for a long time. Certainly, you can make a case for a new baseball stadium for the university. The property that would be taken would mainly consist of a parking lot, but there’s also an apartment building involved.

Phil Haunschild of the Idaho Freedom Foundation was quoted as saying, “The use of eminent domain for a stadium I think is an overreach. Eminent domain was meant to serve as a tool of last resort for those critical public infrastructure needs, for the roads, for the transmissions lines, for electricity, for canals for irrigation.” (There’s also the argument that Boise badly needs more affordable housing, some of which would be bulldozed in this development.)

Greg Hahn of Boise State University countered that the stadium, "is a vital part of the university and the university's mission in creating experiences for the students and it’s a big part of how the community experiences the university as well.”

This isn’t a black and white case. The traditional view about the proper use of eminent domain, I’d say, is closer to Haunschild’s.

But don’t be surprised if, as long as the building boom continues in the booming parts of Idaho, eminent domain returns, and in new and sometimes surprising forms.
 

These can look like dark days for news reporting, and for our ability to keep track of and hold accountable those in power, who we most need to keep on a leash.

There are serious economic pressures, a dynamic underway for a generation now; business crunches that have wiped out massive segments of local and regional news reporting. Journalism in New York (mostly) and Washington, and other top centers, goes on. Beyond those places, far less of it is happening today than did a few decades ago.

There are newer political pressures, some of them coming from endless attempts from the White House to call out “fake news” that isn’t fake at all, in the perverse declaration of the press -- the best protector most of us have from the powers that be -- as the “enemy of the people.”

But under that, almost in the shadows, there are signs of hope. One is the nationwide uprising of newspaper editorials this last week, reflected in Idaho among other places, explaining just why an independent and free press really is important.

This message happened to be magnified for me, on a Northwest level, this week.

About five years ago a former colleague, Steve Bagwell (now a newspaper editor at McMinnville, Oregon), and I co-wrote a book, titled New Editions, about the Northwest’s newspapers, their history, present, and future. This week we were asked to revisit that in an interview for an article on a regional press, to bring up to date some of what we found in our research back then. It brought us to consider a more recent summing up.

We found, five years ago, that while the newspaper scene tended to be reduced to a stereotype of “bleak,” the actual picture is more complex. We found that the reality of newspapers and journalism, their condition and vitality, actually varies a lot between regions, types of communities, types of newspapers. That much seems to be just as true today. Not many definitive lines of description apply to all newspaper journalism.

Overall through the ‘00’s, many newspapers seemed to be crashing, to the point that trend lines (and many prognosticators) suggested most might not be around for long, that the print newspaper was close to extinction. But trend lines are often disrupted; the future isn’t so easily predictable. In the years since 2012, the newspaper industry, while still enduring hard time, has to a great degree stabilized at a smaller level. Layoffs have continued and news coverage is down. But those newspapers that were supposed to disappear en masse? Most are still there.

There are also counter-indicators.

One (the subject of a recent column) in Idaho is the growth of the Nampa Idaho Press newspaper organization, the expansion of coverage, hiring of new staff - what looks like an explosion of confidence in the future of newspapering.

A few miles across the Oregon line at the small town of Vale, look at the case of the Malheur Enterprise, a small, struggling weekly newspaper. Well, it used to be struggling. Now, under new owner Les Zaitz, a former Portland Oregonian investigative reporter, it not only is breaking important stories week after week, gaining not just local but even national attention, but it also is growing rapidly in circulation, adding staff and apparently prospering. Zaitz is now in the process of starting a new hard-news digital publication covering the state, based at Salem.

I should mention my own digital publication, the Idaho Weekly Briefing, which has been expanding and is working on its own new business model (involving online crowdfunding).

The times are difficult for journalism, and for people who want to follow serious news reporting. But hard times can make for some of the most creative solutions.