Posts published in “Idaho column”

David Hahn was hired formally on July 1 by the State Board of Education to become Boise State University’s eighth president, and the expected expressions of energy and enthusiasm were there in abundance, even if the meeting was mostly an online Zoom session.

Hahn remarked, “Boise State University is the place for me. I can’t wait to get going.”

The reply from Board President Kurt Libich was, “I hope you’re ready to hit the ground running, because you’re running as of today.”

Take that response seriously: The challenges waiting for Hahn at Boise will be formidable.

Some of what he encounters, what may be a serious, important and intensive but ultimately easier part of the job, should be very much in his wheelhouse.

We don’t know a lot about him - his name wasn’t even associated publicly with BSU until about two weeks before the hiring - but much of what we do know sounds as if it should match up well with large parts of what the university does.

Hahn’s background is in mechanical engineering research, and he holds a dozen patents. He has not been an institution president or vice president, which might have been expected and often has been the case; he is dean of the College of Education at the University of Arizona. That’s probably a stronger credential, though, than it may first suggest, since UA is a major research institution. Before that he was an administrator at the University of Florida.

BSU is in a major growth mode, and UA has been a growing institution too, and in some of the same areas that BSU seems most likely to position itself for. You could easily imagine someone with Hahn’s background locking into a smooth working relationship with, say, Micron. Words like “builder” were often used to describe him, with some reason.

Administering, managing, developing at Boise State are undoubtedly an important part of the job, and he appears well suited to it. What we don’t know a lot about, yet, is how in other ways he will fit into his new environment, something that may be more challenging in some ways than what he’s worked with before.

Idaho’s governing Republican Party of yore was a clear supporter of higher education, but these days it and the governing structure of the state have a touchy relationship with it. To judge from its actions, the Idaho Legislature seems as least as skeptical as supportive of the college and universities and their mission. At the same time, BSU’s student and professional base, and the city where it is located, have a very different set of expectations from much of political Idaho.

The canyon between the two put a BSU president, any BSU president, in a difficult spot. Hahn’s immediate predecessors probably could have quite a bit to say about that.

So could people at BSU. Just one occasion was built into the presidential selection process when people at the university could question Hahn directly; it drew about 500 people, which as he remarked is a sign of strong interest.

That interest may not always be easy to manage. A couple of exchanges, as reported in the Idaho Ed News, make the point.

One student, a self-described conservative, said people in that group often feel outnumbered on campus, and asked how Hahn would protect freedom of expression. (That concern about free expression also cuts the other way in Idaho.) Hahn’s response - that an open atmosphere helps and “when everyone comes, that’s when you have what society looks like” - was not bad but won’t come close to resolving tensions on either side of the political fence. These days, feel-good statements won’t be enough.

Nor will his response to a question about legislative attacks on diversity and inclusion: That he wants to see a welcoming university, but that state laws have to be obeyed. He was trying to thread a needle, but wound up making an internally conflicfting statement.

The arrival of a new university president is always marked by a small tide of optimism. But the challenges ahead are likely to be large, and as Hahn hits the ground he will have his hands full.

 

Before we get to what the Idaho Republican Party did at its just-ended convention, we need to review a couple of other things.

One is the cheerful wrap-up comment from Dorothy Moon, just re-elected to a third term as party chair. In her e-mail message, she said, “Debates within the Idaho GOP during the primary election and at the state convention have been intense, as they should be. Now, we stand united not only to keep Idaho red, but to keep Idaho a place where all life is valued.”

One party, united, period. Got it. And this is totally consistent with messages implicit and explicitly from the party in recent years..

The second point is enforcement of that unity. Shortly before the primary election, the party sent to the candidates running in its primary a document seeking their affirmation that they agree with all of the party’s platform. Some candidates disagreed with a point here or there, but many simply said that yes, they sign on with everything.

It’s more than paperwork. In recent years, party leaders have insisted that Republican officials, notably legislators, vote and speak in strict accordance with the party’s platform and resolutions - and have gone after those who veered from the party line. One good example is Representative Lori McCann of Lewiston, who was repeatedly censured by county Republican central committees for voting differently than the party dictated. Last month she lost a primary election in her district.

Unity and follow the party line. Do not stray from it. That’s the message from the Idaho Republican Party.

Now let’s consider one piece of this year’s party message, approved at the recent convention, a plank in the platform, advanced by the former and likely future state Senator Scott Herndon:

“We believe property tax is incompatible with true private property ownership. A tax that allows the government to place a lien on and ultimately seize a citizen's home for nonpayment is fundamentally at odds with the right to own property. No Idahoan should face the loss of their home because they cannot keep up with a government assessment of what their property might sell for. We support the elimination of property taxes to protect the private property rights of all Idahoans.”

Simpler: End property taxation in Idaho. Period.

We’ll put aside the fact (which Herndon seems to ignore) of stiff legal consequences for non-payment of other forms of taxes (income and sales), which depending on the situation can be as severe as nonpayment of property taxes.

Herndon has said the state can make up for that loss of more than $2 billion in property tax revenue, which is not the only source but a key underpinning for local government in Idaho, including cities, counties, schools, roads and much more.

Around $400 million of that goes to public schools. Herndon said he would support moving all support for public schools to direct funding by the state, which in itself is not a terrible idea - but imagine the Idaho Legislature approving the additional taxes it would take to do that, and you’ll quickly see what a fantasy this is. And he said he isn’t calling for any increase in the sales or income tax.

That would be consistent with the rest of the platform. While the Republican platform specifically calls for eliminating the property tax, it nowhere suggests replacing the lost revenue with anything else. To the contrary: The platform advises, “We support lower federal, state, and local taxes.” Period.

But Herndon also suggested growth could make up for the loss in property taxes. History, local and national, makes clear what a delusion that is. You could’ve asked Reagan appointee David Stockman about the lessons he learned on that subject 40 years ago and gotten the same answer.

Democratic legislator Ilana Rubel suggested the property tax plank is “just intended to be kind of a crowd pleaser of, ‘Hey, don’t you hate property tax? Here, we want to end it,’ without any credible plan of how they would backfill that revenue.”

I wouldn’t be so sure. This is after all the Idaho Republican Party of strict ideological discipline. And the party line has been dictated. How many legislators next session will be willing to run afoul of it?

 

Three decades ago in Boise I attended a stand-up comedy night where the traveling comedian seized on the local place name “Kuna,” and kept scoring off it all night. It seemed so remote, and rural, and it sounded - what? - a little funny. Must’ve seemed a good comedy word.

Times change. Kuna never was especially remote, even if it was a little out of the way. The Kuna Kave (which I once descended into, in what then felt like an eerie experience) is still there, and still gives the local high school a mascot name, but it’s a lot less central to the identity of the area now.

The Kuna I knew from 40 or 50 years ago still largely exists, mainly around the downtown area which seems preserved in a time capsule. Almost everything around it is transformed. Back then, say in 1980, Kuna’s population was 1,767. Now, the number is approaching 20 times that.

The new hallmarks of Kuna are the subdivision and the strip mall. This is, after all, one of the fastest - maybe the fastest, with Eagle - growing communities in Idaho.

In the Ada-Canyon metroplex, a word that genuinely might be applied to it these days, Kuna is at a southern edge; all that lies between it and the Snake River canyon and birds of prey area to the south is miles of straight-up desert. Some what is now urbanized Kuna used to be farmland or rangeland, but some was open desert by the Snake River Birds of Prey Area.

Much of Kuna today looks like a replicant of the other suburban Ada and Canyon areas, as if someone had copied large pieces of Meridian and pasted them a few miles south. Meridian and Kuna, once clearly separated by seven miles or more, retain a visible gap between them, but one one much thinner and likely to mostly fill in before long.

The explosive growth around Kuna to the south of the Boise area and Eagle to the north represent expansions about as close to the center of the urban mass as realistically possible. Growth to the west - beyond Caldwell - and to the east - well east of Micron Technology and what used to be the Boise Outlet Mall - still seem like a bridge too far. But maybe not if the new casino, business and residential developments planned for the Mayfield area really start to take off.

This suggests the Boise area still has some cohesion, with Boise itself still the center hub of commerce, government and employment, along with much of the social activity.

But that may not be a fair assumption. Meridian is becoming a business behemoth on its own (just count with big office buildings there near I-84, not to mention elsewhere), and businesses looking to build on not-too-expensive land already has led many to start to look at places like Eagle - and Kuna.

Bringing us to the development at Kuna (encouraged by state tax exemptions) of two massive data centers, developed by Meta (the Facebook people) and Diode Ventures. Diode, explaining why it chose Kuna as a location, said, “Agencies, chambers, and economic organizations throughout Idaho undertook concerted efforts to attract data centers to the state because of the recognition of the community investment with a low developmental impact of these types of projects. Over the course of several years, this advocacy helped create a welcoming environment for IT infrastructure providers to set up shop, help grow the state’s technology sector and stimulate the creation of tech-related jobs. Diode identified Kuna as an ideal location …”

There are challenges to both centers, and concerns which include a number of issues, foremost being water: Since data centers use a lot of it (often really tremendous amounts), and since there’s not a lot outside the already diminishing aquifer underground. Both the state of Idaho (through the Department of Water Resources) and the Idaho Water Users Association have warned about the possible impacts on long-term water supply.

If water demands from data centers and residential expansion combined put enough pressure on the water supply, that may force an eventual limit to Kuna’s expansion. The question to come may be how severe that pain has to be before limitations are imposed.

Most likely, severe indeed, and there’s nothing funny about that.

 

In purest theory, you could reasonably say that legislative candidate Steve Herndon has a point. One, anyway.

Herndon, the Republican Senate nominee in District 1, and a former legislator whose ideas periodically have been too much for even the Idaho Legislature to stomach, has filed a complaint against the campaign of Phil McGrane, Idaho’s elected secretary of state. It is under review by the attorney general’s office.

The specific complaint is relatively minor and technical, having to do with whether McGrane properly reported in the right time period certain campaign costs related to a mailer intended to benefit various other Republican candidates, one of them being Herndon’s recent primary election opponent. (For what it’s worth, McGrane’s explanation of the situation sounds reasonable, but we’ll see what the AG’s office does.)

A recent Idaho Capital Sun article on this also brought up a larger point worth some more general consideration. Herndon argued that a person in charge of conducting an election (as the secretary of state generally is and as county clerks are) should “be completely impartial on the elections, regardless of the outcome. It clouds his impartiality.”

You can understand the point. Election officials who take sides in a political contest can be seen as having a stake in the outcome. Judges in our judicial system, to take a related example, are supposed to be rigorously neutral to ensure the cases they consider are decided fairly (and, as it happens, are elected on non-partisan ballot lines); or at least that’s the general idea.

This does run up against the reality of the picture, over at least most of the last century, in Idaho election administration.  Under Idaho law, both the office of secretary of state and those of the county clerks are partisan offices; the people elected to them are (with the rarest of exceptions) Republicans (mostly) or Democrats. It’s been that way since statehood.

The Sun quoted McGrane: “I think at times people forget I’m also on the ballot and a participant in the space, right? …I’m a partisan elected official. I’m a proud Republican. … I think the biggest thing that’s most important is we try to be hyper transparent… and that includes the fact that I have opinions. I’m a voter, just like everybody else, that I want people to know where I stand.”

His predecessors have from time to time made similar comments.

But this is where we get past the theory and move into practice.

In actual practice, the partisan election administration system Idaho has (which is similar to those of most other states), works pretty well.

For generations, Idaho has had secretaries of state whose fairness in handling elections hasn’t been seriously questioned, from Pete Cenarrusa (who held the job 35 years), Ben Ysursa, Lawrence Denney and now McGrane. That’s a long time to keep a track record essentially spotless.

The many county clerks Idaho has elected in those years have had similarly solid records in election management. In recent election cycles (including this one) election results and counts have been audited, and the clerks have emerged with close to perfect records.

And many if not most of these officials have been solidly partisan people as political figures. Cenarrusa had been a speaker of the Idaho House, a job that doesn’t usually go to someone who won’t support their party. They show up at party events and call for electing their side and defeating the opposition. That hasn’t however kept them from doing a fair job of election administration.

All of that said, if a ballot initiative were to appear declaring that all election administration offices in the state would henceforth be nonpartisan, I’d likely support it. In principle, I think Herndon has a point here. It’s just that in practice, it hasn’t been a problem.

Two other points should be made as well.

Idaho has done a decent job of filling those election posts with people willing to put their political preferences to the side when time comes to accurately count the votes.

And, Herndon might reflect on how this push for non-partisan fairness lines up with his party’s recent national push for advantage at all costs.

 

Almost anyone who lived in eastern Idaho half a century ago probably could tell you where they were midday on June 5, 1976. It was a local equivalent to 9/11 or November 22, 1963.

It was the day the Teton Dam broke. The day a wall of water smashed through the region, killing 11 people and leaving more than $2 billion - in 1976 dollars - in its wake.

The dam was located along the Teton River, a tributary of the Snake River, northeast of Idaho Falls and a few miles from Newdale, where the country turned mountainous. It was one of the last dams built during the Bureau of Reclamation’s era of ferociously go-go western dam construction. By then a long string of dams already had been built throughout the Snake River system, from American Falls and Palisades to Milner and the Hells Canyon dams. Teton completed the list.

Farmers in the upper Snake River valley, around Rexburg and St. Anthony especially, felt the massive reclamation system developed through the first half of the 20th century missed their area and didn’t give them enough water storage for irrigation. Early federal studies of the idea of damming the Teton date from about a century ago, and the Fremont Madison Irrigation District began lobbying for more water storage - in practical terms, a dam - in 1948. Over the next few years, a complex system of agreements about how to move and use the water, and who would get to do so and when, was worked out. There’s been a good deal of argument in the years since about just how much this water actually was needed; the case against was laid out skillfully by Marc Reisner in his classic book Cadillac Desert about the Bureau of Reclamation projects.

Congress, with active involvement of Idaho’s congressional delegation, pushed through the construction and budgeting authorization in 1964. Years of both planning and legal challenges, on environmental and other grounds, followed until major construction work started in 1972 and was essentially finished by the end of 1975.

The dam didn’t last long. Starting on June 3, 1976, dam workers, federal and contractors, started noting water spouting out from areas around the dam, and just before noon on June 6 the dam burst open. Eight billion gallons of water shot downstream, along the Teton River, then twisting with the Snake River southwest to the American Falls area. Some cities, like Rexburg and Idaho Falls, saw flooding. Others closer to the dam, such as Sugar City, were all but wiped out.

I was living in Caldwell then, but a year after the flood I traveled to the dam site and the hard hit communities. My strongest impressions were both of how sweeping the flood had been - you could see all soil scraped by the water in some places - but also the speed of reconstruction. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in particular poured enormous resources into helping the area recover, and it worked. Today, little evidence of the flood remains.

For all that success, the wreckage of those days shouldn’t be minimized. In his book, Idaho for the Curious, Cort Conley quoted some doggerel from a man who lived in the area then: “If I sound a little bitter, it’s for certain that I am; Because right now the Upper Valley isn't worth a Teton Dam.”

And why should this echo from 50 years ago be a story to ponder today?

This year, all of Idaho either is in or soon faces severe drought; the national water maps developed for the state look drier overall than I can recall seeing them in decades.

When that hits, people in need of water will go looking for answers. And sometimes the obvious answer isn’t the best one.

There aren’t any very easy answers. History tells us as much.

 

Primary elections in Idaho are not only about political parties. School districts, and the students they serve, typically have a big stake in them too.

And uneasy sit any sweeping predictions about what the voters in those districts will do.

This year, in the tally assembled by the Idaho Ed News, around the state 24 supplemental levies won voter approval, and four failed. Some plant facilities levies failed too.

Two districts, at Kimberly and Rockland, asked voters for bonding authority for building additions and renovation. Neither came close to passing; in Rockland only about a third of voters were in favor while in Kimberly only about 14% voted yes. That's of a piece with recent history; in the last couple of years just one school bond proposal out of 15 has passed, and it succeeded only after its district (Salmon) had tried a dozen in times in a row unsuccessfully to get the money to fix some extremely unsafe and unhealthy conditions at schools there.

These different categories of funding measures - and there are more than that: Idaho’s school funding system can be, from a taxpayer's point of view, a complicated mess - have different kinds of track records when it comes to passage. (Remember that all of them reach the ballot only after locally elected school boards sign off on them.) The money for all comes from property taxes.

These various types of levies have different rules concerning how the money is raised and how it can be used. The greatest needs often fall in the category of major building or renovations, and those improvements can make a big difference in learning and even test scores.

Education Week magazine concluded “facilities improvements such as HVAC system replacements and plumbing and furnace upgrades can lead to statistically significant test score increases equivalent to 10 percent of the gap between high- and low-income districts’ academic outcomes. In other words, the right kind of school facility upgrade can effectively close 10 percent of the academic achievement gap between high- and low-wealth school districts.”

And often to pay for those, you need bonding authority. Supplemental or plant levies often will not do the job.

And here’s the catch: While supplemental levies need for passage only a simple majority (50% of the vote plus one), and plant facilities generally need 55%, bonds need the extremely high approval bar of two-thirds of the vote - 66.7%. That’s really tough, frequently over the years a killer requirement, since each negative vote counts twice as much as every yes vote.

Idaho is a major outlier on this. A 2023 study found that while three states and the District of Columbia require no election for bonds at all, most do and require a simple majority. Those simple-majority states include Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Oregon. Of the others, 10 states require affirmative votes of from 55% to 60%; one of those is Washington state, where the 60% requirement has been under attack by activists for years. But only Idaho requires more than that.

Lowering the threshold to 50% or maybe a little more wouldn't, of course, guarantee bond passage. Many of them would fail anyway, as witness this year’s Rockland and Kimberly requests. But bear in mind that many of those supplemental levies, which require only a simple majority, do in fact pass.

But the proposal at least wouldn’t seem so far out of reach for so many. And you wouldn’t think, even in Idaho, that building and maintaining decent schools would be so terribly controversial.

On the other hand, take it to the Idaho Legislature and see what happens.

 

Of all the primary election results in Idaho this week, the one that jumped out at me was not in a contest for senator or governor or any federal, state or local government office at all.

It was for a humble county-level party precinct committee election, the lowest-level and usually least-noticed contests on the ballot, in just one of many hundreds of voting precincts in the state. Unless you’re really active somehow in politics, you probably don’t know the names of your precinct committee representatives (assuming those spots even are filled where you are). Most people don’t.

But they can be important, and the incumbent on the ballot in this case, named Brent Regan, is the best such example in the state. He has been an elected member of the county central committee since 2014, and much of that time as chair. Under his leadership the central committee has become so powerful in Kootenai County across a wide range of political and social areas as to become a dominating force. Regan for years has been one of the leading figures in Idaho Republican politics, closely aligned with the state party leadership, the Idaho Freedom Foundation and the more hardline conservative legislators and other public officials.

So here’s the shocker: On Tuesday, Regan lost that precinct office to a dental anesthesiologist named Rick Montandon, and possibly (not certainly) with it his chairmanship, by 14 votes.

That was not the only change on the central committee, though a few weeks probably will be needed to settle what direction it will take next, and who will lead it. The committee is scheduled for a full meeting on May 28.

In Kootenai County, many people are likely to see this as the end of a political era. They could be right. But in context it looks more like a break in what has been a steady rightward ideological shift, in that county and in the state. The Idaho primary election as a whole seemed to say much the same.

Some early reaction to the results included pronouncements that state politics - meaning for this purpose the Republican Party - had shifted to the point of going into reverse, heading back toward the center and empowering mainstream candidates and officials. (I’ll use here the “mainstream” and “hardline” descriptions that  seem to have caught on of late; substitute your own if you prefer.) You can find evidence for that.

Don’t bother looking for significant evidence in any of the top-of-ballot races, such as they were; the incumbents in the top offices all drew opposition, but none of it was strong enough to come remotely close to seriously threatening any of the incumbents.  Look rather to legislative races, and below.

Maybe the strongest such result was the renomination of Senator Jim Guthrie of McCammon, who was challenged from the hardline side (his race reverberated statewide) after he stood up to that faction on the Senate floor.

But there is much more. The hardcore Gang of Eight is down to a Gang of Three after the primary. Around southern Idaho quite a few from that side either lost their seats, or lost bids to defeat mainstreamers.

The story does not end there, however. You may notice that all these races were in southern Idaho. Up north, several premiere Republican contests went the hardliners’ way. Look for example at Senate District 1 (where Scott Herndon beat Jim Woodward, a reversal of their match in 2024, which reversed their match in 2022 …) and Senate District 6, where very hardline Dan Foreman turned back a strong challenge from Representative Lori McCann. The string of hardline wins in the north goes on from there, the Regan precinct loss notwithstanding.

For those Republican mainstreamers wondering whether the hardcore right tide could ever be pushed back, this election doesn’t constitute a loud shout. But it does equate to a measured: Not easily but yes, it can.

 

If Idahoans want to look at an important part of today’s top political headlines and evaluate how their state stacks up on that front, they can justifiably say at least in one area: We’re among the best.

At least have been. Maybe will continue to be.

The subject is redistricting, which used to be a hot topic (among political junkies if not most people) just once for a brief time every ten years, and only then. Now reapportionment has become a never-ending battle that makes our already junky standards for politics even worse.

The drawing of lines between political districts for purposes of electoral advantage is almost as old as voting. The word gerrymander, either as a noun or verb, referring to corrupt mapping of districts for political gain, goes back to this nation’s founding and a genuinely illustrious founder: Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the fifth vice president of the nation. He was also governor of Massachusetts and as such signed a state redistricting law including a legislative district so twisty its critics compared it to a salamander, rather, a gerrymander.

As then in Massachusetts, legislatures over the years have done much of the work of remapping districts, which has to be done to keep up with changes in population. (Point of interest: Look up the state legislative district map for the 1970s and compare it to today, and see the fast-declining number of rural districts compared to urban.)

Legislators, having personal interests in these maps - what politician wouldn’t want to choose his own voters? - have in many places often succumbed to the temptation in redrawing districts to benefit themselves or their parties. Sometimes the maps are so bad they’re thrown out by courts.

After the 1980 census the Idaho legislative redistricting process was unusually bitter, and after the 1982 election the Idaho Supreme Court 86’d it and imposed its own, an odd (some thought bizarre) plan that imposed two layers of legislators, one regional and one more local, increasing the number of legislators overall to 126 compared to the 105 the state otherwise has had since the mid-1960s.

Following that fiasco, support grew for turning redistricting over to an independent, bipartisan commission. In 1994 voters approved that idea in a change to the constitution. While some legislators from time to time have explored the idea of retaking control of the process, the commission seems to have general support.  Idaho today is one of the 21 states with some kind of redistricting commission, along with such nearby states as Washington, Montana and California.

The commission system does work well. In Idaho, the maps from these commissions usually generate disagreements from someone, but that’s probably inevitable: The shape of the state and the contours of its population mean that at least a few counter-intuitive districts probably are inevitable. Overall, the maps have been reasonable.

They’ve been fair too on a partisan level: Idaho’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature isn’t that way because of how the districts are drawn, but rather because Idaho just has a lot of Republican-leaning voters. If anything, it would be more possible to draw maps that wipe out most of the few small scraps of territory (Boise and some smaller-population areas) where legislative Democrats do have an advantage. (Idaho’s two congressional districts both already are so Republican there’s almost no way to draw a map to make either of them much less so.)

Therein, in today’s environment, runs the risk: There’s now a growing movement among high partisans (mostly but not exclusively Republican) to wipe out every trace of the opposition, wherever possible. Watch the headlines and you’ll see it in places like South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana. In Washington state, where Democrats already hold eight of the 10 congressional seats, there’s some talk about trying to add a ninth, by splitting the super-Democratic Seattle area between a half-dozen or more districts. (No, it’s not likely to actually happen.)

Start down that road and madness ensues, and a whole lot of people who feel unrepresented start to sue, and worse.

Idaho can avoid all that simply by keeping in place the smarter approach it already has.