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.