Posts published in “Idaho”

The election of November 2025 nationally has gone down in the books as a Democratic wave, which it was in places where state-level partisan elections were held, as they were in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Did any ripples of that, however subtle, touch Idaho?

Idaho had plenty of local elections on Tuesday, but all were for non-partisan offices, which puts the Gem State a little outside the national partisan framework.

Still. There seemed, among those people who did vote (a smaller number in the off-year elections, as always, than in the even) a few points of general commonality apparently matching with the national mood. For the most part it was a good night for incumbents. Broadly, voters seemed to lean toward stability and competence, and away from the ideological and chaotic.

The contest you might reasonably mark as the top-line for the state could be one piece of evidence for that. The major races were held mostly for city offices. In Boise and Meridian only council offices were on the ballot, and relatively non-controversial incumbents (entirely unopposed in Meridian) easily were swept back in both cities.

Nampa, where the two-term mayor was retiring resulting in an opening at the top, was a more notable case. Four candidates ran for mayor, three of them outsiders and prospective boat rockers. The fourth was Rick Hogaboam, who had been an administrator in Nampa city government, and more recently has been serving as Canyon County clerk and had the endorsement of the last mayor.

What would voters in Nampa, who has elected some of the state’s most ideological legislators, do? The question was in what vote level Hogaboam would get; he might well come in first, but if he was a narrow plurality winner, that would be an indication that voters mostly still wanted to upset a few applecarts.

But no: They went for the known and experienced quantity, Hogaboam, by 62.9% of the vote - an impressive rollup against three opponents. The full speed ahead message seemed quite clear.

In smaller Garden City, something similar happened as a long-time council member, Bill Jacobs, was elected in a competitive race  to replace retiring 20year mayor John Evans - who had endorsed Jacobs.

The election for Coeur d’Alene mayor was in some ways even more on point. It’s a little more subtle, since the voters did turn out the incumbent, Woody McEvers, who was appointed to the top job by the council several months ago. The winner, Dan Gookin, who served on the council since 2011 (who does have some Republican background), won the four-way race with just 34.2% of the vote. (Compare that with Hagaboam’s numbers in Nampa.)

But there’s also this: The second-place finisher, Debbie Loffman (with 28%), was an outsider, and would have been new to city government. Centrally for our purposes here, she was the endorsee of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (and not Gookin). This matters, because that group (involved in numerous non-partisan races, including famously that of the governing board of North Idaho College) is the political dividing point of the region.

Loffman’s website looked professional but anodyne (though note the high prominence it gave to describing her as a “devout Christian”) but all the indicators of a hard-line approach were there. You have to read between the lines, but consider her statement for the Watchmen Ministry: “I want to be a voice for people in our community who don't feel heard. I want to bring a Christian perspective to Coeur d'Alene government. I have a servant's heart and I want to serve the people in our community. I am a conservative Republican.”

Message received - evidently by the voters. The fact that the endorsed candidate of the overwhelmingly dominant party in the area got 28% says something.

Not everything in Idaho fell in one direction. Just west of Coeur d’Alene, voters in Post Falls ousted their three-term incumbent mayor (in another three-way race) with a candidate endorsed by the KCRCC.

Still, even in Idaho some of the distant echoes of changing national moods seemed to find some reverberations.

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A political fact about Richard Stallings, the former U.S. representative from Idaho who died on October 26:

In 1988, he came in third place for the Democratic Party nomination for president.

From that, you might deduce Stallings had presidential ambitions and had been campaigning around the country for the office. He did not. He received his three votes at the national Democratic convention that year in large part because he was a pro-life on abortion (a view he generally has retained over the years) but also because he struck a number of people as genuine and straightforward, as well as smart and capable. Those votes for him apparently came as much a surprise to him as to anyone else.

The underlying sense of the kind of person he was had emerged only gradually over time. He lost a 1982 run for the House against the seemingly teflon-coated though controversial Republican incumbent George Hansen, by a fairly close margin. He might not have won his rematch in the heavily Republican year of 1984 except for Hansen’s criminal convictions in the early part of the year, and then Stallings only barely prevailed by 133 votes.

So much might have been written off as a matter of good timing or luck. But in a very Republican, very conservative southern Idaho district, Stallings proceeded to win convincingly (54% of the vote) in 1986 and in landslides in the next two elections. He probably would have won another term in 1992 had he not tried for the Senate instead. Whether he would have survived the 1994 Republican sweep remains a big unknown.

He would not have been able to generate that kind of support - the kind Cecil Andrus and Frank Church did for so many years - without strong service to the district and a trusting relationship with the people there.

There’s another point to be made from the Democratic convention asterisk: When his time in Congress ended, he did not move in the direction of national politics and activism and fundraising, but went local instead.

After working in Idaho for a short time as a federal nuclear waste negotiator (a job held only by him and another Idahoan, David Leroy), he settled in Pocatello. But Stallings did more than just live there. For years he led the nonprofit Pocatello Neighborhood Housing Service, to help create and find housing for people in need in that area. (This is a problem which was serious then and has only become more broadly pertinent.) And he served for six years on the Pocatello City Council.

He stayed active in Idaho politics, running again (unsuccessfully) for the House, and serving as state Democratic Party chair.

If the old saying in politics is that “they never go back to Pocatello,” then Stallings would be one of the best examples of an exception to the rule. The work he did there after serving in Congress is the kind of track record many candidates might have used as a launching pad in a race to get there.

I met him for lunch at Pocatello this year in May, when he was fresh off another project: He and fellow former Representative Larry La Rocco had held a series of town hall meetings around Idaho, and he was enthusiastic about them and the prospect of doing more. Stallings kept in close personal touch with a lot of people in his district, and he was concerned about the loss of contact between Idahoans and their representatives.

Stallings was serious about the problems of Idaho and the nation, without becoming an ideologue about them - a trait more politicians could use these days.

He was a politician in the best sense. The word has been trashed a lot in recent generations, helped along by too many people in politics whose words and actions besmirch it: ambitious graspers, unconcerned about the practical effects of what they do.

Stallings is one of the best human rebuttals to that criticism I’ve known, a politician who worked on behalf of the community and nation. Full stop.

 

In my small town the police slogan, posted on the sides of their vehicles, is “Police and Community together.”

They do a good job of living up to it, interacting well and working with people in the community, focusing on problem solving where they can, de-escalating rather than escalating. It’s not that there isn’t crime to fight or arrests to make - there are; or cooperation with state and federal agencies - they do that too. But they’ve been able over the years to maintain a critical level of trust within the community.

What they understand is that no police force, however large or well-equipped, however well-trained, can get done the job of keeping the peace in a community without the active help and cooperation of the people who live there. If police are seen as an alien, invasive force, community cooperation will collapse.

With that in mind, what happened in Wilder last weekend should serve as a huge wakeup call for many law officers and agencies but most specifically and immediately those in Southwest Idaho.

Wilder, a city of about 1,600 in western Canyon County, is heavily Hispanic. One of the major civic weekend gathering points, for families with children as well as adults, is at a small local horse racetrack called  La Cathedral Arena. On Sunday somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people (Governor Brad Little has estimated 400) were there peacefully socializing while horses ran.

That was disrupted when  an army of about 200 federal, state and local law enforcement officials descended on them, with forces from (according to the FBI) the “Canyon County Sheriff’s Office; Homeland Security Investigations; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO); the Drug Enforcement Administration; Idaho State Police; Idaho Department of Corrections; Nampa Police Department; Caldwell Police Department; and FBI Seattle and Portland field offices.” That’s quite an array.

Hundreds of people were detained. Parents were separated from children, and some children were separated from their parents and according to numerous news reports zip-tied. The FBI initially denied reports that children were zip-tied or hit with rubber bullets, then retreated from that to limit the denial to “young children”; you can draw your own obvious conclusion. ICE grabbed 105 people present (some reports later put that at 50) presumably on immigration charges, though how many charges may actually stick (probably far fewer) will become clear only with time.

All of this was said to have been prompted by an FBI-led gambling inquiry; local law enforcement sharply denied that ICE led the operation, as it seems to have claimed.

And all of this - all these lives and activities disrupted and children terrorized - was in the service of what vital public safety and law enforcement goal? The ICE roundup aside, it amounted to this: Arrests of four men for gambling on horses.

An FBI agent noted, "Illegal gambling isn't a victimless crime," and I won’t argue that point. But this isn’t a question simply of going after a few small-bore gamblers, which could have been done with a few officers and scant uproar. The use of such nuclear weaponry to swat a fly, 200 law officers from a dozen or so federal, state and local agencies directed to a small, quiet town, has to be about something else.

This seems to be about terrorizing a community. (Could that be why ICE was so quick to try to claim a primary role?)

And when law enforcement does something like that, the message from it to the community, intended or not, is: We are on the other side, and we see you - all of you, whether law breakers or law abiders - as the enemy.

The opposite, in other words, of “police and community together.”

Actual enforcement of the laws will suffer, badly, if people start to absorb a lesson that law enforcement cannot be trusted. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but in Wilder, it may be too late.

 

Due west of southern Idaho sits the city of Portland, conflicting descriptions of which have been roiling national politics in recent weeks.

Portland is not terribly far from Idaho. For some Idahoans, it’s the nearest large city and a significant governmental and commercial center. So this ought to hit home, arriving as it does next door to the Gem State.

President Donald Trump has called it “war ravaged,”  said “it’s anarchy out there,” and talked about “the Radical Left’s reign of terror in Portland.” He said the place has been all but incinerated, and there are no businesses left. At a news conference, he talked about “the destruction of the city.”

He has ordered hundreds of federal or federalized troops sent to the streets of Portland, to curb the wave of destruction and attacks on federal officials. (If you look at voting statistics, it’s clearly true that Portlanders do not like Trump, at the least.)

Oregon officials have pushed back. Keith Wilson, who as mayor of Portland actually, you know, lives there, said in a statement, “If President Trump came to Portland today, what he would find is people riding their bikes. Playing sports. Enjoying the sunshine. Buying produce at a farmers' market.”

The state of Oregon (like the state of California before it) has taken the Trump Administration to court on the issue, and so far, at this writing, has fended off the troops, which state and local officials say are not needed and would create problems where few or none now exist.

We all know about President Trump and his rhetorical, um, flourishes. And it is true that local officials usually like to talk up the positives, rather than the negatives, in their communities. (And let it not be said that Portland is completely free of problems. As plenty of Portlanders will tell you, they have some, homelessness, traffic and high housing prices among them. Boiseans could relate.)

I’m not a resident of Portland, but I do go through there from time to time, and I’ve been in town a couple of occasions in the last few weeks. Consistently this year I’ve seen a Portland that looks and acts more or less as it always does, prosperous and intact, with people going about their business. I saw no significant dangers or destruction.

I’ve found, and written about, the one real center of protest, the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, which is located in one building on one block a couple of miles south of downtown. Protesters often appear around it, but only once this year (back in June) has it turned violent, and the numbers of protesters usually haven’t exceeded about two dozen at a time, mostly consistenting of seniors who are there as part of religious groups. Traffic all around the building flows normally. ICE operations inside appear to be going on unimpeded. The protests seem not to have expanded beyond that one block. That’s just about the extent of the “chaos” in Portland.

Okay, that’s my view. But still, who do you believe?

Here’s a case where you can resolve the question conclusively for yourself.

Take a road trip. Head down Interstate 84, all the way to the end where it merges with I-5 in the middle of Portland, and then head off on a street tour. You can visit the east side of the Willamette River, the industrial district, or even the less-affluent (some say long-ignored by city hall) far east side of town, or the downtown area. Oh, and while you’re downtown be sure to check out Powell's, one of the best and most famous book stores in the world, and still very much in business. Parking likely will be your biggest problem.

If you want to check out the scene at ICE, you can take Macadam Road south from downtown, and look to your left. You’ll know you’ve gotten to protest central when you see some sign carriers.

So drive around and check it all out. It’s about as safe as Boise. I promise.

As you return home, you may need to consider this question:

Who do you believe now? President Trump or your own lying eyes?

 

Last Tuesday the Idaho Legislature’s Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee showed off a new digital and online web tool for evaluating the state budget, the “base builder tool.”

Any kind of tool inherently is neither good nor bad. A hammer can be used to drive a nail or build a house, or to bash someone’s skull in. This new JFAC tool is the same. Better evaluation of the state budget base would be a good thing, and long needed. But legislators ought to take care that the tool is used constructively rather than destructively, because either could happen.

In public budgeting, a “base” (which is not the same thing as a political “base”) in most places is under-studied, a situation that can last for generations. It’s often the unexciting part of a government’s spending picture, but it usually has by far the most money.

The budget base is ongoing core spending. If a service or a division is considered to be essentially permanent or long-running (as, on the state level, areas from corrections to education to parks to health and many more are assumed to be), then the easy way to budget is to start by taking the amounts from the last budget cycle and move them forward, with adjustments, into the next. The adjustments might include increases to cover inflation or new projects, or reductions because of revenue shortfalls or priority changes. After that, you might add new programs or services, or delete them. But the idea is, you start with the base and work from there.

Because of that, a lot of governmental spending simply lurches forward unexamined from year to year, and it tends to be looked at only around the edges.

That’s not a good thing. At some point - not necessarily every year, but at least from time to time - assumptions ought to be challenged. Is this particular service something we still need? Do we need more or less of it? Is it being done as efficiently as it should be? Or are we spending too little, with the result of failing to do a needed service well enough?

Those kinds of questions often get too little attention, not just in the Idaho Legislature, but in many places, local, state and (to no great shock) national. Looking at the whole of the budget rather than just the new or standout pieces of it takes a lot more time and work.

But if that kind of serious review is to be done - and it should be - then it should be done carefully.

The newly unveiled online “better builder tool” Idaho’s budget committee will use could help. Unlike many budget presentations, it focuses on the core of the budgets, not just new or sidebar projects.

The database allows researchers, which could and should include the public as well as legislators, to dig deeply into what’s been spent, and for what. And you can see in the charts how the base has changed - grown, generally - over the years.

This is the kind of granular work budgeters ought to be doing. You can take a look for yourself.

There’s another aspect to this.

The new base reviewer seems to come out of a new and sometimes problematic way the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee has been doing its budgeting recently. Instead of, as in the past, reviewing the state agency budgets as a whole, they have split them into a maintenance or base budget, passing those quickly toward the start of the session, and then doubling back and spending more of the time remaining on any major changes.

Part of the effect is to remove context. Committee consideration of the base is reviewed apart from major proposed changes to it, and the changes are considered separate from the larger picture of an agency’s base. The Department of Corrections, say, might have a base budget geared around last year’s (with inflationary and other adjustments), but if a new prison building were needed, that might be considered separately, weeks after the look at the department’s overall situation was placed before the committee.

Good budgeting requires a broad, comprehensive view. The new database could allow for better insight on the details, but legislators - and everyone else - will need to be sure the bigger picture isn’t lost in a blizzard of details.

 

Nampa is Idaho’s third largest city, home to more than 110,000 people, and stressed in many ways, from social concerns to car traffic to politics.

It is about to get a new mayor after this year’s November election. What kind of mayor should it be?

The mayor there since January 2018 has been Debbie Kling, and though she appears to be generally popular and well regarded she’s been riding a tiger ever since. The city has grown by one subdivision or more at a time almost constantly, and the community has struggled with roads, schools (not city jurisdiction but relevant to it), zoning changes, dealing with attempts to upgrade downtown and complicated politics, including cultural warfare. You could label Nampa as conservative Republican ideologically (and many would), but those terms have lost real meaning, and they encompass complicated threads from more or less centrist to highly extreme.

Mayor Kling has often made a point of calling for planning for the future (a centrist mindset), and that seems to have applied to her own job. Of the four candidates filing to succeed her, she has endorsed one, Rick Hogaboam.

The situation here has some similarity to that of the slightly larger and even faster growing city to Nampa’s east. In 2019, four-term Meridian Mayor Tammy de Weerd opted not to run again and (along with other City Hall figures) backed her top administrator, Robert Simison, for the job. Simison won with a solid percentage and was re-elected easily in 2023.

His appeal was that of an experienced manager who could help guide growth in the exploding city. Voters had the option of going with more ideological, rather than managerial, alternatives, but they didn’t go that way. This could portend something about Meridian as it continues to develop.

The contours of this Nampa election, then, look familiar. Kling’s endorsee, Hogaboam, was her chief of staff and also served on the city council. He’s also been appointed and elected (in 2024, unopposed) as Canyon County clerk, a job he said he would leave if elected to the top post  in Nampa.

Hogaboam’s campaign themes cover such topics as, “Safe and Thriving Neighborhoods; Sustainable, Thoughtful, and Strategic Growth; Economic Vitality and Opportunity; Transparent and Responsive Governance.” They bespeak a plan to do the job and stick to the knitting, rather than make big changes or deliver large or loud statements.

He has three opponents.

Erick Myricks is a tech entrepreneur and a jazz musician, who declared, “Nampa is going broke—and I’ve got the plan to fix it. I’m pro small-business. I’m pro-agriculture. I’m pro-The People of Nampa!” Not granularly specific, but there’s something of a boat-rocking tone.

Justin Buchholz, a construction truck driver, calls himself “a regular guy” and has appeared on podcasts and forums; his candidacy seems a little undefined, but could become a focus for outsider interests. Or Myricks’ might, if there’s a large enough protesting constituency.

The fourth candidate is Melissa Sue Robinson, who has run many times for state and local offices over the last couple of decades but usually has received only small votes.

The odds seem to favor Hogaboam, as the inside-anointed contender with a convincing strong resume and plenty of local support, running against three outsiders (vectoring in from somewhat different directions) who look likely to split the opposition vote.

But the attitude and feelings of the voters matter too. And that’s where this race, maybe more than others happening this year around Idaho, may provide some larger clues about where the voters are and what they want.

Idaho’s electoral hinge, after all, increasingly has become suburban, and Nampa makes as good a measure of that as any place in the state. Watch closely how they decide this race - a stable experienced figure versus the prospect of one or more boat rockers - and that could tell you something about area politics in the year to come.

 

No one should have been surprised by Idaho Governor Brad Little promoting, as he did a few days ago, nuclear energy research and commerce in the state. That has been more or less standard state policy for a long time.

But the changes and gaps involved raise some questions about the how and why, and about the transition of attitudes toward nuclear power, too.

There was a time when Idaho state government - governors most specifically - had a skeptical and sometimes tense relationship with the state’s nuclear side, especially what is now the Idaho National Laboratory. Long-timers will remember Governor Cecil Andrus shutting down the state’s borders to incoming nuclear waste. He was highly concerned about waste storage there generally: “They took a bulldozer and dug a hole in the sand and put in barrel and paste board boxes, then covered it up with sand and called that storage. And it is above the largest fresh water aquifer in America.”

It wasn’t just Andrus. His successor, Phil Batt, negotiated a deal on waste only after hard negotiations, and he didn’t take compliance for granted. Much of the state, maybe the Magic Valley especially, looked at lab operations uneasily.

Gradually, that concern eased back as waste became a lesser issue (though it’s not gone away completely and some promises were not kept), and the Idaho National Laboratory’s role in the state economy - which is large - moved close to front of mind.

In February 2012, Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter started the Leadership in Nuclear Energy (LINE) Commission, which its website said “makes recommendations to the Governor on policies and actions of the State of Idaho to support and enhance the long-term viability and mission of the Idaho National Laboratory and other nuclear industries in Idaho.” Its membership over the years has included a number of prominent state leaders. Its current website refers to LINE 3.0, suggesting revisions.

LINE was steadily promoted publicly over the years and kept going when Brad Little took over as governor. But it seemed to get less attention in the last few years, and its website indicates the group’s last meeting - at least the last for which an agenda was prepared - was in January 2024. You get the sense, looking from outside, that the effort appeared to be running out of steam. The executive order creating it was allowed to expire earlier this year. (There’s a reference in a new report to a renewal of it being in the works for later this year.)

For the year following, nuclear seems to not have been a front-burner issue for Idaho state government.

Last week, Little announced a new Idaho Advanced Nuclear Energy Task Force and an Advanced Nuclear Strategic Framework which appeared to have been designed to link to Trump Administration nuclear policies.

What prompted this? Here’s a clue: The framework document noted that “the Trump Administration released a series of four nuclear-focused Executive Orders to accelerate the deployment of advanced nuclear reactors. These Executive Orders include actions to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act and environmental reviews, strengthen the domestic nuclear fuel cycle, expand the nuclear energy workforce, and reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A key deadline from these Executive Orders is the federal approval of at least three new reactors by July 4, 2026.”

And what actions exactly are intended? Here’s another piece from the new proposal: “In January 2025, Governor Little signed Executive Order 2025-02, the Strategic Permitting, Efficiency, and Economic Development Act (SPEED) aimed at better coordinating state permitting on big projects that promote energy independence, support national security, and drive Idaho’s economy. If supported with adequate funding, SPEED could draw advanced nuclear developers to Idaho by bringing together agency directors — especially those with permitting and regulatory authority and subject matter expertise — to collaboratively reduce barriers and accelerate project timelines.”

The nuclear skepticism of decades past could sometimes be overdone, and the technology around nuclear power has made major advances. That said, you have to wonder who in the state is keeping at least some kind of skeptical eye on what’s hoped to be large-scale and rapid-fire developments in the nuclear field.

 

The second part of the sentence gets the most attention, but pay heed to the first part as well:

“The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools.”

That comes from -- actually, it’s all of -- Article IX, section 1 of the Idaho Constitution. And it’s the centerpiece of the legal argument filed this week by a group of public education advocates, including at least one school district.

It ought to be enough for the Idaho Supreme Court to throw out House Bill 93, passed in this year’s legislative session and which sets up a system of payouts (structured as tax credits) to people who say they want to use taxpayer money for private education of their school-age children. The program set to start in January is structured as a tax credit, up to $5,000 for most students and up to $7,500 for students with special needs. Again, the structuring of this approach as a tax measure seems designed to resist legal attacks, but the new lawsuit notes, “the ultimate result is appropriated public funds being used to pay private school tuition and fees.”

It’s not a knock on private schools or home schooling to say that this bill has acres of problems. Paul Stark, the Idaho Education Association's executive director, said last week (as many others have over the years this subject has been debated) “Private schools get taxpayer dollars without disclosing their curriculum, test scores or even requiring background checks. They can reject students based on religion, disability or anything else. This is not just unaccountable, it’s unfair, it’s unsafe and it’s unconstitutional.” There’s scarcely any accountability or transparency.

But what gets less mentioned is the benefit of public schools, which the Idaho constitution framers (and they were hardly alone around the nation) specifically wanted to support although they were well aware of alternatives. They did not want to shut out those alternatives. But their take was that public schools had particular virtues which the state ought to encourage.

It is a broad general education, as defined over time by the public - the voters, the school boards, and to some extent the legislature. It provides a mechanism for preparing children for their adult roles in society, the governing, economic and beyond. It gives students a common frame of reference. Public schools are part of what allows us to communicate with each other, and at least in general use a common base of information.

We can’t govern ourselves - as opposed to government by dictator - otherwise.

Public education is more than classes, important as those are. It creates an immersion into community, an experience of getting along and even cooperating with a lot of people who aren’t exactly the same as you.

You can reasonably argue about how well the Idaho public school system delivers on “general, uniform and thorough.” It’s not perfect. I have concerns about that, and so may you; but the specifics of what is taught in the public schools are public and have been and will be debated in public, and grow out of what most people are looking for.

But “general, uniform and thorough” is  the aspiration at least, while private forms of education are none of those things. They are alternatives to those goals. That’s not an argument for banning them, and there’s value in trying out alternatives; private education is legitimate, and some of it is very well done.

But to the extent er lost s common public education, we lose an important part of the glue holding us together. Private schools are there for private purposes, not public ones. The new lawsuit makes a similar point, and refers to a legal principle called the “public purpose doctrine.”

The Idaho Supreme Court would be right in deciding there’s no legislative authority, or legitimate public purpose, in requiring taxpayers to support private schools.