Posts published in “Stapilus”

I don’t do a lot of predictions. But odds are good for a particular news story happening in Idaho soon, and with a reasonable set of probability about where it will happen.

Though it could happen anywhere - or to anyone.

This thought grows out of a pile of recent news stories around the country about activity by federal (and sometimes state or local level) immigration forces. A wrapup by Pro Publica said “Federal immigration authorities have a history of wrongfully detaining U.S. citizens. Advocates warn that the Trump administration’s immigration policies mean that more citizens will get caught up in raids and sweeps.”

It’s not that prior administrations never grabbed citizens and treated them, in the immigration system, as they shouldn’t have. It’s happened before. (If you’ve never seen the Cheech Marin movie comedy Born in East LA, it’s not a bad introduction - informative as well as entertaining.)

But things are moving into a whole new level under the Trump Administration.

The agencies even have been given arrest quotas; the pressure is coming on to ramp up those numbers. There seems to be less concern about making mistakes than about failing to hit the targets.

In making its assessment, Pro Publica of course had receipts. They cited a Philadelphia car wash employee who was handcuffed and facing the business side of a gun before he could demonstrate that he was, in fact, a citizen.

The news site went on: “In Utah, agents pulled over and detained a 20-year-old American after he honked at them. In New Mexico, a member of the Mescalero Apache nation more than two hours from the border was questioned by agents who demanded to see their passport. Earlier this month, a Trump voter in Virginia was pulled over and handcuffed by gun-wielding immigration agents. In Texas, a 10-year-old citizen recovering from brain cancer was detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint and eventually deported to Mexico with her undocumented parents and other citizen siblings in February.”

As a side indicator, there’s the case of an academic from France headed to a professional conference in Houston who was detained by customs, his phone seized and himself deported to France - because messages critical of Donald Trump were found on his phone.

Much of the recent activity has been happening toward the southern border states. But not all of it, and more will be coming north.

Won’t be long before Idaho sees some of this action - meaning I think it highly likely it will show up in news reports - if it hasn’t already. When large-scale “sweeps” happen, their agents tend to be not especially picky about who is seized.

Is this likely to happen more in some parts of Idaho than in others? Probably.

If I were to bet on the next Idaho occurrence, I’d go for Canyon County. About 26% of its population (more than 50,000 people) is Hispanic, according to census information, and Caldwell is thought to be the third most Hispanic city in the state, with Nampa coming in seventh. That could put a major bullseye on that area.

But consider too the northern Magic Valley. Here are the other cities topping that list of Hispanic populations: Rupert, Jerome, Burley and Hailey. Jerome County’s population is about 38% Hispanic - the closest in Idaho to a majority-Hispanic county.

It’s immediately followed (at 37.5%) by Clark County, which is Idaho’s smallest-population county, but might be attractive to immigration forces looking to simply swamp an area.

The point there is that if large numbers of people are swept up in these areas, they easily can include citizens as well as non-citizens.

If you’re thinking to yourself: I’m a citizen, I have every right to be here, or even ‘I’m not Hispanic’ - don’t get too comfortable. If you’re caught up in a sweep, none of that may matter until after your life already has been turned upside down.

You’re not safe now. None of us are.

For all of Idaho’s vaunted population growth, a lot of people have been making their way out of the state, or opting out of providing services. Doctors, teachers, librarians and many more: For a variety of reasons, but specific legislature-passed state policy clearly among them.

Let’s add child care providers to the list.

This comes out of a report just released by IdahoStars, a block-grant-funded (so don’t expect this to continue long into the Trump Administration) effort run at Moscow through the University of Idaho, with the Idaho Center on Disabilities and Human Development and Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children.

It wasn’t put together by a private non-profit group, though some of the new reports’s conclusions could match up with one.

At a time when Idaho’s population continues to grow, IdahoStars report said more than 2,400 people working in child care in 2023 left work in that area, with turnover at a high 37%.

The overall number of people working in that field in Idaho fell by 3%, at a time when it should be rising. The number of available “spots” for children in Idaho child care centers has dropped around the same time by 1,321.

That in turn led to an estimated economic cost for the state of about $478 million, IdahoStars said.

Many of the reasons for that are endemic to the way child care operations usually run. Many are large in size and don’t pay especially well. Stress can be considerable. The report said, “Working in child care is rooted in a passion for early childhood, but the job is overly taxing and drives individuals out of the field. Low pay, long days, constant changes in leadership, children, co-workers, and requirements as well as the physical and emotional toll of the job all contribute to leaving the field.”

The workers were asked what would be needed to get them to return. More than two thirds cited higher pay, and almost half the rest talked about “bad management.” Obviously, that’s not true everywhere, but it seems to be common enough to represent a problem.

The turnover and diminished staffs are resulting in specific problems statewide: “High turnover rates lead to increased recruitment and training costs for child care providers. Constantly hiring and training new staff members to replace those who leave is not only time consuming but also financially burdensome for child care centers. These costs can strain the financial sustainability of child care businesses, potentially leading to increased fees for parents or closure of facilities.”

All that is worth bearing in mind in considering House Bill 243, at this writing House-passed and awaiting final Senate action, which hacks away at regulations covering child care, and would let child care centers set their own staff-to-child ratios. Convenient for center operators trying to save money and avoid finding hard-to-get staff; but problematic for children and parents.

The Senate committee hearing on it was heated. Christine Tiddens, executive director of Idaho Voices for Children argued, “Stripping these key safety standards from law opens the door to operators and bad actors who cut corners to save costs. In a child care setting, cutting corners results in babies being put into harm’s way.”

The bill supporters’ argument? Here’s Senator Brian Lenney of Nampa:  “I’ve heard cities and bureaucrats saying that they know how to run a day care better than a day care owner. It’d be like a bureaucrat telling a farmer the best way to milk a cow.”

If the bill passes, and it seems to have a good chance, we’ll know a year from now how well that logic held up. And how well Idaho children fared under its terms.

And we’ll know more - if there’s any money to pay for updated studies then - about how many child care providers still are offering their services in Idaho.The number may be down from where it is today.

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When the highly controversial Idaho school voucher measure, House Bill 93, landed on Governor Brad Little’s desk, his office asked for comment from Idahoans about what he should do: Sign the bill, or veto it?

The bill had been passed by both chambers of the legislature, but not overwhelmingly: 42-28 in the House, and 20-15 in the Senate, meaning the Republican caucuses were split on it. A veto likely would not have been overridden. That means a veto would not have been performative or a statement of concern; it would be decisive.

It turns out that a veto is what most Idahoans want. We’ve known that for some time. In the Boise State University Idaho Public Policy Survey released in January, 53.3% said they opposed vouchers to 38% who supported them. The proposal was defined in the survey as “use of tax dollars to help pay for a private or religious education if a parent chooses not to send their child to a local public school,” which if anything may have been a favorable description.

But we don’t have to rely only on that to gauge Idaho’s attitude toward the subject. Actual opposition in Idaho may have been larger, to judge from the response to Little’s invitation. A lot of Idahoans did respond, as 37,457 phone calls and emails poured into the governor’s office. And 86% of them opposed the voucher bill.

Little, without making any direct reference to this, then signed the bill into law. In fact, the statement he released about his signing made no direct reference to the content (other than the cost) or the meaning of the bill at all, or the overwhelming wave of opposition to it.

This legislative session is packed full of bills most Idahoans, if informed of them, likely would oppose. But no significant roadblock or blowback has surfaced yet.

Most Idaho legislators no longer appear to see themselves as representatives of the people. In many cases, they seem empowered to do whatever they want to do - carry out their personal preferences. That’s constrained mainly by the will of a few interests - the state Republican Party organization, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a few others - which have outsized impact on Republican primary elections. Voters, whether aware of what their legislators are doing or not, have been imposing no political penalties for failing to represent them.

The Idaho Legislature keeps re-emphasizing the point, over and over and in recent years in session after session. Examples are all over the place. (And outside the Statehouse too, as shown by recent events at a Kootenai County legislative town hall meeting, in which citizens were largely reduced to being mute observers - and dragged out when that boundary was challenged.)

On Wednesday (March 5) the Idaho House approved a proposed constitutional amendment, House Joint Resolution 4, to allow only the legislature, not the voters, the ability to decide policy on marijuana and similar substances. (It still needs Senate approval to reach the ballot. That’s intended to work as a brick wall against a proposed ballot initiative to “decriminalize cannabis now,” petitions for which are circulating. (In 2022, an Idaho Statesman poll found that about two-thirds of Idaho adults favor legalization of at least medical marijuana.)

The point here isn’t who’s right on that subject. It’s that most Idaho legislators don’t trust the people who voted them into office to decide this issue for themselves.

To become effective, HJR 4 would need approval from a majority of the Idaho voters in the general election a year from November. Would they approve such a proposal to take power away from themselves and give it to legislators? Good question.

In all, the voters seem to figure less and less into these equations.

They could. They can. But it will take some work to make themselves solidly felt as a force legislators ignore at their peril - including the ouster of a bunch of legislators who currently ignore them.

The release by congressional Democrats of a list of federal offices - these including only those within the Department of Interior - may be swept under the radar, just another piece of the news from Washington. But it deserves more attention than that.

Those two million square feet of office space in 164 buildings amount to quite a lot of sudden closure, all set for June 30. Three of the offices are in Idaho, a Bureau of Indian Affairs building at Lapwai, an Office of the Solicitor location in Boise, and the Bureau of Reclamation office on Curtis Road in Boise.

The House Democrats pointed out that “The impact on Bureau of Indian Affairs offices will be especially devastating. These offices are already underfunded, understaffed, and stretched beyond capacity, struggling to meet the needs of Tribal communities who face systemic barriers to federal resources. Closing these offices will further erode services like public safety, economic development, education, and housing assistance—services that Tribal Nations rely on for their well-being and self-determination.”

But maybe because I have a little more of a link to the Bureau of Reclamation building - I worked across the street from it at the old Idaho Statesman office, and I’ve been in it a number of times - that one may have hit me more directly.

The idea of a closure of a federal building or two - they have lots and lots of them, right? - or the office itself may not register with quite a few people. But reality is that those offices do things. They’re there for a reason. And if one day they simply vanish, that will matter.

Southern Idaho has a rich agricultural base and a substantial and growing population in large part because of the Bureau of Reclamation, which for a century and more (sometimes under other names) the massive dam, reservoir and other projects that provide water to the area. If the Bureau of Reclamation did not exist, neither would be Magic Valley as we know it. It would instead be mostly unoccupied desert country, as it was during the Oregon Trail days.

But it’s not just history. Idaho is still heavily reliant on water management. A former BuRec staffer suggested, after hearing about the prospective closure of the Boise office, “this smackdown would hit the irrigation and water districts throughout the state with some adverse force.  The bureau is a vehicle by which the districts are still somewhat subsidized by the Federal government through water and facilities management and expertise.”

Boise happens to the regional Columbia River management office, and the former staffer asked, “If they shut down C-PNRO, where would the remaining and necessary administrative staff be located?  Denver?  Washington DC? Yakima? Grand Coulee?”

At a time when the president seems to have designs on Canadian water - as improbable as that sounds and is - closing the office most directly involved with managing Columbia River water coming from Canada would be a serious problem.

BuRec is a bureaucracy, of course, which means it generates massive amounts of paperwork, which for most people may not seem like much of an issue. It is, as anyone involved with water rights and engineering can tell you. The staffer: “At the office, there is maintained a large amount of legal paperwork -- such as water contracts, title transfers, facility maintenance contracts, etc. -- plus a large number of reports, maintenance files, etc. that only a bureaucracy can/does maintain until they are needed.”

And not only people in the agency need those records: So do state and local governments, water districts, canal companies, water users (agricultural and otherwise), attorneys and many more. The loss of those records could quickly throw Idaho’s (and the region’s) water management into chaos.

These points only scratch the surface of the problems associated with a rapid shutdown of the Boise Bureau of Reclamation office. The full range of impacts might need a book rather than a column to enumerate.

That’s one office among 168 in the recent round for closures; and that round may be be only one among several or many. And that’s just the Department of Interior; multiply all that by two dozen or probably more if you talk about federal office closures across the country. The effects already have started to hit in many places in the Northwest; the Forest Service may be the most prominent so far, but it is far from alone.

Donald Trump always has been President Chaos. We’re now about to see, writ large, what the impact of that will be.