Imagining Idaho's future, or what red and blue look like when cast against our towering peaks.
SR.com: Democrat Brady to run for governor again: "Democrat Brady to run for governor again
Ex-publisher says balance needed; he lost to Kempthorne in 2002"
posted by PJG @ 11:34 AM
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Local News - The Idaho Statesman - Always Idaho: New jobs, land boom change hamlet's look and lifestyle"
posted by PJG @ 2:30 PM
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Millionaires posing as farmers will keep their property-tax breaks for vacation lots unless the Idaho Senate cuts through the crap this week.
If lawmakers fail us, more $500,000 lots at places like Tamarack Resort in Valley County and Teton Springs in Teton County will be sold to speculators and well-heeled buyers cashing in on exemptions intended for farmers.
They will pay almost nothing — in many cases literally nothing because counties don't send tax bills for under $1 — because of our lawmakers being unable to clean up the mess they made of our tax law in 2002.
You will make up the difference. This year, $3.3 million will be paid by other taxpayers to recover revenue lost under the 2002 law, according to a State Tax Commission estimate.
Compounding this outrage is that it has twisted a tax policy crafted to protect working farmers and ranchers. What I call the Tamarack Tax Break has its origins in a 1980 law approved by a unanimous Legislature that created a property-tax exemption to "preserve land for agricultural use."
The 1980 Legislature said scarce land and encroaching development threatened the future of agriculture; the tax break was necessary to sustain a key segment of Idaho's economy.
The 2002 Legislature turned that law on its head. Instead of saving ag land, the Tamarack Tax Break stimulates subdivision of farmland for vacation homes and enables speculators to buy and hold tax-free lots
More.
posted by PJG @ 8:45 AM
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Ridenbaugh Press: "Preferential treatment
One might expect that a state legislature assigned to sift among all the interests of the state would weigh the interests of one against another, and that even a notably pro-business legislature, such as Idaho's, would weigh at least the various business interests against each other, rather than worry about single-dimensional fairness to just one.
But do it did, once again, in the case of House Bill 33, the latest in a series aimed at ensuring the right of farmers in the Rathdrum area to burn their grass seed, a component of developing that crop. This particular measure has to do with defining an 'economically viable alternative' to the burns that darken skies and clog lungs in the Panhandle.
You could feel the unease in the Senate when Senator Shawn Keough, a Sandpoint resident - an asthmatic - who lives straight in the path of the smoke, talked about the impact. This is smoke produced by someone else which comes not just to but through her home. She talked about having to decide whether this arrival of smoke meant she had to go to the hospital, and consider just what the health consequiences of this burn might be. She is, of course, far from alone, but making the matter personal, affecting someone all 33 of the other senators knew, made it the more powerful.
Strong as that argument was, it has not swayed a working majority of senators in the past. Put perhaps a bit more forsibly this time was the point that other businesses - tourism notably, but many others as well - are being harmed by the burns. Considering the impact of legislation beyond just one sector - the grass seed farmers - evidently was more than a majority of senators would absorb. In the end, the bill passed 19-15; it had previously passed the House. 03/16/05 08:37 "
posted by PJG @ 2:00 PM
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posted by PJG @ 10:31 AM
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Idaho Legislature - The Idaho Statesman - Always Idaho: "Economist says restoring fishing seasons for salmon would pay off
'The bottom line is fish are worth money,' he said"
posted by PJG @ 8:36 PM
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"As a Matter of Fact, Money Does Grow on Trees"
With an anti-environmental backlash inflicting one defeat after another on conservationists, a band of maverick economists is riding to the rescue with a startling revelation about the true value of our natural resources: Follow the money, and you end up in a very green place.
For more than a century, the people who run America's extractive industries—logging, mining, and fossil-fuel drilling—have offered one answer. Conservationists and the environmental movement have offered another. Developers have touted job creation and the connection between industrial exploitation and economic vitality. Environmentalists have grounded their appeals in ecological science and the value of wilderness to the human soul. Always at odds, locked in ideological opposition, the two sides, it seems, have long been speaking different languages.
Currently, with tens of millions of acres on the line and developers enjoying a stiff political tailwind blowing out of Washington, D.C., the mutual incomprehension has become nearly absolute. The environment reflects the red-state/blue-state divide and plays out in vitriolic debate.
Amid all the noise, both sides are failing to hear the whisper of a bold development that could break the deadlock and revolutionize sustainable environmental policy: the arrival of wilderness economics, a dollars-and-cents way to attach a fair and reliable estimate to the seemingly uncountable value of preserving wild spaces and pristine natural resources.
The lyrical phrases of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and David Brower never came with dollar signs attached. They couldn't. In bill and coin, nobody in those days could say what wilderness was worth. Now we can. Studies of rivers and lakes reveal that healthy watersheds provide millions of dollars' worth of water filtration, just one of many such natural services critical for healthy communities. Researchers digging into the economy of the West are finding that forests often have a higher cash value standing than they have as cut timber. Small towns born as logging outposts now thrive as recreation gateways.
"Fifteen years ago we knew intuitively that cutting down these forests didn't make sense," says Bob Freimark, Pacific Northwest director of the Wilderness Society. "We couldn't point to any economic studies to back us up. But not anymore."
This new economic paradigm couldn't arrive at a more crucial time. The failure of environmentalists to sell their agenda to voters has run headlong into an administration that's put energy development at the top of its list and is making it easier than ever to siphon private resources from public land. While mainstream media have focused on hot spots like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Bush administration officials have quietly opened millions of acres of wilderness-quality land in the lower 48 to developers. Much of the 58.5 million acres of roadless national forest preserved by the Clinton administration will soon lose its protection. In Wyoming, ranchers who've wisely tended their land for generations are watching energy companies ruin their soil and water in a natural-gas free-for-all. In Utah and Colorado, nearly 150,000 acres of wildland—including previously protected sections of Desolation Canyon, as well as spectacular tracts of Sagebrush Pillows and the Dolores River Canyon—have been leased for drilling in the past 14 months. Tens of thousands more will likely follow.
President George W. Bush and his supporters defend these actions in the name of energy security and jobs. But set against the West's new economic reality—a long-term shift away from extractive industries and toward recreation, tourism, the service sector, and information technology—the aggressive drive to cut and drill without factoring in long-term effects on the value of public wildland isn't just environmentally unfriendly; it's economically unsound. Converting the natural wealth contained in the nation's pristine forests, deserts, canyons, and mesas into a one-time hit of corporate profit is a swindle of the first order, one that should outrage anyone, Republican or Democrat, who favors combining sound business practices with smart environmental stewardship.
Fortunately, the new way of thinking, if embraced by both sides, could lead to an era of compromise, in which decisions about extraction and preservation are based on assessments of long-term value, and of how that value might or might not be sacrificed for short-term gains.
If that happens, we'll owe thanks to people like John Loomis, 52, an economics professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and one of the pioneer thinkers in wilderness valuation. Loomis has written dozens of papers showing that mining, logging, drilling, and grazing are rarely the most economically beneficial uses of public land.
More What's Wilderness Worth?:
posted by PJG @ 10:15 AM
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Ridenbaugh Press: "On their honor
On their honor
A few days ago, down below in this space, you may note this: "You get the sense that we're just on the verge of seeing a bunch of really ugly stories coming up on the subject of the Boy Scouts."
That was not really a guess, even though the point came from a look at organizational dynamics. A story from out of Idaho has been bewing for a while; today it surfaced, in the Idaho Falls Post Register, and it is explosive.
It evolved out of a shabby attempt at coverup - the disappearance of a whole civil suit court file, that action itself being the subject of some discussion of abuse of court process some weeks back. This might have been just an odd curiosity, but the few details which did surface - that it had to do with a child sex abuse case and that it related to the Boy Scouts - suggested that something much deeper and more damaging, something near the heart of the social, political and power structure of the area, was involved.
The bit of background to that conclusion is this: Nearly all Boy Scout activity in eastern Idaho (and a very large chunk in Idaho overall) is sponsored directly by the LDS Church, which is socially dominant in the region, and which has made scouting an official church activity since 1913. That means child abuse in the Boy Scouts in Eastern Idaho translates to child abuse under the umbrella of the LDS Church. Once journalists and others gained access to the court records, as they eventually did, the dots were almost sure to be connected.
And they have, in some alarming ways.
The Post-Register story (no direct link available) starts: "Paid professionals at the Grand Teton Council hired a child molester to work at Camp Little Lemhi even though they, the national Boy Scout office and troop sponsors in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were warned about Brad Stowell. Court records, which the Boy Scouts' lawyers fought to hide from public view, show the warnings might have been sufficient to disqualify Stowell from scouting six years before he was finally arrested."
Stowell was picked up for sex abuse (of a six-year-old) as a teenager, and his mother was well aware of it - she took him to rehabilitative treatment for months. But she also was long heavily involved in scouting, is in the regional council's Hall of Fame, and let her son take a job at a scout camp. Stowell's LDS bishop knew as well. But Stowell went on abusing. The story says he eventually confessed to molesting two dozen boys; ultimately, he was arrested after some of his victims complained directly - but that was after years of warnings to the adults yielded no results. This is a key point: None of those trustworthy and morally straight adults would act; it took the kids to do it.
The effort to bar Stowell from scouting activities apparently had been led before that by a Blackfoot man, Richard Scarborough, who pleaded with the national scout organization and his own church to keep Stowell away from the kids - to no avail. The response he got from the high offices of the LDS church raised a whole set of other questions, because officials there wrote back to note an investigation by the Idaho Department of Health & Welfare had determined no further action was needed.
The Post-Register noted, "It's unclear how church officials obtained the information because Idaho law prohibits Health and Welfare from releasing such details to private individuals or organizations, particularly in a case involving a juvenile."
As indicated, this case goes to the heart of the social-political-power structure in Idaho. (Should be noted that running the story at all constitutes an act of courage on the part of the Post Register.) On various levels, many people have been involved in what has happened, and only a few have been publicly named inthis first round. This story does not appear to be done.
Among the implications: Is it even conceivable that this is the only such case? Or that, with this one exposed, no one else (maybe in another state) will come forward to tell of another? Bear in mind what the Catholic Church has undergone in the last decade, and how all that started, and you can easily imagine - now - what may lie ahead. 02/28/05 11:42 [comment / reprint]
posted by PJG @ 8:24 AM
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