Month: <span>October 2015</span>

The campaign finance reports that tend to get most attention are those for the big offices, for governor or for Congress (not to mention president). That’s understandable.

But you can find the reports for many Idaho cities too, and sometimes they show you information useful in deciding where your vote should go.

Cities weren’t included when the state’s voters passed the Sunshine Initiative in 1974, but in 1982 the legislature added elective offices – mayor and council – for cities over 16,000 in population to the requirements. In 2004, more cities were added: Those with a population over 5,000.

That means it covers 32 Idaho cities, the smallest of those being Preston; Weiser and Rupert are the next largest to be included. Fruitland, Shelley and American Falls just missed the cutoff.

The details of reporting have been changed, by the legislature, over the years. This year, for example, House Bill 112 changed the rule covering late contributions. It (according to a Secretary of State’s report) “requires all political committees to report within 48 hours all contributions of $1,000 or more received after the 16 th day before, but more than 48 hours before Election Day (as is currently required for candidates). The bill takes effect July 1, 2015.”

Many of the cities post the campaign contribution reports online, which means easy access for voters.

Boise’s Mayor David Bieter, who’s running for a fourth term, has his most current one (the seven-day pre-general report) at http://cityclerk.cityofboise.org/media/310646/bieter7daypregeneral.pdf. It shows substantial contributions indeed, more than $180,000. You could find a lot to look at there. His main opponent, Judy Peavey-Derr, showed contributions of a little more than $15,000. Among other things, this may give you some idea how the race is likely to shape up on election night.

Fine. But does all this tell you anything useful, assuming you’re one of the minority of eligible voters planning to cast a ballot?

It can. On Friday, for example, the Idaho Press-Tribune at Nampa reported that, “The largest contributions to this year’s city council elections in Nampa and Caldwell have come from real estate, construction and development groups.” It proceeded to tell who received how much from who.

That’s of interest and meaningful, especially in growing communities like Nampa and Caldwell. Who are these contributors, what sort of work would they like to do in these cities, and what kind of relationships might they be trying to build? What might that mean for the kind of cities Nampa and Caldwell may become a few years from now?

You don’t have to assume corruption or foul play in asking these questions: The answers could be good ones, depending on your point of view. But they are likely to matter, and could influence your voting choices – in fact, the reporting laws were designed with that in mind. Substantial contributions to city candidates from businesses or other organizations with concerns before a city government tend not to materialize simply because a candidate seems to be a nice guy.

There are implications here, maybe good, maybe bad, which voters taking their job responsibly ought to try to understand.

Is testing becoming less central to Idaho education policy?

Not so long ago, at least in Idaho political circles and very often at the legislature, all the discussion about schools seemed to center around making them “accountable.” In a general sense, of course, they have been accountable for many decades, with records of many kinds kept: Graduation rates, SAT scores, attendance records, grades and much, much more. You won’t easily come up with a major institution in our society much more accountable than schools traditionally have been. But what was really meant, in this discussion from, say, a decade ago, was aggressively scheduled and high-stakes testing.

The exact structure of testing on the table has changed some over the years, from “no child left behind” (ironically named, since the way it was structured it did leave behind whole schools that didn’t score well enough) to Common Core. Budgets and salaries were on the line when students put pencils to paper.

The idea that parents and taxpayers, not to mention citizens in our society who need an educated public as a broader matter of social good, should have an idea of how well schools are doing their job seemed reasonable. It still does, but those of us outside schools and setting policy (as voters or in some more direct capacity) never figured out the metrics – another way of way of saying we haven’t been clear about what we want schools to accomplish. I’ve long thought, for example, that serious civics education should be a core part of the public school experience. But we generally have never had discussions about things like that, political discussions since this is a logical subject for our politics. We’ve wound up with basic-level testing on math and English, teaching to the test, and a compression of what students learn (goodbye arts, for example) and what we emphasize in class.

Over-emphasis on this kind of accountability can and does short-change students.

Gradually, some shaking up seems to be underway.

Last week, the Idaho Board of Education said it would waive two key requirements for a big Common Core test that was tried this spring but whose results have proven hard to compile, even five months later. The test has been administered in many states, but criticism of it has grown, and some Idahoans even have filed a federal lawsuit to quash it. The lawsuit has an iffy states-rights basis, but it may cause a number of Idaho political people to take second and third looks at the testing regime.

And nationally, the number of states running the tests has dropped from 18 to 15, according to Idaho Ed News.

And IEN points out that the Boise School District board last month “unanimously approved a resolution calling for working alongside the Idaho School Boards Association, the Idaho Legislature and the State Department of Education to “consider adopting other testing measures in lieu of the SBAC that will have the primary goal of improving instruction without overburdening Idaho classrooms.” If Boise’s proposal gains momentum, it could serve as the catalyst to a major policy and testing debate during the 2016 legislative session.”

The dialogue is changing. Testing won’t go away, nor should it, but its role at the center of education policy may get some adjustment in years to come.

Much of the politics in Idaho’s Panhandle is driven by a collection of groups of activist extremists, successful enough to dominate most Republican primary contests and many general elections.

Despite their splinters into competing factions (Tea Party Patriots, Reagan Republicans, species of Pachyderms and others) they are dominant – you can look at the roster of state legislators from the area for initial evidence – but are they a majority of the public at large? Does this segment of the Republican Party (again, I’m not talking about the party generally, just this segment of it) really speak for a majority of the people of the area?

I posed that question to a number of Panhandle people while in the area last week, and the answer uniformly and unequivocally came back: No. (An admission: None of those people were from the extremist groups, but they did represent a variety of viewpoints and experiences.)

Second question: How, then, do they win so many elections?

In answer to that, I heard mainly: They vote. And they got themselves organized. They did it the old-fashioned and proper way. And their opposition – outside of some recent strong organizing work on several elections inside the city of Coeur d’Alene – didn’t do those things nearly as well.

This isn’t the whole story. Immigrants from California and other places have tended very conservative, and many have been receptive to relatively extreme messages. The demographics have changed somewhat.

Still, there’s external evidence the extreme groups are not a majority. Polling done over the years broken down by region has consistently shown more moderately conservative positions on a range of issues, from the social to the fiscal, have more support than more narrow, extremist views.

You start to wonder what would happen, and what Idaho elections would look like, if everyone voted.

Idaho has somewhere around 1.2 million people eligible to vote; that number may be edging toward 1.3 million.

In November 2014, about two-thirds of those eligibles were registered to vote, and barely a third of the eligibles actually voted; about 800,000 did not. The elected officials Idaho has got there on the basis of winning a majority of that third. What does the other two-thirds think of the result?

More people turn out in presidential years, of course, but the point here still holds. In November 2012, about three-fourths of the eligibles were registered, and a little over half voted. The views, whatever they were, of about 600,000 Idahoans were not reflected.

Who are these people who are not voting?

One national study from about five years ago said that “approximately 51 million eligible Americans are still not registered to vote. This represents almost one in four eligible persons, disproportionately low-income voters, people of color, and younger Americans.”

In Idaho’s case then, considering that study and the polling showing overall attitudes on ideas and issues, there’s some reason to believe that the large mass of non-voters is more moderate generally than the voters have been, at least in recent years.

An exclamation point: Don’t read too much into this. I don’t at all mean to suggest that Idaho would suddenly go Democratic or liberal if all the eligibles turned up in the polls; I don’t think that would happen. But there’s some reason to think the state’s politics would moderate a bit if they did.

Last week writer Chris Carlson and I were touring around north Idaho, and when we pulled in at Moscow decided to stop in at the local paper.

We pulled up to the downtown building that for half a century and more had housed the Daily News (or, as I knew it in my Moscow years, the Idahonian). I was a little startled to find it now occupied by an economic development company, but the receptionist there helpfully pointed me to the newspaper’s new digs.

Those were located in a suite of offices on the second floor of the Moscow federal building. Chris and I inquired about the unusual situation of a newspaper whose landlord was the federal government, but that turned out not to be the case either. The federal building, which still includes the post office and federal courts, had earlier been sold to a foundation of the local hospital. Which presumably could kick them all out if it developed expansion plans in the area, as many hospitals in recent years have been known to do.

The newspaper, which had off-loaded its press years before and was using only a small part of the space in its old building, understandably wanted more cost-effective offices, and conditions were right at the federal building. But it seems a comedown to see a newspaper in an office building suite, like just another firm of accountants or lawyers.

This week also brought news of the anticipated sale of the Post Company in Idaho Falls, which operates that city’s daily newspaper, the Post Register, and three eastern Idaho weeklies. The sale is said to be final at the beginning of next month. The sale leaves the Lewiston and Moscow papers, jointly owned at Lewiston, and the Hagadone papers based in Coeur d’Alene, as the lone locally-owned papers in the state.

The surprise buyer at Idaho Falls is Adams Publishing Group, an organization completely new to the Northwest. The most common expectation, probably, was that the Post Register would go to one of the big national chains like Gannett or McClatchy, but Adams is a smaller presence in the newspaper world. The Post Register may be the largest newspaper in its organization, which has 46 newspapers but mostly very small dailies, weeklies and specialty publications, and all of them located in the northeast, from Minnesota to Maryland. It seems a surprising connection.

The Post Register is among the diminishing numbers of papers that still have their own printing presses, and that may have been attractive to Adams, which does a substantial amount of commercial printing. Still, the Post Register-Adams linkup does seem a little unusual, partly because the Idaho paper is so far outside the company’s geographic base .

Word from the Post Register is that little is expected to change, at least any time soon, at Idaho Falls: The paper should continue on generally as it has been. But once newspapers move from local ownership to the national or international marketplace, unpredictable things can happen. Over the years, for example, the Boise Idaho Statesman went from local ownership to Federated Newspapers, to Gannett, to Knight-Ridder and now to McClatchy. In large corporations, especially the largest, newspapers can be swapped around like trading cards.

Adams may be small enough that won’t happen. But keep watch on this: See how this distant Idaho property is integrated into the moderate-sized business from the east, whether by more acquisitions out west or in some other way.

It’s a new world for newspapers, and it just keeps getting newer.