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Other natural resources

Other natural resources

May 17, 2019

stapiluslogo1

As long as people have been here, the Northwest has been a place of great natural resources available for human use. Some of those resources are less obvious than others, but that doesn’t mean they’re less valuable.

The earliest travelers through the region, the Native Americans and eventually people from the east along the Oregon Trail, took clear note of many characteristics of the Idaho region - like the blazing sun, the blustering winds shooting across the desert plains, the roar of the rivers cut into deep canyons. For them, such things were more obstacle, annoyance or even hazard than they were anything else. They were conditions to march through and get behind them.

But the sun and the wind and the rivers all have turned out to be massive resources of immense value - commercial and financial value on top of everything else.

The rivers were recognized that way first, initially as sources for irrigation water, but not long after as generators of electric power. Questions of water use and power manufacturing - the context of the time - were subjects of discussion as long ago as at Idaho’s constitutional convention.

Now, more than a century later, the sun and the wind are beginning to be recognized for the powerful natural resources they are.

We see the vast wind farms whenever we travel around the state, especially around southern Idaho. When I lived in eastern Idaho I often felt the winds sharply and it was one of the characteristics of the place I might have changed if I could. Now, wind turbine farms, found in many scattered locations across the southern part of the state, are turning what once seemed to me an annoyance into juice and profits, and undergirding an important part of the economic development of the area. In the last few years I’ve made a practice of retracing some back routes - away from the interstates and busier roads - and I’ve been consistently struck by how extensive wind power development in the region has become. (Not just in Idaho, of course; I could say something similar about much of the northwest.)

Wind power is of course not the only major resource Idaho is newly able to tap.

The largest solar energy farm in the Northwest may be built soon in the relatively remote and barely populated desert. Recent news reports about a project by Alternative Power Development, which is based in Boise, point to a massive new solar development not far from the northern side of the Nevada border some miles from Jackpot. The land is owned by the J.R. Simplot company, and would be leased from it.

If the reported development follows through as planned about 120 megawatts of electricity would come online about three years from now. That one development, in other words, probably would supply enough juice for somewhere around 60,000 to 80,000 homes.

If the project works as planned, you can reasonably expect more like it to pop up across Idaho’s vast wide open spaces.

Idaho Power is slated to buy the Jackpot-area electricity, as it is more or less required to do under the law. But the law doesn’t have to twist Idaho Power’s arm; the utility has been moving steadily in recent years toward more use of renewable power (that would also include its use of Snake River hydropower), including solar and wind. Over time, that should keep some of the lower power rates in the nation low for even longer.

The blazing sun and the blustery wind are annoyances no more. They are becoming key components of Idaho’s natural resource mix.
 

Quit griping: get to work

Quit griping: get to work

May 16, 2019

schmidt

The favorite pastime of the day seems to be railing against government. Isn’t that what these editorial pages are for? If you can’t find a good word to say about your government, then I think you ought to join it. Of the people, by the people, shall not perish; or maybe you just want to gripe. We are better than gripers; republic up.

For this republic needs our service if it is to prosper. It’s not just your vote in November, it’s your voice we need. You, my fellow citizen, have a valuable voice to offer to our common good. Keep your AR15’s, keep the stockpiles of ammo and rations, but invest in this republic. I still believe in it. Do you?

If you don’t have the temperament for elected office but you care about your community, here’s a way to serve: look through the list Governor Little updates regularly on his website. Below the banner of the beautiful capitol in Boise there’s a heading “Administration”. Click on it and a list pops down that includes “Appointments”. There is a simple description of how you apply, a link to download and print the forms, then a list of all the appointments that are coming up.

I’ll bet you thought these appointments were just handed out to Brad’s old buddies. Not so. His office is making a strong effort to reach out and include all of us in this process so many disparage. Good for him. Better for us if we show up.

Many of the positions require some professional experience and that makes sense. But even the Electrical Board (which will have 5 vacancies in July) has an opening for an at-large member. If you are passionate about electrical codes, here’s your chance.

I’d encourage you to look into the legal responsibilities of each board. You can look up the duties for the Electrical Board in statute (54-1006). Same goes for the Building Code Board; they have a great website and a contact number to call.

It’s a long list of appointments the governor has to work through. Something ought to suit you.

Keep in mind, some of these boards have a “political requirement”, not just a professional one. That means the governor will be looking for a Democrat or a Republican. Why does that matter? In the best of all worlds, it shouldn’t. But there have been many times in the history of this country, and this state, when partisan affiliation was the test applied to governance. Sorry fact, but it’s true.

The Idaho legislature saw such party politics a few decades ago harming our common good and decided to impose in law a balance. So, there may be a legal requirement that a board have three members from the “majority party” and two from the “minority party”. Such a requirement was designed to embrace balance and service to the common good, not promote partisanship. The good old boy system needed a legal thwart. The legislature gave it.

Imagine that, the Idaho legislature embracing balance. Like I said, it was a while ago. But I respect the concept of balance. I doubt todays legislature would see such wisdom. Partisan affiliation has become the test before service to the common good. We need to show up folks.

I encourage all citizens to participate in this process of governance. Lincoln’s phrase, “of the people, by the people, for the people” was not in any founding document. In fact, he might have plagiarized it from a sermon by Theodore Parker. I don’t really care; it is an ideal I can embrace. I would hope you can too. Quit griping; get to work. Our republic may perish.
 

Derangement syndrome

May 15, 2019

politicalwords

The current usage is in the form of “Trump derangement syndrome”, meant to suggest a person who has come unhinged by the subject of Donald Trump.

But it cannot be properly understood without acknowledgement of its predecessor conditions: Obama Derangement Syndrome, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Clinton Derangement Syndrome - all in-currency usages in their day, and all meant to connote something similar but with interchangeable subjects and objects. (Trump, Obama and Bush all have separate pages on Wikipedia, as an indication of their common usage.) The DS coinage seems to have started with Clinton; earlier strong objections seem to have been described differently.

(The popularization of the term has been pegged to columnist Charles Krauthammer, who launched the Bush-era use of it in 2003.)

Are we doomed to become deranged by anyone sitting in the White House? Or is any criticism of that person doomed to be dismissed as the product of insanity?

That seems to be the common usage. One web site said called Trump DS “a[n] illness that hard left liberals, anti-trump conservatives, and progressives have. These are very hateful people who cannot have reasonable arguments or conversations about common sense issues." (Sounds like a calm, objective, fair-minded point of view, right?)

Columnist E.J. Dionne counters, liberals “are told that their apprehension about the threat he poses to our constitutional democracy is not a form of vigilance but a disease.”

(Dionne also proposes “Trump Rearrangement Syndrome: A disorder common among Republicans who were once very critical of #Trump but now disown everything they said (or pretend they never said it) to curry favor with him & his core supporters.)

Does “derangement syndrome” - which sounds so scientific - actually have a meaning other than as an insult meant to be lobbed across the political aisle?

It does, as it turns out.

This traces back to a physical therapist from New Zealand named Robin McKenzie (1931-2013), who researched and helped treat pain in the spine and the limbs. He developed a school of thought on treatment in that area, called the McKenzie Method, which has some popularity in the field.

He organized his varieties of condition and appropriate treatment in three categories, all classified as “syndromes.” One of them related to tissue deformities (dysfunction syndrome), and concerns posture (postural syndrome) coming from such actions as slouching, and then there’s derangement syndrome, the most common of the three.

It refers to “pain which is caused by a disturbance in the normal resting position of the affected joint surfaces. This syndrome is classified in two groups: Irreducible derangement … No strategy is capable to produce a permanent change in symptoms. [And] Reducible derangement: Shows one direction of repeated movement which decreases or centralizes referred symptoms = preferred direction; shows also an opposite repeated movement characterized by production or increase or distal movement of the symptoms. The treatment includes: examination of the patient’s symptomatic and mechanical response to repeated movements or sustained positions because the chosen treatment depends on the clinically induced directional preference.”

Read through that carefully again, and ponder whether Dr. McKenzie might in fact have found something that might be usefully adapted for use in American politics ...
 

The sixth extinction

The sixth extinction

May 14, 2019

jones

The United Nations just released an alarming report that should knock the socks off of all of those who still wear them. The report, which was approved by the U.S. and 131 other countries, says the Earth is headed into a mass die-off of plant and animal species. Up to one-eighth of the planet’s species are in danger of extinction unless humans make dramatic changes in their planet-fouling behavior.

The report points to a number of factors that have seriously degraded the environment and threatened global biodiversity in recent decades, including deforestation, overhunting, invasive species, overfishing, pollution, pesticides, and ruinous farming and mining practices. The nearly 7 billion people engaged in these activities have altered the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

Climate change poses the most serious danger to the world’s species in coming years. The report says that about 5% of Earth’s species will face extinction if the average global temperature rises another degree Celsius. Plants and animals that cannot adapt will perish.

The report concludes that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken.” The panel’s chair wrote that “the health of ecosystems on which we and all species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

It may be that many of these plants and animals are not grand specimens--pesky insects and nondescript plants--but they still play a crucial role in maintaining life on the planet. Many lowly insects pollinate crops, break down feces, recycle and enrich soil and provide a food source for grander species which then provide a food source for even grander animals. Many of the lowly plants are also a critical food source for animals and even ingredients in medicines and other useful products for humans.

What makes our dire situation more discouraging is that the report does not tell us something that we did not already know. Scientists have been concerned for years about what is called the Sixth Extinction. About four years ago, I read an excellent, but frightening, book with that title.

The book’s author, Elizabeth Kolbert, writes: “Over the last half billion years, there have been five major mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.”

The present extinction is the result of human activity and we are doing precious little to head it off. Rather than making a concerted effort to bring a halt to practices that cause great harm to species which play a critical role in the food chain, we continue merrily along our destructive course. Instead of taking the drastic action needed to reduce pollution and curb planet-killing greenhouse gasses, we argue about whether climate change is a hoax.

The time for taking action to keep this planet from turning into a hell hole is running perilously short. We need to get with it and blunt the present extinction to the greatest extent possible. Continuation of a ho-hum attitude is not an option.
 

Healthcare is a business

Healthcare is a business

May 13, 2019

rainey

A lot a folks these days are bandying about words like “universal healthcare” and “Medicare/Medicaid for all” and similar popular phrases.

Sounds good. Sounds positive. Sounds hopeful. And chances for any to materialize nationally in the near future are slim to none. Like lots of things we want to fix in our lives, the distance between “want” and “get” is a country mile. Or two.

In November, large majorities of voters in Idaho and Utah said they wanted expanded Medicaid programs to take care of hundreds of thousands of uninsured. Referendums in both states passed with significant numbers. In the old days, the legislatures would have heard the call and gotten right to work fulfilling the will of citizens.

Today, not so much. Majority political parties in each state tried their damndest to ignore those voices. Bills were introduced to cut benefits of anything eventually adopted. In Idaho, there was a “poison pill” measure in committee to kill eventual expansion if the feds ever change the funding ratio. In Utah, they tried to flat out stop expansion. Period!

If voters in those states want to see their dreams of more insured folks, they’re going to need a second election to get rid of the naysayers. Maybe even a third and fourth.

Looking to Congress for help is an even more daunting - and certainly doomed - task in the near future. While large numbers of us want significant improvements, too many denizens of that swamp won’t lift a finger. There’s all that lobbying money from insurance companies, the folks making pharmaceuticals and dozens of other interests wanting to keep the status quo.

It’s not as if “universal” care or federal medical programs won’t be expanded or that our payment system for services won’t be improved. All that can - and likely will - happen. But, given the obstacles, those politicians promising such in the near future are blowing smoke.

For those too young to remember, we went through such efforts in the ‘60's with creating Medicare. Even with favorable majorities in Congress, Lyndon Johnson had to push, pull, promise, horse-trade and literally threaten the political futures of some in both parties to get it. The fight today is way more uphill. The aforementioned drug and insurance outfits and their friends are making it so. Whatever the outcome, it’ll start with political and business decisions - not consumer need. A basic issue that must be solved is how those entities can survive and in what form.

Proof of that is how physicians and hospitals have radically changed business models in the last decade to stay in business with Medicare. Many now use step-down intermediate care to get patients out of the more expensive hospital stays. They’ve hired salaried doctors and “hospitalists” on staff, opened their own related care facilities such as rehab centers and lower-level extended care centers. Many ancillary services previously farmed out have been incorporated into the overall structure.

Physicians have reorganized for Medicare, too. Often, they create a partnership of several specialities, open in-house labs, manage their own testing such as EEG and similar exams and limit nearly all patient visits to 15-minute appointments. Many docs have hired specialty physician assistants so more patients can be seen, spreading the load but not the costs.

Insurance companies started “Medigap” programs which, given the amount of advertising to attract new customers, must have proven profitable. They’ve also changed other aspects of their business models to streamline coverage while assuring income.

In all likelihood, we’re heading to some sort of single-payer system in this country. Call it “Universal” or “expanded Medicaid” or any other popular name. The plain fact is we can’t continue to operate under a system that eats so much of our national resources, is priced out of reach of millions and causes bankruptcies in the thousands each year.

But, to realize a goal of “healthcare for everyone,” the political and business issues must be solved first. If availability and cost containment are the goals, then assuring the survival - in some form - of the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance providers who make up that system must be addressed up front.

No one entity has the answer. And you won’t have traditional quality healthcare of any reliable sort without them. As businesses and corporations, they’ll need to survive or none of us will live to see significant changes.

Politicians who make it sound like we can achieve all that by simply electing them and they’ll make it happen, are glossing over the massive work to get it done.

Healthcare is, after all, a business.
 

Income share agreement

May 12, 2019

politicalwords

No, it’s not another term for “marriage,” though that does offer an indication of just how involved this can get.

The use of “share” and “agreement” give the phrase an uplifting, almost cheery, sound, but the underlying consideration here is debt - the mountains of nearly unpayable debt many college students face. After mortgages (which most of the time are a manageable and ordinary part of middle-class living), the largest mass of debt in the United States is higher education debt, more than $1.5 trillion. In many cases that debt is in such large amounts that final payoffs of them seem unseeably far into the future.

This is a new development. During my college days in the 1970s, I took out a couple of student loans, but they were modest in size, and I paid them off without difficulty in four or five years. The amounts were small, because the costs were too. Finances were not a reason, in those days, a person could not go to college (at least, some decent college) if they chose to.

Conditions have changed. The situation is not good for anyone involved, but especially for those buried under all this debt. One theoretical advantage in a search for solutions is that, increasingly, student debt is not scattered among endless numbers of private lenders but under the umbrella of the federal government; the advantage is not that the federal government is any better as a lender but that it is just one unit to deal with,k and susceptible to congressional action.

One approach for dealing with it, a method that seems to be gaining in popularity, is the “income share agreement,” which is a variation on how a loan will be repaid. Instead of imposing a set amount due every month (depending presumably in part on the size of the loan), the ISA is more flexible: It would vary in size depending on he income the former student receives once employed. A law student who goes to work for a top white-shoe firm might kick in more, while one who works as a public defender might pay less. An in-demand physician would may more dollars per month than, say, an elementary school teacher.

The idea has some appeal (which is about 40 years old), as a way of matching ability to pay with liability. But the story could get more complicated. The debt size in many cases is so enormous that it might not plausibly be repaid in a working lifetime - and what then? (The law is very hard on discharging student loans, albeit not impossible under some conditions.)

That’s only one of the questions.

There’s a financial-structural question, which is beginning to arise as private lenders gradually move back into the business. As writer Malcolm Harris put it, “If you can convince investors you’re going to be rich for the rest of your life, why spend your college years poor? I.S.A.s bridge the gap. It’s hard to think up a better advertisement for free-market capitalism. But I.S.A.s are premised on the idea of discriminating among individuals. Once the high-achieving poor and working-class students have been nabbed by I.S.A.s, the default rate for federal loans starts to rise, which means the interest rates for these loans have to go up to compensate. A two-tiered borrowing system emerges, and the public half degrades.”[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/student-loans.html]

This leads to developments that could even “reshape childhood,” encouraging K-12 students to redraw their K-12 learning and activities to suit not only college admissions offices but also lenders - to persuade that they’d be a good lending risk.

The ongoing steps where this might lead - not least in the discouraging of students even thinking about entering much-needed but less-profitable careers - could take a dark path.

University of Chicago economist Gary Becker said in one study that “Economists have long emphasized that it is difficult to borrow funds to invest in human capital because such capital cannot be offered as collateral and courts have frowned on contracts which even indirectly suggest involuntary servitude.”[https://www.nber.org/chapters/c13571.pdf; referenced in Harris’ New York Times opinion piece, May 11, 2019.] But under enough financial pressure - we’re talking about really big money here, past the trillion-dollar mark - how long will courts continue to look at it that way?

Which takes us back to “share” and “agreement,” and the question of how such a fine-sounding concept can turn into something so dark.
 

Dereliction of duty

Dereliction of duty

May 11, 2019

johnson

Nearly 100 years ago — April 15, 1922 to be exact — a Democratic senator from Wyoming introduced a resolution in Congress that touched off one of the most significant investigations in American political history. The Wall Street Journal had reported the day before that the secretary of the Interior, a former Republican senator from New Mexico by the name of Albert Fall, an appointee of President Warren Harding, had engaged in unprecedented conduct. Fall had leased to a private company, without competitive bids, U.S. naval oil reserves at a remote field in Wyoming known as Teapot Dome.

Republicans, who controlled the Senate, actually voted to investigate the Republican administration. But expecting the investigation would come to nothing, they detailed the most junior member of the Public Lands Committee, Montana Democrat Thomas J. Walsh, to chair the investigation.
Montana Democrat Thomas J. Walsh, investigator of the Teapot Dome scandal

By the time Walsh was finished cataloging Fall’s corruption and the bribes he received for facilitating the oil leases, the secretary was on his way to jail. Walsh became a political celebrity and Teapot Dome entered history as one of the great scandals in American politics.

An offshoot of the oil scandal was a parallel effort to investigate corruption at the Justice Department, an investigation also conducted by a Montanan, Democrat Burton K. Wheeler.

When the subjects of that investigation stonewalled the Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Congress had the power to issue subpoenas, compel testimony and demand production of documents. As the court noted in a landmark 1927 decision, the memory of James Madison was invoked, “the power of inquiry — with process to enforce it — is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function. It was so regarded and employed in American legislatures before the Constitution was framed and ratified.”

Said another way: Congress’ oversight and investigative functions were legitimately earned amid a huge scandal uncovered by a newspaper and investigated by determined lawmakers. Now, decades later, congressional oversight and accountability is being frittered away amid a host of real and potential scandals by an administration that seems destined to replace Harding’s as the most corrupt in history.

The Trump administration has apparently determined that it will comprehensively stonewall oversight by a co-equal branch of government. The president says the executive branch will resist every subpoena for information, while the attorney general of the United States flips his middle finger to the House Judiciary Committee.

And the United States Senate — where Teapot Dome was exposed, where a corrupt attorney general (Harding pal Harry Daugherty) was forced to resign, where Harry Truman investigated the defense industry and where the crimes of Watergate were disclosed — continues to squander its constitutional obligations to investigate and check the executive branch.

As the Salt Lake Tribune noted in a recent editorial, “By abandoning the role the Constitution assigns them, to jealously defend the power of their branch of government against encroachments by other branches, Republicans in Congress surrender their duty, their power and their part in defending American democracy.”

Idaho’s two U.S. senators are poster boys for this shameful dereliction of duty.

Jim Risch has had the gavel of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee now for nearly five months, months when the NATO alliance has been under siege from the White House, when Venezuela has been in crisis, when North Korea has saber-rattled with new missile tests, when tensions have mounted with China and Iran, and when Saudi Arabia has escaped responsibility for the brutal murder of a journalist employed by a U.S. newspaper. Yet Risch has required no testimony on any of this from the secretary of state or other senior administration officials.

Each of Risch’s public statements toes the administration line even as that line shifts and wobbles with incoherence.

Risch is also a senior member of the Intelligence Committee but has no interest in questioning the attorney general or special counsel Robert Mueller on the extensively documented Russian effort to interfere with American democracy.

Mike Crapo is a member of the Judiciary Committee, the committee that recently endured a word salad of obfuscation from Attorney General William Barr on the Mueller report. Crapo, rather than focusing on the substance of the special counsel’s work, used his precious time to question the nation’s top law enforcement official about how the Washington Post obtained a copy of Mueller’s letter taking issue with how his work has been characterized by Barr.

Crapo might have asked, just as one example, about this sentence from Mueller’s report: “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations.” Crapo didn’t display even a hint of inquisitiveness about the Russian investigation or the president’s behavior, but spent the hearing serving up softballs. His and Risch’s performance is rank political incompetence or, perhaps, it’s something else even more troubling.

Senate Republicans could well be ignoring their constitutional obligations, as the Salt Lake Tribune suggested, “To get themselves on the good side of a chief executive who is so clearly corrupt, engaging in obstruction, campaign and ethics violations, using the presidency as a cash cow for his personal business interests, who disrespects the separation of powers, freedom of the press, the rights of minorities and immigrants and our long-standing international alliances.”

In other words: Crapo, Risch and fellow Senate Republicans have willfully surrendered their own and congressional power for wholly partisan political reasons.

By consistently placing loyalty to a president of their own party above the institution of the Senate and the good of the nation, they mock a sworn oath to “support and defend the Constitution” against all enemies.

Political courage is an increasingly rare commodity these days and playing to the prejudices of your partisan tribe trumps all other considerations. But that is not what the job — or the oath — requires.

While it may seem quaint to invoke the Constitution as a guide to appropriate congressional behavior, it has never been more important to do so. Democracy may well die in darkness, but it also dies when people sworn to protect it ignore their responsibilities and that is what Risch and Crapo are doing.
 

Idaho’s art of the deal

Idaho’s art of the deal

May 10, 2019

stapiluslogo1

The annual Idaho Deal Flow Report came out last week, and its statistics show some noteworthy trends, though you have to look beyond the toplines to find them.

The report comes by way of the Idaho Technology Council and participation of a number of private businesses (Alturas Capital and Holland and Hart among them), and “demonstrates the strong Idaho economy which is driving a demand for more talent and supports increased capital investment.”

Sounds like a positive and happy story, period. But the details are a little more of a mix.

It certainly shows a good deal of business activity. The report essentially monitors the number of substantial business transactions over the course of a year (in this case, 2018). There’s little by way of definition; the reports lists 163 “deals” for the year (loosely comparable to the annual totals over the last decade), but what constitutes a “deal” isn’t entirely clear.

The report also includes this reasonable disclaimer: “Readers should understand that the information
contained herein has been collected from several different sources and not all of the information contained in this publication has been independently verified, substantiated, or audited.” It did say it used an array of reports, some publicly available, and put more than 700 hours into its development.

The report does offer a number of category breakdowns, though, and that’s where some of the information gets interesting.

We do get an estimate of the dollar volume of the transactions: $1.73 billion last year, which is a significant amount but the second-smallest amount in the last decade; only 2016 was a little lower.

The deals were not spread evenly around the state. The Ada-Canyon County area accounted for close to two-thirds of the deals, and nearly all the rest were in the Panhandle, around Kootenai and Bonner counties. The average size of each deal was far larger as well in those two regions than elsewhere.

The report tracks number of public offerings, which truly can be considered a big deal. Over the years their number has fluctuated, peaking at a dozen each in 2010 and 2013; there were nine in 2012 and seven in 2011. Last year there was one, and three each in the two years prior.

There have been a number of mergers and acquisitions - 54 of those reported in 2018 - but while the numbers there have been stable, last year’s was the smallest in a decade, and the dollar amount involved was on the small side as well.

The report also totals “private placements,” which the Investopedia defines as “the sale of securities to a relatively small number of select investors. Investors targeted include wealthy accredited investors, large banks, mutual funds, insurance companies and pension funds.” That Idaho number was on the high side last year in number of transactions, but down to about average in dollar amount.

The picture you might take away from the breakdowns is a moderately slowing economy - not necessarily a bad thing, but lacking the indicators of a continuing boom. You also continue to get the sense of a highly regionalized and varied kind of economic growth, still very strong in Ada-Canyon and around Kootenai County, but relatively softer elsewhere.

All this does realistically reflect one of the hardest data points available, the tax revenue coming into the state of Idaho, which for this fiscal year has been running behind original estimates.

The deal seems to be: A somewhat slower economy ahead.
 

New rules

New rules

May 9, 2019

schmidt

Darrell had finally gotten his small office just the way he wanted it. When he’d been hired last year as the Coordinator for the Liaison and Edification of Administrative Rules (CLEAR) he’d had a thorough introduction to the state health insurance from HR but hadn’t been told his office would be next to the hot water pumping station in the basement of the Hall of Mirrors. But the work was rewarding. He had spent all summer preparing for legislative review of new rules.

And the first three weeks of the legislative session were busy but it seemed he had prepared well and the rules review went without much drama. Legislators always had good questions. They had insisted their review of rules was important and even got it into the Idaho Constitution. But when the session ended and all those new rules had been dropped by the legislature, he was kind of scratching his head.

“Hello, Dennis?” He called his old boss. “What are we going to do now?”

“Heh, heh.” Dennis chuckled. “Start from scratch.”

“You mean rewrite all the rules?”

“You’ll have to. All rules, not just the new ones they reviewed this session, expire on the first of July unless renewed by the legislature and they didn’t renew them. Start over. Should be fun. I gotta go. If I birdie this I’m three up. Click.”

Darrel called the Governor’s office. “Oh, Darrell, I was looking for your number, thanks so much for calling.” Linda was always so cheerful. “We are having a meeting this afternoon and you need to be there.”

“Sure. What should I bring?”

“Well, bring your thinking cap and a smile would be good.”

Darrell looked up at the top shelf of his small neat office. Four feet of binders held the 8000 pages of fine print of administrative rules. When the legislature passes a law, the details of just how to follow the law are written up into rules and these rules hold the effect of law. They started on the left with the Accountancy Board and ran south to the Wheat Commission. By the dust on the binders he knew they weren’t up to date. The real rules lived in the cloud, on servers, who knows where.

The meeting was called to order and introductions were made. Darrell was after the Commissioner on Commissions and before the Director of the Department of Redundancy Department. Darrell had some ideas right away.

Alex, the Chief of Staff, spoke boldly. “I know this is a surprise, but the Governor and I look at this as an opportunity. He has been wanting to reduce rules since he signed his second executive order.”

“You mean the one that told us to cut two rules for every new one?” asked the Logic Department Director. “If we follow that order we’ll end up with a negative number.” He smiled at his logic.

“Those legislators wanted complete control of the administrative rules, and then they go and do this.” Hissed the Chairman on Consistency.

“Now don’t go complaining. This is an opportunity!” exclaimed Alex again with a grin. “We can start over! Our governor wants government streamlined and made more efficient and the legislature has given us this gift.”

“I’ll have my secretary just paste in the old rules with a different font.” Offered the Chairman of Furniture.

“I was planning on a smaller font so there were less pages. Are we counting pages or words?” asked the Director of Measures.

“Can we combine two rules into one? Will that work?” the Director of Efficiency was eager.

“It all seems pretty silly to me.” Offered the Commissioner on Common Sense.

The room got quiet except for some murmuring between the Finance Director and the Human Resources Commissioner. Darrell thought he should add his part. “Well, you all need to know that the legislature is required to review all new rules. And since all the rules will be new next session, I think they will be too busy to do much else. It could take them months.”

Alex grinned. Governor Little walked in and smiled to the room. “We settled?”