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NCA NEWSFAX FOR YOUR INFORMATION NCA • P.O. Box 6407 • BOISE, ID 83707 • 208-342-5402 • Fax: 208-342-0844 MARCH 20, 2009 Idaho Falls Post Register, Friday, March 20, 2009 – Cheers & jeers editorial by Marty Trillhaase (3 pages) Killing the governor's plan Post Register editorial board members are Roger Plothow, publisher; J. Robb Brady, publisher emeritus; and Marty Trillhaase, Opinions Page editor -- JEERS to eastern Idaho's delegation in the House. On Thursday, it voted overwhelmingly to kill Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter's modest fuel tax increase. Two years of debate and review has done nothing to change the basic facts: Every year, Idaho's highway program falls $240 million behind what it needs just to maintain what it has. One of every five miles of highway surface is now deficient. In four years, it will be more than one in three miles. Already, half the bridges are beyond their 50-year design life. Inflation has eaten away at highway revenues -- and no governor has had the nerve to ask for a gas tax increase in 13 years. Until now. Otter started out asking for $178 million, including a 10-cent increase in the fuel tax over five years. He was willing to settle for about two-thirds that, including raising the fuel tax 7 cents during the next three years. His plan died on a 27-43 vote. From this corner of the state, only Reps. Dell Raybould and Mack Shirley, both R-Rexburg, and Marc Gibbs, R-Grace, cast the responsible vote. But everyone else -- Reps. Lenore Barrett, R- Challis; Dennis Lake, R-Blackfoot; Tom Loertscher, R-Bone; Jim Marriott, R-Blackfoot; Russ Mathews, Janice McGeachin, Erik Simpson and Jeff Thompson, all R-Idaho Falls; and Transportation Committee Chairwoman JoAn Wood, R-Rigby -- voted no. -- CHEERS to leadership of the Idaho Senate, Republican and Democratic. Led by Majority Leader Bart Davis, R-Idaho Falls, and Minority Leader Kate Kelly, D-Boise, they're backing a substantial improvement in Idaho's public ethics standards. Their bill would require candidates for legislative or statewide office -- and their spouses -- to disclose their employers, sources of income exceeding $10,000, major real estate investments and other financial assets in Idaho. That kind of transparency allows voters to see when their elected representatives are acting in the public's behalf and when they face a conflict of interest. The federal government and most states already do this. Idaho is among only four states that do not require financial disclosure from state officials. Such comparisons, including one from the Better Government Association, persuaded Davis to accept the need for this change. "There was one area where Idaho was falling substantially behind other states, and it was in the area of financial disclosure, the predisclosure of potential for conflicts of interest," Davis said. -- CHEERS to Keith Allred of Boise. Founder and president of the Common Interest, Allred has been critical of Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter's plan to raise vehicle registration fees to raise money for highways. Allred contends Otter's plan makes a bad situation worse by shifting more of the burden of paying for highways from heavy Cheers & jeers editorial 1 truckers to passenger car and truck drivers. Allred struck political gold this week when he discovered the governor's registration fee plan overestimated how much money it would generate -- by $10 million. For maximum effect, Allred could have sprung this discovery on the unsuspecting governor's office just as this bill was scheduled for a House vote. Instead, Allred alerted both Idaho Transportation Department officials and Otter's shop, giving them enough time to draft a new bill. -- JEERS to Sen. John McGee, R-Caldwell. Here we are in the middle of a struggle to shore up funding for highways and bridges, and McGee, who chairs the Senate Transportation Committee, wants to play politics. Ever since the 1950s, Idaho has sought to shield decisions about how and where to build roads from regional and partisan politics. A governor names the transportation board members, but it's up to the board to hire the department's director, usually a professional engineer. Pam Lowe now holds that job. McGee wants to give the governor direct authority to name the director. Imagine where that would lead. You could count on more politicization of the department. Like earmarks at the congressional level? You'll love what McGee has in mind here. Where will the highways get built? Anywhere the governor wants. -- JEERS to the Idaho Transportation Board and Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter. They had the opportunity to spend up to $5.5 million of the federal stimulus package on bike and pedestrian paths. Good thing, too, since the cash- strapped transportation department opted to zero out its own program to focus more dollars on motorized transportation needs. Only 3 percent of the stimulus funds Idaho received for transportation, that $5.5 million would have helped at least 11 projects statewide, such as expanding the Idaho Falls greenbelt or widening shoulders along a north-south route between Driggs and Victor. Instead, the board -- and Otter -- funneled all that money into landscaping the Ten Mile Interchange project along Interstate 84 near Meridian. Remember that the next time you're riding your bicycle in heavy traffic. -- CHEERS to Idahoans for Open Government, the Idaho Press Club and Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden. They've drafted a bill to plug serious holes in Idaho's law requiring public officials to conduct your business in public. Their bill cleared the Senate unanimously Thursday. Idaho's open meeting law had been all but neutered when the Idaho Supreme Court ruled public officials couldn't be penalized unless they "knowingly" violated it. The new bill corrects that, imposing a $50 fine even for an inadvertent violation, although officials can avoid the penalty by going back into open session and correcting their mistake. Penalties ratchet up dramatically for intentional violations. Breaking the law twice in a year could yield a $500 per individual civil penalty. Significantly, the bill has support from city and county leaders, who tend to deal with Idaho's open meeting law more often than state officials. -- CHEERS to Don Hill. The former Idaho National Laboratory employee has been fighting for years to establish his claim that he was exposed to radioactive iodine during the "RaLa Accident." Hill has tenaciously battled the Department of Energy, trying to get the agency to acknowledge his exposure and to credit his retirement for eight years of employment. That's still pending. But Hill has won another battle: Under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, the U.S. Department of Labor has concluded Hill was exposed and that he was entitled to $150,000 in compensation. -- CHEERS to former Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Marilyn Howard. Now out of office more than two years, Howard has broken her silence. Faced with the certainty that Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter, the Cheers & jeers editorial 2 Legislature and even her successor, Tom Luna, will cut the school appropriation next year, Howard is offering some common-sense advice. Elsewhere on this page, her column recommends giving local school boards maximum flexibility to spend the limited state dollars they will receive. Howard also argues for a freeze on creating costly new charter schools and new state initiatives. Marty Trillhaase Cheers & jeers editorial 3 .