Boise News

LAND BUY

The Bureau of Land Management announced on Monday it is buying a key piece of private land in the midst of southwest Colorado’s Canyon of the Ancients National Monument believed to hold hundreds of undocumented prehistoric sites.

The purchase is of one of seven deals to buy 5,026 acres of private inholdings of conservation land within or next to public land in Colorado, Montana and Nevada.

Essay: A week in our national town

Washington, D.C. is a town where an arcane government and a logical street grid are muddled by overlap and diagonal lines. But the reverent preservation and displays of America’s history have a clear and tangible path.

In a town where the ghosts of American history wait for you to discover them, your hosts are cabdrivers, waiters, and doormen from Eritrea, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia. They are a twenty-year wave of immigrants just as the Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans who are the backbone of the Eastern seaboard were at the turn of the 20th century, and by working as hard as their role models they remind you why America exists.

In a place where federal buildings are so baffling that in looking for the “Anteroom” you run across a door marked “Not the Anteroom” you can still simply have your bag scanned and then walk straight to your congressman’s office and state your plea.

New West Book Review

Thanks to television shows such as Dora the Explorer, Maya and Miguel, and the trusty Sesame Street, many kids growing up in English-speaking homes can count to ten and say hello in Spanish. Cinco Puntos Press, based in El Paso, specializes in literature that straddles the U.S./Mexico border, and publishes a number of bilingual books for children that will help kids who are interested in Spanish take their language study further.

El Paso-based writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz‘s The Dog Who Loved Tortillas (36 pages, $17.95), with vibrant clay illustrations by Geronimo Garcia, will be a hit with any kid who has ever begged his parents for a dog.  In this story, told in Spanish and English with a clay squiggle dividing the two texts on the same page, Little Diego Domínguez (who previously appeared in A Gift from Papá Diego) and his big sister Gabriela simultaneously hit upon the idea that they should get a dog.  When they ask their parents for a dog a piece, the parents say they can have a dog, but only if they share. (As a mom, I was sort of rooting for the parents to demand more from Diego and Gabriela: fifty whine-free days and nights, cleaning, scullery work.)

Gabriela and Diego agree, secretly thinking, “But it will be more mine.” They adopt a puppy from the humane society, and work hard housebreaking him.  Diego discovers that the puppy, Sofie, will perform tasks in exchange for bites of tortilla.  Sofie becomes well known around the neighborhood as the tortilla-loving dog.  But one morning Diego discovers Sofie “barely moving,” and Mr. Domínguez says, “Her nose is dry and hot.  It’s supposed to be cold and wet.” A trip to the vet is on order.  Uh oh, I thought, maybe dogs aren’t supposed to eat tortillas? 

Boom and Bust

Like the residential real estate bubble, the commercial real estate boom of 2003-2007 was fed by cheap money and lax lending standards. Institutional investors such as hedge funds and insurance companies - strangely blind to the possibility that real estate values could decline - had an insatiable appetite for any loan that had a decent interest rate and was backed by real estate. When the rosy projections on cash-flow for apartment complexes, office buildings, shopping malls and resort hotels were revealed to be pipe-dreams when the market turned, the carnage began - and it’s likely to continue for a while, according to a recent report from the Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

From the Panhandle With Cate Huisman

What stands out from the “first annual” Economic Outlook Forum that was held in Sandpoint Thursday is the extent to which the panhandle continues to grow away from its roots in the timber industry. This process has been going on for decades, but the current recession and concomitant implosion of the real estate market have hastened the transition. While logging and milling employed over 1100 local people in January of 2006, that number had fallen to less than 500 by January of 2009.

For a while, mills laid off workers, cut shifts, or shut down for a few weeks at a time. But in October 2008, JD Lumber permanently closed its mill in Priest River, and Idaho Forest Group ceased production at its mill in Laclede two months later.

With the 10th anniversary of the “Battle in Seattle” coming up Nov. 30, expect a lot of stories about WTO. The Seattle Times, for example, is already asking you to send in your memories of 1999.

Coverage will include “then-and-now” looks at how the world has and hasn’t changed. One interesting trend: The protest tactics developed by the left in the 1960s and practiced by anti-globalization protesters in the 1990s are emulated and echoed in the Obama era by the American right wing. We’ve gone from “turtles and Teamsters” to “Teabaggers.”

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

If you see a sweaty young guy sprinting past you downtown or on the University campus, jumping over trash cans and picnic tables and doing flips over concrete barriers or other architectural features, relax. He’s not a purse snatcher, he’s just practicing parkour.

Rusty’s latest obsession has Barb and me cringing in dread as we go online, double-checking our dental coverage and investigating the going rate for reconstructive plastic surgery. Parkour (French for “suck it, gravity”) is a cutting-edge sport that’s pretty much the same as free running (“because jogging won’t get me on MTV”), an urban athletic hipster trend that peaked when it was featured in some Sprite commercials a few years back.

The difference between parkour and free running, according to Rusty and the other traceurs (“trespassers”) who practice it, is this: Parkour is the art of getting from point A to point B as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Free running is moving in any way you feel, in a way that’s cool or looks good, but not necessarily focused on trying to get anywhere. Of course, the one thing in common between the two is that you’ll need special [more]

Montana Property Taxes

In late summer and early fall, many Montanans were unpleasantly surprised to receive notices telling them their property values had skyrocketed. The reappraisals, due every six years from the state Department of Revenue, meant their property taxes would take a big leap forward, too. In areas like Gallatin and Flathead counties, where the 2002-2008 period saw a dramatic real estate boom—followed by a bust—some property values increased 300 percent or more.

But there was hope for people feeling the pain. First, property owners could seek relief by appealing their appraisals, either by asking for informal reviews from the Department of Revenue (DOR) or by appealing directly to their County Tax Appeal Board. Second, local governments could decrease their mill levies, the formulas that actually determine how much property tax residents pay.

Here’s a look at what’s happened on those and other fronts, according to the DOR.

WE NEED YOUR HELP WITH BURLINGTON NORTHERN SANTA FE

Dear Mr. Buffett:

I read with interest and glee about your recent acquisition of the majority ownership in Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). Congratulations on buying a great company--investment wise, I should clarify, because BNSF is a not-so-great company on the public relations front.

Now that you own the railroad, you can change that bad image with one phone call and instantly make your new acquisition--and yourself, of course--a corporate saint out here in Montana.

public transit

Public transit, such as Boise’s proposed streetcar, is bad for the economy and bad for the environment. Just ask Randal O’Toole, who works on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues at the Cato Institute, and who spoke in Boise today about public transit, particularly in Portland.

By the way, O’Toole also believes that urban planners caused the recession, that they’re using social engineering to try to turn the U.S. Communist, and that all roads should be privately owned.