New West Network

My Page: Jill Kuraitis

And Here We Have Idaho

Hiking to Shirts Lake, accessible from West Mountain Road around Cascade Reservoir in Idaho’s beautiful Valley County, was a part of our kids’ childhoods. The fishing, camping, swimming and messing around in the mountains turned them both into lovers of nature and the earth. Son is a hiker and mountain biker, and Daughter, close to finishing a degree in environmental science, wants to spend her life trying to save the planet. Getting kids outdoors really does help them stay rooted in what’s real.

The lake, no doubt named after somebody named Shirts, rises from the town of Cascade’s 4,760 foot elevation to 7,700 in Idaho’s beautiful Valley County, where it is no longer early spring but not quite mid-spring.

That means wildflowers and songbirds, and a weekend family hike to Shirts took us through meadows and mountainsides grinning with both. [more]

Governor and Legislature Will Try Something Else

After a miserable legislative session dominated by fruitless disagreements over transportation issues, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter has appointed a 15-member task force to consider how to resolve them. The task force was a provision of the agreement between Otter and legislative leadership which finally ended the second-longest legislative session in state history.

Lt. Gov. Brad Little will preside over the group, and meetings, starting in August, will be open to the public.

The governor’s press release describes the groups goals as “developing recommendations by December 2010 for sustainable road and bridge funding for the next 20 years. Task force members will study everything from fuel tax increases and registration fees to truck fees, targeted transportation-related sales taxes and other alternatives.”

A state budget backlog now over $100 million and possibly several times that is needed for road and bridge repairs and maintenance and road improvements. The governor and the state legislature have disagreed over the best way to raise the money for several years, with Otter favoring a gas tax and the legislature firmly opposed. The Republican-dominated legislature is so opposed to fuel taxes that they have established a different task force to determine by the 2010 legislative session whether the share of funding from the state’s 25-cents-per-gallon fuel tax that now goes to the Idaho State Police and the Department of Parks and Recreation should be replaced with some other form of user fee. [more]

Stars and Stripes Newspaper Unhappy with Army's Decision

Full disclosure: Former Idaho Statesman political reporter Heath Druzin, now with Stars and Stripes in Iraq, is a friend. I sometimes covered the Idaho State legislature while sharing the reporter’s room with Druzin and others. I consider him a talented and thorough reporter with the integrity and attention to the truth we expect from all journalists.

The mideast edition of Stars and Stripes, “the independent news source for the U.S. military community” has a story today on one of its own reporters, Heath Druzin. Druzin left the Idaho Statesman last year to report from Iraq.

“Officials said Stripes reporter Heath Druzin, who covered operations of the division’s 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team in February and March, would not be permitted to rejoin the unit for another reporting tour because, among other things, he wrote in a March 8 story that many Iraqi residents of Mosul would like the American soldiers to leave and hand over security tasks to Iraqi forces," says the story.

“Despite the opportunity to visit areas of the city where Iraqi Army leaders, soldiers, national police and Iraqi police displayed commitment to partnership, Mr. Druzin refused to highlight any of this news,” Major Ramona Bellard, a public affairs officer, wrote in denying Druzin’s embed request. Bellard was also unhappy that Druzin repeatedly asked Army officials for permission to use a computer to file a story when a blackout period was in effect. She said he “behaved unprofessionally.”
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"Planning in the West" - the first Boise NewWest.Net conference

One of Boise’s best-known downtown developers, Mark Rivers, was a hit at today’s “Planning in the West” conference.

The group of 175 guests were engaged and laughing with the blunt and lively Rivers even though he issued stern warnings about the state of growth and development, the recession, and unemployment in the Treasure Valley.

“There is not enough job growth for new development right now,” he said. Citing a Brookings Institute report called “Tracking Economic Recession and Recovery in America’s 100 Largest Metropolitan Areas,” Rivers observed that local media report on every Top Ten list where Boise is mentioned but don’t often pick up on lists where there is bad news – and the Brookings study has bad news indeed.

Numbers for the rate of change in employment for the 4th quarter 2008 to the first of 2009 rates Boise/Nampa the second-worst metro area, with job losses at -3%.

Only Detroit was rated worse.

“It’s not as though six months from now everything will be the way it was – it’s not. We’re hitting the reset button for the way we do things,” said Rivers. “We have to rethink, reimagine and reinvent ourselves.” [more]

Planning in the West

It’s easy to see why the city of Seattle has had success in setting green standards in building and development, once you talk to Diane Sugimura.

Seattle’s director of planning and development is an infectious voice for environmentally-friendly building, with a notable depth and breadth of knowledge of her subject and the ability to put things in meaningful and interesting terms.

Sugimura will bring terrific value to “Planning in the West” the latest in NewWest’s series of regional planning conferences to be held Wednesday and Thursday at BSU’s Stueckle Sky Center.

“Seattle is called the Emerald City in the Evergreen State, so there has been a strong environmental ethic here since the 1970s,” she said. Policy protecting shorelines came first, then residential building policy. The 1980s saw the beginning of environmental regulations in commercial building, she said.
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NewWest.Net's popular series of business conferences

Back in the day – from the dinosaurs to about the 1990s – business conferences were often boondoggles designed partly as tax-deductible vacations, client-flattering golf weekends, or perks for valued employees.

The modern business conference is something different. Budgets – and time - are tight, the internet provides its web of networking and communicating, and the recession has done away with just-moseying-along business practices. Environmental factors are demanding business solutions that must be accomplished in record time. It’s an intense business world during this recession.

It can also be an isolating world, lacking in human interaction and real-time alliances and friendships. So much is done in front of a screen that face time with people can feel unusual.

Next week NewWest.Net is producing and hosting another of our conference series called Planning in the West that promises face time with inspiring leaders and innovators who are designers, developers, architects, transportation and urban and rural planners. From our other conferences we know that people who attend get intensely involved in the subject and form bonds that have achieved results – a citizens’ group collaborating with a city government on a planning project, for example. Staff at NewWest.Net have more relationships with the people who are moving and shaking the world of our growing region – the people who show us “how the west is one” – which is one of our continuing themes as we cover the news of the Rocky Mountain region.

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Column: Politics

We need new terminology for animals like James von Brunn, who murdered a guard at the National Holocaust Museum in D.C. on Tuesday. von Brunn, who is 88, has a revolting history of anti-Semitism which is well documented.

Though it’s academically accurate, according to standard political ideology scales, to call people like von Brunn “extreme right-wing” - the SLPC calls them “radical right” – I propose that we called them what they are: hate terrorists. Not only does the term emphasize their vile psychological makeup, it removes any hint of an association with very conservative Republicans. Unfortunately, many members of these radical groups identify themselves as Republicans, but no Republican I know claims them, and it’s a wildly unfair association which suggests an alliance with terrorists. It’s also unwarranted to help legitimize hate terrorist groups as some sort of generally-acknowledged political party. We should abandon the “right-wing” term in naming these monsters.

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Column: City Politics

Boise City Council races are surprisingly lively. Even when there's no challenger, Boiseans love to wave their political energy around during a council campaign.

Most of Boise’s state legislative seats are in Democratic hands, and with the landslide election and re-election of Democratic mayor Dave Bieter, the core of the city is a liberal island surrounded by a sea of conservative districts. (The mayor’s seat is technically nonpartisan, but nobody believes that anymore, if ever they did.)

The City Council, now centrist with a sight tilt left, has six seats, one of them held by Jim Tibbs, who spent 34 years with the police department, most of them in leadership roles, including interim police chief in 2003. He is on the board of the Human Rights Task Force and has won, among other honors, a human rights award.

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Business and Technology

Boise’s summer is about to enter its annual phase of desert heat, but it’s already blazing with business events and ideas to promote innovation.

In his State of the City speech this week, Boise Mayor Dave Bieter announced that the city will open a building downtown called Green House, designed to help entrepreneurs get up and running.

The Watercooler, a nonprofit project which opened in 2008 in the growing Linen District, is already open. Its stated mission is “to create a building and community to house a business development center for synergistic, emerging businesses and interests in Boise’s creative economy.” Boise City is one of the investors in the Watercooler, and Bieter doesn't think the Green House competes with the Watercooler.

Last week, local nonprofit coalition Kickstand held its fourth annual IdaVation conference on innovation and have more similar events coming up. Kickstand’s stated mission is “to empower entrepreneurs and innovators by providing access to a community of peers, resources, industry leaders and critical information to help emerging and high-growth companies network, learn and grow.” Lt. Gov. Brad Little attended the conference and even Tweeted the event while it was happening, a “very encouraging sign,” said board president Chris Volk. [more]

Column

Bryan Fischer, Idaho Values Alliance director, has announced he is moving to Mississippi to host a radio talk show.

Fischer has hung around the Statehouse a lot in the past few years, lobbying for anti-everything causes. His ideas and proposals consistently try to legislate rights away from certain groups of people, but grant special rights to others. He’s horrified by yet strangely obsessed with
homosexuality, and has tried to legislate it away with his promotion of a successful anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment and his opposition to other legislation.

He also likes to try to link homosexuality to Naziism. In fact, Fischer spends a lot of time writing about Nazis, and his historical interpretations are garbled and without true scholarship.


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