Just one day before his budget presentation

“Controversial” Idaho Commerce Director Goes on Leave

By Sharon Fisher, 2-04-08

One day before he was due to give the budget presentation to the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee for the Department of Commerce, Director Jim Ellick has gone on leave effective immediately for unspecified personal reasons, according to Governor Butch Otter’s office and the Department.

Don Dietrich, administrator of the Department of Commerce’s Division of Economic and Community Development, will be acting director in Ellick’s absence, Otter’s office said.

The department itself does not know why Ellick went on leave nor when, or if, he will be back, said Bibiana Nertney, communications director for the department.

Dietrich also filled in for Ellick in mid-January when he canceled that day a planned appearance on the Dialogue program on Idaho Public Television.

Ellick had caused some controversy a week earlier by reportedly telling JFAC Vice Chair Representative Darrell Bolz, R-Caldwell, that he expected Micron’s manufacturing facility to leave Idaho within two years.  This concerned Bolz in the context of planning for Idaho’s revenues in the future, he said. At that time, Mike Ferguson, the state’s chief economist, had told JFAC that the Governor disagreed with Ellick’s assessment.

Rumors have been circulating about a possible Ellick departure for several months, possibly due to a health issue, and possibly due to his frustration about working with a state department sometimes thought of as being insular and slow-moving. Nertney believed he had not bought a house in Idaho.

Marcia Franklin, who hosted Dialogue the night Ellick had been scheduled to appear, had said it was “highly unusual” for a sole guest to cancel the day of the program, noting that State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna appeared as scheduled the day a warrant had gone out for the arrest of his brother. She also said she had been told at first that Ellick had been called away by the Governor, but that the Department of Commerce called later to say he had had another commitment and was “indisposed,” and that Otter’s office had told her the Governor was not involved in the cancellation.

During Ellick’s tenure, he primarily had overseen the splitting of the Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce, which former Governor Dirk Kempthorne had merged. In addition, Ellick was reportedly crafting, with Otter, a new role for the Governor’s Science, Technology, and Advisory Committee, which Otter had criticized last year for taking too strong of an advocacy position for Idaho’s nascent high technology industry.

Ellick was named head of commerce in May of last year. At the time, Otter called Ellick, whom he had recruited to champion Idaho’s entrepreneurial community, “a veteran of Silicon Valley’s phenomenal growth and sustained high-tech success.” “He also walks on water,” Otter had told a conference of Idaho’s entrepreneurial community last spring.

Ellick had worked for Silicon Valley companies such as Fairchild Semiconductor, Applied Materials, and four startups, most notably Photon Dynamics, Inc., which he took public—and from which he resigned soon after, also “for personal reasons.”

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