Idaho County

I’ve lived in Idaho County on and off, for roughly half of my life. The other half was spent in a number of states, and even in a few foreign countries thanks in part to the US Air Force. I’ve been to a few places that I liked, and a lot of places that I didn’t care for at all. Southern California was a pretty nice place… back in the 1940’s and early 1950’s. Arizona wasn’t bad either, if you like living in a blast furnace. South Florida somewhat resembles a sauna in the summer, and is occupied by a liberal supply of swamps, snakes, and alligators, in the winter it’s a bit cooler, but infested with Yankee tourists. Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley was quite beautiful before the developers and sub dividers arrived from California. Overseas I liked Germany just fine, and thought Norway was a fantastic place to visit. But back in the days when we still owned Wheelus Air Force Base, North Africa really didn’t impress me at all. (But we really outta consider making camel riding a rodeo event! It’s almost as much fun as riding a saddle bronc… for a couple of hours at a time!) Exotic Thailand was impressive and a great opportunity for an amateur photographer, while Laos has a lot of beautiful scenery along with some real friendly people, even if the neighbors do have a bad habit of shooting at American flyers.

I guess I’ve seen my share of the world through the years, and in comparison with Idaho I’ve seen bigger mountains, larger rivers, taller trees, more game animals, and sometimes a lot better weather. Funny though, I’ve never seen ‘em all in the same place, or at the same time. When opportunity knocked, I came back to Idaho, and Idaho County, because warts and all, this is my home. And we do seem to have more than our share of problems, mostly economic, and which I will, in my ever popular style, blame on “government”.

Back in the old days, when I was growing up around here, I really don’t remember anybody being homeless, or even “broke” as such, but it always seemed like money was in fairly short supply among most of the folks I knew. Dad was a logger, and while he was usually busy Mom had to work as well, and I noticed that the luxuries were generally few and far between. Today it seems that much the same situation exists among far to many of our citizens. In doing a little checking on county demographics, I found that the average yearly income in Idaho County is approximately $29,515, or about seventy percent of the national average of $41,994 per year, and that about a quarter of our citizens live below the national poverty level! While I wouldn’t expect a rural area to be quite as affluent as a high-tech urban area, that disparity does seem a bit much. From that twenty-nine thousand dollar average income we all pay… TAXES… city, county, state, and federal taxes, along with those of a wide assortment of taxing districts, and a few things I have yet to figure out as well. Taxes are of course the curse of just about everyone, with the exception of the politicians who get to spend all that money, and the folks that think “government” is supposed to take care of us. (Personally I think that if they want the government to take care of them, they can go ahead and work, send their paycheck to the IRS, and then try to subsist on food stamps. But that’s a story line for another day.)

Any government entity has to operate on the income from its tax base, which at state and federal level can be fairly good sized. Cities and counties on the other hand don’t have all that much income, and they still have to provide the services that their citizens demand. With that, they’re always looking for means by which they can improve their income, and some of those means are pretty innovative! (I believe it’s New York City that charges a fee for city tax forms, and then levies a tax on that fee!) Most communities aren’t quite that desperate I guess, and generally settle for little more than property taxes, sales taxes, and what have you. The greater the property value, the more money the community can take in, and thus spend. In our case, the county budget runs about twelve and a half million dollars per year, with the lion’s share of the money going to things like schools, roads, and the Sheriffs Department. It seems however that there are always a number of projects that have to be held in abeyance for a few years due to a lack of funds. With that, the county is always trying to attract new businesses that will build (taxable) factories and hire a lot of local people, thereby enlarging the tax base even more.

According to the US Census Bureau, our county consists of a total area of 8,502 square miles, of which, 8,485 square miles is land and 18 square miles of it is water. According to my calculator, 8,502 square miles comes out to 5,441,280 acres, of which the vast sum of 15% (or 816,192 acres) is private land, and thus taxable to support the rest of the county! The Nez Perce National Forest is located entirely within Idaho County, and comprises approximately 50% of the entire county land area. In addition we have parts of five other National Forests located in the county. That leaves four million, six hundred and twenty five thousand acres that “belong” to government, and who do not pay property taxes on said lands. With the Idaho County tax base working out to about $2 per acre of private land according to Idaho County Accessor James Zehner, along with whatever else he can find to tax. Instead of property taxes on forest lands, we get PILT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) funds from the feds every year. I realize that undeveloped forest land probably doesn’t have the same taxable value as producing farm land, but PILT pays the princly sum of thirty-two cents on the acre each year. (Incidently, Idaho received $25,831,812 in PILT funds for the entire state in 2008, and that has to be spread between all forty-four counties!)

The federal government has so far killed our timber industry, strangled our mining industry, and is now attacking our ranchers through their grazing allotments. The fledgling recreation industry that we so painfully started will quite likely be stillborn, thanks to forest road and trail closures. (So much for the “multiple use” of our public lands.) All this federal attention has hit the county tax base where it hurts, right square in the budget, and it’s not doing our employment situation any good either. In return, the feds send us our annual welfare check to the tune of 16% of what the rest of our land owners have to pay!

County Commissioner James Rockwell recently made comment that if the feds were “good neighbors” and paid the same tax rate per acre that the rest of us do, the county’s economic balancing act would be a whole lot simpler, and we wouldn’t need PILT money, Craig-Wyden funds, or any other federal handout. He’s quite right of course, but just how do we go about getting the feds to do that? They are after all busily robbing us blind… and like good little citizens we’re all standing around with a smile on our faces, and not doing a darn thing about it!