OPINION: Cheers and Jeers: Mayor makes a vote for the kids

CHEERS ... to Lewiston Mayor Dan Johnson.

Last week, he cast the tie-breaking vote, greenlighting a housing project to help foster children who age out of the system. The Village, consisting of a dozen one-bedroom, one-bath tiny homes for people ages 18-20, required the city’s approval for a 50-year, $100-per-year lease of a small, abandoned city park along East Main Street.

Nobody asks to become a foster child. Removing any Idaho child from his home requires checking off all five of these boxes:

There has been severe harm.

The risk to the child’s safety is imminent.

The family is out of control.

The threat to the child is “evidenced in explicit, unambiguous ways.”

The child is vulnerable and relies on others for protection.

Among the many pitfalls in that system is how it often curtails financial support to foster parents once children reach the age of 18. It’s one reason why so many former foster children wind up homeless.

Not only is the Village a modest step toward addressing that inequity, it also is a tangible piece of solving at least a portion of the homelessness dilemma in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley. It offers social scaffolding to young adults — providing a mix of rules, adult supervision and independent living — leading them toward employment, life skills and financial self-sufficiency.

By no means was this decision popular with many residents of the East Main Street neighborhood, who disputed assurances the Village would not become a magnet for crime, drug abuse and homelessness.

But Johnson offered a clear-eyed assessment of a project he said will “do good things for the neighborhood, good things for the city. So I’m committed to that. I will work on that but I will work equally hard for your neighborhood.”

JEERS ... to Idaho House Speaker Mike Moyle, R-Star.

Once again, he has squandered millions of your tax dollars. This time, it involves his successful effort to block the sale of the old Idaho Transportation Department headquarters in Boise. After the structure was heavily damaged by flooding, the state acquired new accommodations for transportation employees and then arranged to sell the campus to developers for about $52 million.

Moyle balked. For a mere $32.5 million, he argued, the state could repair the building rather than sell it.

He was relying on a Department of Administration estimate that was produced quickly and was “sight unseen.” The Department of Administration’s office specialist, Linda Edkins, called it a “rudimentary ‘back of the napkin approach.’ ”

But much like his often wildly optimistic — or self-serving — fiscal impact statements regarding past legislative endeavors, Moyle stood his ground. And he held the Legislature in town last spring until he got his way.

Now it turns out Moyle was wrong.

As the Idaho Statesman’s Nick Rosenberger reported last month, the minimum repair bill comes to $64 million, “higher than the range lawmakers previously received and $59 million more than what it would’ve cost the state to sell it.”

As reckless as Moyle is with your money, let’s have no more talk about him being a fiscal conservative.

CHEERS ... to U.S. Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho.

Along with Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., Risch is responsible for a common-sense piece of environmental legislation aimed at cleaning up abandoned mines, including hundreds, if not thousands, of them in the Gem State.

Left unaddressed, these mines threaten to contaminate soils as well as waterways with heavy metals. Cleaning them up could cost $50 billion.

Standing in the way has been the liability so-called “Good Samaritans” would face if they attempted to clean up the sites, even though they had nothing to do with creating pollution in the first place.

Signed into law by President Joe Biden, the new Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act begins with a pilot program, involving 15 abandoned mines, by waiving federal laws that had interfered with cleanup.

However, it is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for mine owners and operators responsible for pollution.

At its core, the measure assumes good faith and does not allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.

“We can potentially do like a 70% improvement in water quality that would then support aquatic life, as opposed to 100% water quality that would be unachievable, both financially and long term,” Jason Willis, an environmental engineer with Trout Unlimited, told Source New Mexico reporter Danielle Prokop.

Despite his reputation as a hard-core partisan, this is one time Risch crossed the aisle and got results.

CHEERS ... to Karole Honas.

The retired eastern Idaho television anchor rose to the occasion last month while moderating a debate about whether to drain state dollars from public education to provide private school students with a voucher.

State Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, is for it.

Former Idaho Business for Education President Rod Gramer is opposed.

The key issue here: Will an Idaho voucher program evolve into a budget-busting, universal entitlement in Idaho as it has elsewhere, notably in Arizona?

Horman has pitched a $50 million spending cap. But, when Gramer pressed Horman to pledge against spending more, she hedged.

“I didn’t come here to debate him,” Horman told the Idaho Falls City Club audience. “I came here to speak my piece.”

Countered Honas: “I’d kind of like to know, too, though.”

So would the rest of us. — M.T.