Treasurer wants another term

BOISE – The race for state treasurer this year pits a two-term Republican incumbent against a longtime Sandpoint banker and Realtor.

State Treasurer Ron Crane has held the office for eight years and is seeking a third four-year term. Democratic challenger Howard Faux says he wants to bring “fresh ideas” and a North Idaho presence to state government.

“I ask people who the treasurer is, and nobody knows,” Faux said.

Crane acknowledges that the office is low-profile and many of the issues the treasurer handles are technical. But he’s been trying to raise the office’s profile by using it to promote financial literacy and small-business loans, as well as the treasurer’s main duties of receiving, disbursing and investing government funds.

“People will listen to you, if you’re in the treasurer’s office, talk about finances,” Crane said.

So he formed a 501(c)3 tax-exempt charity to raise funds and put on a free women’s money conference each year in Boise, which has drawn an average of 1,500 women a year, to learn about everything from balancing a checkbook to managing retirement investments for greater returns. After getting the idea from the former Oregon state treasurer, he’s talked it up, and now 33 state treasurers have held similar conferences.

He’s gone around Southern Idaho teaching a one-day class to high school economics students about credit cards. Crane tells the students that if they owe $2,000 on a credit card at 18 percent interest and they make the minimum monthly payment, it’ll take them 19.3 years to pay it off and cost them more than $5,800 to do it.

The point: Credit cards aren’t necessarily bad, but they can be if not managed properly.

As state treasurer, Crane said, “You’ve got a bully pulpit, and you need to take advantage of it. These are just some of the programs that get me turned on.”

He’s also enthusiastic about municipal bond bank legislation that he pushed in 2000 to allow the state treasurer to bundle together local government bond issues for better rates. “It actually saves the property taxpayers money,” Crane said.

He’s working on a program to enhance the state’s credit rating by tracking all debt that’s guaranteed by the state, directly or indirectly, on a Web site. He started a process to have banks bid online for state deposits, competing by offering favorable interest rates, rather than the old system of the treasurer arbitrarily choosing where to deposit state money.

And he’s launched a prime rate loan program for small businesses in which the state partners with banks and the federal Small Business Administration. The program makes the federally guaranteed loans part of the state’s investment portfolio and discounts them to make them more attractive loans for banks to issue.

“Last year I did probably 17 percent of all SBA loans in the state of Idaho,” Crane said, “and the small-businessmen got a loan for prime rate.”

Faux doesn’t have those kind of specifics for what he wants to do in the treasurer’s office if elected, but he said he wouldn’t make big changes right off. “Certainly we’re not going to run in there with a big hammer and start slamming,” he said. “I’ve always found it’s better off to not stir the pot too much until you get which way it’s going.”

Then, he said, he’d “try to bring my banking experience (and) … using what I know, my background, to improve the operation if there is any improvement to be done at the time.”

Faux, pronounced “fox,” said he’s running because he thinks longtime incumbents should be challenged, and he thinks his background qualifies him for the job. He’d also like to see Democrats and North Idaho folks be part of the state government. Idaho has only one Democrat among its statewide elected officials and congressional delegation – state Superintendent of Schools Marilyn Howard. None of the current statewide elected officials or congressional representatives hails from North Idaho.

Faux is a 40-year Sandpoint resident who long has been involved in the community. “I think I’ve got a good reputation in Sandpoint as a person who’s honest and would do a good job for this particular thing, for anything I do,” he said.

The election is Nov. 7.