Full house for today’s Land Board meeting
Every seat is filled, and people are standing around the back and sides of the room and spilling out the door at the state Land Board meeting this morning, where the state's top five elected officials are taking on what's always been a thorny issue for them: How to deal with state-owned cabin sites, on which people have built and owned their own family cabins, sometimes for generations. Yet, the state-owned land underneath is endowment land, which the Land Board is required to manage for the maximum long-term return to the endowment beneficiaries, the largest of which is the state's public schools. Today, the board will consider sharp rent increases for the ground, and possible moves toward changing the whole way the deals are structured, even to the point of exchanging or selling the cabin sites, which ring Payette and Priest Lakes. The Idaho Statesman's Dan Popkey has a full look at the issue facing the board here.