D.F. Oliveria

Fellow legislators weren't laughing with state Rep. Tom Dorr, R-Post Falls, last week. They were laughing at him - for good reason. They didn't understand why a legislator would oppose $2.5 million in property tax relief for his own county. Nor can I - even after hearing Dorr's explanation. He didn't want liquor taxes to be used to replace property taxes for North Idaho College. Kootenai County is one of only three counties in Idaho that support community colleges with property taxes. Said Dorr: "To take money from something like that (liquor) that is known to be and documented to be so destructive and to funnel it into something that is as positive and constructive as community colleges, to me, is inherently wrong." What's inherently wrong here is that Dorr hasn't learned much in his 1-1/2 sessions in the Legislature. Liquor taxes are mixed into almost every state budget, as the sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Ron Black, R-Twin Falls, pointed out. I admire principled stands. But goofiness? Never.

Idaho's timber industry is bracing itself for an invasion of 500 Earth First! radicals hell-bent on "fun" in the woods this summer. That's how one fanatic described a national rendezvous planned in the Nez Perce National Forest: "It's going to be in Idaho, it's going to be at Cove-Mallard and it's going to be fun." A plague of locusts would be preferable.

Any of the top Republican presidential candidates is preferable to President FlipFlop. Steve Forbes, with his intriguing flat-tax plan, understands America's yearning for tax reform better than Bill Clinton, who arrived in office promising tax cuts and then nursed the Mother of All Tax Increases through Congress. Pat Buchanan, despite his unsettling dark underbelly and his goofy trade-protectionist ideas, has a quiver full of attractive stands to combat Clinton's gays-in-the-military approach to social policy.

Jack Buell has found religion in the floodwaters of the St. Joe River. The veteran commissioner and others in anti-government Benewah County, Idaho, have learned that Big Brother isn't always the bad guy. Sometimes, there's a good reason to follow regulations, such as those governing flood plains, even when constituents don't want you to do so. A day of reckoning came this month for Benewah County when the river breached two dikes and submerged the St. Maries area. Said a wiser Buell afterward: "We just misjudged. ... We're going to be a heck of a lot smarter than we were before."

Add GQ to the magazines that have done a hatchet job on our neck of the woods. Free-lancer Mike Sager wasn't very gentlemanly when he parachuted in from Washington, D.C., with preconceived notions about North Idaho and then ferreted out people to validate them. (Maybe that's why he preferred talking to what he termed the "gonzo" journalist of the other newspaper instead of the Coeur d'Alene mayor.) You needn't look further than the big print on the title page to see where this one is going: "The lovely lake region of northern Idaho is home to the Aryan Nations, Mark Fuhrman and a cracked pot of other white supremacists united by hate. African-Americans, Hispanics and Jews are not welcome here. It is, its residents boast, 'what America used to be' - and must be again." Standard tripe. But, worse yet was Sager's paranoid impression of how people "circumnavigated" him - "with my olive skin and deep nostrils, my shaved head and earring." But those who saw this Hemingway wannabe say he isn't any darker than I am. I'm a full-blooded Portuguese. I've been here 12 years, and I've been circumnavigated only once - by a Richard Butler goose stepper. In Sager's case, I think it takes prejudice to find prejudice. Don't hang kids out over principal flap So few Hot Potatoes, so many candidates. All sides deserve a Hot Potato in the controversy surrounding the demotion of Sandpoint High School Principal A.C. Woolnough. The administrators who privately promoted it. The school board who apparently went meekly along with it. And the parents who now are threatening to sabotage an important levy, tentatively scheduled for April, unless trustees reinstate Woolnough. Steve Battenschlag, Bonner School District business manager, has it right: "The differences between A.C., the trustees and central office are totally separate from providing dollars for education." Still, you'd think trustees would have learned from the controversial firing of Principal Steve Johnson in 1993 that led to the previous board's ouster. Phone mail Sister Judith Brower, a North Idaho College instructor, didn't object to my call for background checks on teachers, a proposition under consideration by the Legislature. But she didn't think teachers should pick up the $40 tab for the checks. I agree. And since it will cost the state $4 million to check all current Idaho teachers, I'd go a step further. Let's give current teachers grandfather status and then pay to check the new ones who come in.

An old saying in the Coeur d'Alene area goes: "There's no good roads to Worley." Former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus might have been thinking of the narrow, twisty portion of U.S. Highway 95 between the two North Idaho towns when he contemptuously dubbed the highway "the goat trail." Or he might have pictured the broken, patchwork ribbon of asphalt that ties Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry together. Or the shoulderless roadway that meanders through the Palouse inviting head-on collisions. Or any of an endless number of spots that make U.S. Highway 95 a deplorable deathtrap to be avoided if possible.

Idaho Gov. Phil Batt thrilled North Idahoans this week with the passionate conclusion to his unprecedented midsession speech to the Legislature, advocating flood relief: "This is not a North Idaho flood. This is an Idaho flood." Batt backed up his talk by promising to use his authority to appropriate up to $30 million in state matching money for federal aid.

Well, it's official: Post Falls wants no part of the Kootenai County 911 system. I can't blame River City either. Several years ago, Kootenai County officials successfully sold voters on the need for a countywide 911 system and a $1 telephone surcharge to fund it - without working out the details. They figured Post Falls would want to merge its system with the county's. They figured wrong. Seems Post Falls Mayor Jim Hammond, Police Chief Cliff Hayes, et al., believed their system was better, so they wouldn't agree to consolidation until the county could provide similar service. Nothing has happened since then to change their minds. In fact, agencies served by the Post Falls system say privately that they're against consolidation, too. Maybe the wrong center is running the countywide system. A round of taters for initiative bashers Many people deserve Hot Potatoes Au Gratin for trying to thwart Idaho's initiative process, including the Idaho Farm Bureau, Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry and state Rep. Milt Erhart, R-Boise. In fact, Erhart earned an additional Idaho russet with all the trimmings for proposing a bill that would have made it harder still to place initiatives on the ballot. Erhart sought to limit the number of signatures that could be collected in any single county and require a minimum number of signatures from 33 of Idaho's 44 counties. So much for the old one-man, one-vote rule. Fortunately, the House State Affairs Committee killed Erhart's bill - despite lobbying by commerce and industry association President Steve Ahrens, who wanted the process tightened before Idaho becomes an "initiative factory." Of course, he was talking horsefeathers. Only eight initiatives have made it to the Idaho ballot since 1982. Your average legislator, like Erhart, can do more mischief than that in a single session.

North Idaho College trustees - three of them, that is - deserve Sweet Potatoes for making their election process more convenient - finally. In 1994, I climbed all over Chairman Norm Gissell and the board for not combining their trustee elections with the general election. It would save money and ensure a bigger turnout, argued I. But trustees feared that the NIC election would be lost in the shadows of higher-profile races. Recently, Gissell joined Betty McLain and Sue Thilo in voting to consolidate the elections. Now, we need to work on those school districts, including Coeur d'Alene's, that refuse to combine trustee, levy and bond elections. Incredibly, the Coeur d'Alene School District is considering running elections for trustees and a supplemental levy a week or two apart this May - and at least one week ahead of the spring primary. Such tricks ensure lower turnouts and enable factions to control elections. And you wonder why voters become cynical? Competence not enough in Sandpoint Sandpoint High School Principal A.C. Woolnough and I aren't the best of friends. But that doesn't mean I don't respect the job he's done cleaning up problems at Sandpoint High. My sources say he's a tough administrator who is respected by students. For some reason, though, he'll be out of a principal's job at the end of the school year. Trustees cite "philosophical differences" in not renewing Woolnough's contract and little else, fearing legal reprisals. Some suspect Woolnough is the victim of a vendetta. Others figure the new superintendent wants his own lieutenants running the schools. Who knows? But the action certainly doesn't make the school board or district look good. Manure spreaders bring back memories One of my first jobs as a young hand on my uncle's cattle ranch involved scraping out the corrals on Saturdays. I'm very aware of the smells and feel of fresh cow manure. So I applaud what Bonners Ferry Councilman Russ "Doc" Docherty describes as "a crackdown on crap." Apparently, Canadian cattle haulers routinely open the drains in their trailers while trudging around steep hills near Bonners Ferry, pouring an unsightly, smelly and often slick stream of cow manure onto U.S. Highway 95. It poses a traffic hazard. Maybe - besides the $97 tickets they occasionally get - culprits should have their noses rubbed in the mess they leave on the road. That method works in housebreaking puppies.

Actor Bruce Willis has lived with Tinseltown's virtual reality so long, he seems to believe anything's possible - for example, that all he has to do is sneer to make Idaho Gov. Phil Batt and the Republican Legislature disappear. Willis recently flaunted his political naivete on the Capitol steps in Boise, demanding that his adopted state quit accepting nuclear waste. Willis believes Idaho got a bum deal in October when Batt agreed to accept 1,133 shipments of spent nuclear fuel at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory over the next 40 years. In exchange, the U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to remove the nuclear waste from the site by 2035.

So, President Bill Clinton can clear his packed schedule to see the flood-ravaged Pacific Northwest. But Gov. Mike Lowry can't find time to tour Eastern Washington's soaked communities? Idaho Gov. Phil Batt can visit the inundated Panhandle three times in five days, offering comfort and an important state presence. But Lowry prefers to meet with staff and the Washington State School Directors' Association? Something's wrong here.

Cataldo, Idaho, residents were caught unaware when floodwaters came early Friday morning because emergency officials from Shoshone and Kootenai counties had cried wolf 1-1/2 days before. Seems worried residents were huddling with disaster folks Wednesday night when word came from upstream that a huge ice jam was breaking up. And, officials announced, a 6- to 10-foot "wall of water" was barreling down on Cataldo. Of course, everyone panicked, and Cataldo quickly became a ghost town. But "Chicken Littles" didn't realize that the broader stretches of the Coeur d'Alene River downstream would absorb the rushing water. The townsfolk, angry at the false alarm, returned to their homes only to awaken Friday with water in their living rooms - without warning from town sirens. Many were lucky to save their vehicles. They have a reason to be upset today. Ice jams and floods are a regular occurrence at Cataldo. Yet, a major flood caught public officials unprepared. The Keystone Kops are alive and well at the county line.

Hanging would have been too good for obese double murderer Mitchell Rupe - even if the process had ripped his head off as he feared. The two bank tellers he shot dead during a 1981 robbery - Twila Capron and Candace Hemmig - had no say in how they would die. Their executioner shouldn't have either. Gallows. Firing squad. Electric chair. Lethal injection. Most methods of execution show more mercy than mad-dog killers such as Rupe showed toward those they slaughtered. Unfortunately, in September 1994, Rupe's defense attorneys persuaded a finicky federal judge that the prospect of accidental beheading in Rupe's case would be cruel and unusual punishment. The judge gave more weight to Rupe's bulk than to the quick, clean executions carried out by Washington authorities this decade against triple murderer Charles Campbell and child torturer Westley Dodd.

Take a memo to Judge Gary Haman: Judge, how can you justify sitting on the Hayden Lake Dike Road case for five years? Maybe you don't recall the particulars of the case. It began in 1984 when ol' Otis Wuest announced plans to build a recreation area on public land along the dike. But neighbor Tom Richards claimed the land belonged to his company, Idaho Forest Industries, and stopped Otis with an injunction. The case has been in the courts since then. In 1988, the Idaho Department of Lands got involved on Otis' side. The files have gathered dust on your desk ever since the Idaho Supreme Court overturned your original decision, favoring Idaho Forest Industries. Now, Otis is dead, and the recreation area he envisioned exists at expanded Honeysuckle Beach nearby. Meanwhile, the land dispute not only continues but also has created a potential health problem by blocking work on the dike spillway. If I were you, judge, I'd cut down on my smoke breaks and spend time reviewing the old files. Then you could render a ruling before we're all too old to care. Some of my best friends are Kootenais

Apparently, Kootenai County commissioners Dick Compton, Dick Panabaker and Bob Macdonald believe the courthouse belongs to them - not the public. How else can you explain their sneaky, arrogant and probably unconstitutional decision to ban petition gatherers from courthouse hallways? Without fanfare, the three censors cited safety concerns for passing a resolution prohibiting "parades, processions or assemblages." But their action was nothing more than a bald-faced attempt to muzzle tax activist Ron Rankin.

State Rep. Jeff Alltus, R-Coeur d'Alene, sees something wrong with local governments hiring lobbyists to plead their case for more taxes. And so do I. In fact I'm surprised few have squawked about Kootenai County, Coeur d'Alene and Post Falls anteeing up a combined $30,000 to hire a lobbyist - Chuck Lempesis and friends. One of Chuck's first orders of business is to win Kootenai County a chance to impose a local-option sales tax. Post Falls Mayor Jim Hammond defended the hiring by saying: "The north is still under-represented down there." Seems to me that Kootenai taxpayers are getting triple-teamed here. First, they pay for legislators to represent them. Then, their tax dollars subsidize the state associations of cities and counties, which routinely lobby for more taxes. Finally, local governments are coughing up $30,000 for the same thing. Alltus' bill doesn't have a chance of passing. But that doesn't mean he's wrong. The rats are nibbling away at initiative

Now, we Northwesterners know how Cleveland feels. And Houston. And possibly Tampa Bay, Cincinnati and Arizona. The National Football League's version of musical chairs finally has come to a city near us: Seattle. Seahawks owner Ken Behring has conjured the weakest of excuses - the seismic inadequacy of the Kingdome - in his attempt to break his stadium lease and respond to the siren call of Los Angeles, the nation's No. 2 market. As Behring's vans head southward toward the San Andreas fault, we have recourse, however. Northwesterners should make Behring's life miserable, fighting the Seahawks' exodus in the courts, in Olympia, in Washington, D.C. - as jilted Cleveland is doing.

Kootenai County Commissioner Dick Compton has a good idea on how to handle problem drivers: Slap a sticker on their bumpers identifying them as such. It could read something like "I've been caught driving drunk," "I'm a habitual speeder" or, simply, "I'm a lousy driver." Dick ran that idea past me as he tried to make sense of administrative assistant Darlene King's death two weeks ago. The popular commissioners' aide was killed on her way home from the courthouse when a driver with a laundry list of traffic violations crashed headlong into her. The other driver had tried to pass five cars on icy Idaho Highway 41. Dick's idea would add a little shame to the judicial hand-slaps these multiple offenders typically receive. Save posturing until county fair time

In his quest seemingly to tie every death he investigates to homosexuality, Spokane County Coroner Dexter Amend has crossed the line of decency again. This time, Amend pestered the family of an 11-year-old boy who died in a fire Monday, particularly his older brother. The coroner asked the grieving teen if his brother ever masturbated or had sex with another boy. The question resembled one Amend posed last summer to Mabel Grantham shortly after she learned that her teen had been shot dead. Amend wanted to know if the girl had ever been sodomized (an act the coroner mistakenly associates only with gay men).

Take a memo to Lake City High officials: I think I have a book of yours, "Goodbye, Janette" by Harold Robbins. It's about three women - "as richly sensual and exciting as only Harold Robbins can create." Tanya, Janette and Laren are in one graphic sex scene after another - from bondage to incest. The book arrived in the mail with an anonymous note. Usually I toss anonymous letters but this one caught my attention. A mother writes that she heard her daughter and two friends giggling in her daughter's room. She investigated, and discovered the book. "Anonymous" asks three questions: "How can anyone write such trash?" (Answer: Money.) "How can a publisher print such trash? (Money.) "And how can a book like this get into a school library where a 14-year-old girl can get ahold of it?" (Sex education?) Anyway, can someone from your school pick up the book before my wife hears about it? She has this thing about women routinely being called "whores" and worse. Thanks. Smile when you say 'liberal,' mister Is Congress(wo)man Helen Chenoweth a liberal in disguise? No way. She may be the most independent member of Idaho's all-GOP delegation. But the most liberal? That's a stretch. Yet some drew that conclusion from a Congressional Quarterly report on voting patterns. Larry Craig, Dirk Kempthorne and Mike Crapo voted with their party and the Conservative Coalition 94 percent of the time or better. Our Miss Chenoweth scored 91 percent in both categories. She'd have been higher if she hadn't voted for Big Bird in the great public-broadcasting debate. Still, she sided with the GOP on 578 of 635 votes and with the Conservative Coalition on 101 of 111 bills. Those numbers should keep her safely to the right of Bella Abzug.

Michael R. Opland wasn't Everyfool-In-A-Four-Wheeler last Wednesday when he ignored glare-ice conditions and began to pass five vehicles. He was worse. He was a man with a history of lawlessness, including several traffic offenses: drunken driving, five speeding tickets, driving on the wrong side of the highway, operating an unsafe vehicle, possession of marijuana with intent to sell and vandalizing a railroad crossing gate. One previous victim, hospitalized in 1994 after Opland rammed the back of her car, suffers pain still. Last week Opland was driving with a suspended license, the result of a drunken-driving conviction in Montana, when he began to pass on dark Idaho Highway 41, south of Rathdrum.

State Sen. Rex Furness, R-Rigby, was laying for Bob Bennett when the North Idaho College prexy came calling with his hand out. Furness thought Bennett had taken two junkets to Korea and assailed him during a Senate Finance Committee hearing. But President Bob isn't Hazel O'Leary. Actually, he'd made one trip to Korea, with the NIC board president - and the host Koreans picked up all but $1,200 of the tab. In exchange, Bennett wooed 19 Korean students and $50,000 in tuition to NIC. Said Bob: "I think it's a bargain any day of the week." (Well, it doesn't beat the first lady's $100,000 jackpot in cattle futures, but it ain't bad.) What's in a nickname? James Rising, the new sawbones at Silver Valley Medical Center, has been given a nickname by colleagues that might unnerve patients who are Creedence fans: "Bad Moon" Rising. The moniker seems a natural until you consider the words to John Fogerty's third verse: "I hope you got your things together/I hope you're quite prepared to die/Looks like we're in for nasty weather/One eye is taken for an eye." ... What's this? The Huckleberry Hound heard an interesting PSA on K103 recently. Seems con artists are on the loose taking advantage of seniors via door-to-door and telephone solicitation. And Idaho's Small Business Administration wanted the old-timers forewarned. So did Attorney General Larry EchoHawk. (Now, there's a golden oldie.)

A plan to race hydroplanes on Lake Coeur d'Alene this summer sank for one reason only: Coeur d'Alene residents didn't want the races. Anyone who thinks otherwise - race promoter John McGruder, for example - either is deluded or is trying to salve a bruised ego. In announcing the decision last week to drop plans for an unlimited hydroplane race, McGruder blamed potential litigation and "the same group that derails everything as far as anything to do with the city." There was no pending litigation - although the promoters of this fast-track scheme likely faced a referendum in May and sympathetic City Council members risked a recall effort. In reality, the proposal had little public support beyond the Coeur d'Alene Chamber of Commerce, businessman Duane Hagadone, a couple of Spokane radio talk-show hosts and a local beer distributor.

Idaho legislators need only consider Javier Tellez-Juarez to understand why they should extend workers' compensation insurance to farm laborers. His arms are gone, torn from their sockets in a horrible farm accident Dec. 13. His left leg is sawed off at the knee. Tellez-Juarez, 23, was using his feet to push a post-hole digger deeper into the ground when a moving shaft snagged his shirt and pushed him in. That was three limbs and nearly $500,000 ago.