Ken Olsen

Pile of trouble Don Keil, assistant superintendent of the CdA Waste Water Dept., stands atop a pile of leaves collected from city streets during the last five years. The city says it has no room at the compost facility for more leaves. Photo by Colin Mulvany/The Spokesman-Review

A backhoe is at work on Joe Chapman's property on Sanders Beach. Photo by Craig Buck/The Spokesman-Review

Supporters say it would save the forest and private property. Critics call it a budget-buster and a new way to exclude the public from having a say in forest management. The debate will be aired in Washington, D.C., as hearings open on U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth's new forest bill. It proposes to roll back environmental regulations so the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management can do more logging in the name of lessening fire danger. The proposal targets areas where urban expansion encroaches on the fringes of national forests.

The narrow two-lane bridge on Northwest Boulevard crossing Interstate 90 could be transformed from a traffic bottleneck to one of the largest interchanges in the city in a few years. The Idaho Transportation Department is considering spending $6.5 million on the interchange beginning as early as next summer.

Hassell

Bats similar to this little brown bat are behind a rabies scare in Idaho. File/Associated Press

Pollution levels from an industrial solvent are again dropping at the Hanley Avenue well. Tests show trichloroethylene levels at about 4 parts per billion in the city's most productive drinking water well as of late August. Last May, city tests showed 7 parts per billion. Also in May, Panhandle Health District tests found more than 8 parts per billion.

Servick

The Hagadone Corp. is asking the Idaho Transportation Department to sell about 4 acres near the Coeur d'Alene Resort Golf Course. John Barlow of the Hagadone Corp. is appearing before the Transportation Department Board in Boise today to ask the board to declare the land surplus and sell it. The board denied a similar request three years ago.

A court likely will have to decide whether the public has rights to use Sanders Beach and whether a property owner can put a house at the water's edge. "I do not believe there is a resolution short of a court hearing," Councilman Kevin Packard said at Tuesday evening's council meeting.

U.S. Highway 195 along The Creek at Qualchan golf course disappears into the haze last week. Photo by Christopher Anderson/The Spokesman-Review (Photo ran in color in the Idaho edition.)

Paradise lost? Jan Johnson throws sticks for her dog, Buddy, and picks up trash while strolling along Sanders Beach in Coeur d'Alene. Photo by Craig Buck/The Spokesman-Review

Public money may help open some of the last key grizzly bear, caribou and wolf habitat in the Selkirk Mountains to serious logging and road construction, biologists and environmentalists say. The U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are poised to approve an agreement, part of which calls for three access roads from Colville National Forest land to Stimson Lumber Co. land north of Usk, Wash. The taxpayers will provide $30,000 of the yearly cost for maintaining these approximately two miles of access roads - which is fairly routine. The agreement that allows the next part of this picture is more unusual.

Attacks on publicly subsidized logging roads by an unusual alliance of fiscal conservatives and environmentalists is expected to surface in the U.S. Senate on Monday. The Senate is expected to debate an amendment trimming $10 million from the $47.4 million Uncle Sam proposes to spend on National Forest road construction. The proposed measure also eliminates the purchaser credits program, where the Forest Service trades between $40 million and $50 million in trees every year for additional logging road construction by timber companies.

Environmentalists say the U.S. Forest Service is delaying a study on mudslides, fearing bad publicity about logging roads in the Clearwater National Forest on the eve of U.S. Senate action on road funding. For two years, the agency has promised to produce a definitive study of the nearly 2,000 landslides on the Clearwater Forest during the winter of 1995-96. The results first were promised in October 1996.

Come November, city residents may be wondering the same thing. Where are all the candidates?

Although Rathdrum Prairie grass growers have barely 10 percent of their fields left to burn, the last of the acreage is going to smoke quite slowly. Rathdrum Prairie farmers burned just 80 acres Sept.

A 49-year-old man was killed in a firewood-cutting accident late Friday. Donald Eugene Johns was found under an overturned tractor by his 17-year-old son about 9 p.m. The death occurred about 2-1/2 miles from the family's Black Rock Road home, east of Idaho Highway 3 near Cataldo. It is the fourth timber-related fatality in North Idaho since May. Earlier in the day, Johns had promised his son he would attend the youth's football game. Johns was planning to cut firewood first, said Kootenai County Sheriff's Sgt. Brad Maskell.

Wallace

Last week, the Inland Empire Public Lands Council called for an end to commercial logging on federal lands. This week, representatives from the group stomped up to the Little North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River to call for a moratorium on logging in that watershed. And they say they are backed with petitions with more than 1,200 signatures from Spokane residents.

Is the sale of Jacklin Seed Co. the beginning of the end for grass growers on the Rathdrum Prairie? File/The Spokesman-Review

The J.R. Simplot Co.'s purchase of Jacklin Seed is only the second time Idaho's largest privately owned company has sunk money in a business enterprise north of the Salmon River. The other time Idaho's richest man ventured into North Idaho, then-Idaho Gov. John Evans called him a "white knight." But five years later - 1987 - J.R. Simplot's attempt to be one of four businessmen to rescue the Bunker Hill mine fizzled. Idaho's potato king retreated south, extracting himself from the partnership with Coeur d'Alene businessman Duane Hagadone, Silver Valley mining magnate Harry F. Magnuson and Jack Kendrick, an executive with Gulf Resources Ltd. The foursome purchased the lead and zinc mine from Gulf for $15 million, with plans to resurrect the mining empire when metals prices improved. "We're here to stay," Simplot told The Spokesman-Review in 1982. "The plant's going to stand there until the rust gets it before I give up." Lead and zinc prices got worse. Simplot got out, as did the other partners. Court records indicate the Simplot company paid a $1.1 million settlement to Gulf after the venture unraveled. Environmental Protection Agency contractors, not rust, took the plant down as part of cleaning up what is now one of the largest Superfund sites in the United States. The J.R. Simplot Co. obviously has higher hopes for its acquisition of the Jacklin Seed Co. Right in line with the agricultural bent of Simplot's empire, Simplot-Jacklin will be one of only two stand-alone companies. SSI Food Services, which sells hamburger patties to Burger King and fajita makings to Taco Bell, is the other. Simplot acquired the Wilder, Idaho, based company five years ago, said Fred Zerza, Simplot vice president for public relations. The Simplot-Jacklin deal has been under way for about two months, he said. This is the largest acquisition for Simplot this year. The largest in the company's history was the purchase of several companies from the Australian conglomerate Pacific Dunlop. Those companies have annual revenues of $450 billion. Now 88, the patriarch of the potato plantation, stepped down as chairman of the board three years ago. Three of his children, Scott, Don and Gay, and grandson Ted now run the company. Simplot is a near-mythic success story. He left school in the eighth grade and was a millionaire by the time he was 30, according to Forbes magazine. He pioneered commercial processing of frozen potatoes in the 1950s and 1960s and now the company is the third-largest producer of frozen french fries in the world. He's the richest man in Idaho, according to Forbes and Fortune magazines. His ranching empire includes 62,000 acres of the most productive state grazing leases. The Simplot feed lot enterprise is No. 6 in the nation, pumping out 400,000 cattle a year. The Simplot company, the largest privately held company in the state and about 45th in the nation, also is one of the powerhouses in state politics. During the 1996 election cycle, for example, the company and family members gave $26,350 to individual candidates. Lockheed-Martin, which runs the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, gave $16,050 to individuals. Hecla Mining Co. gave $10,100, according to Nancy Spittle of United Vision for Idaho. Simplot backed computer memory chipmaker Micron Technologies with a $1 million investment in 1985. He still owns 13 percent of the company. He owns 6 percent of Boise Cascade Corp., a timber company, and nearly 9 percent of mining company ASARCO.

Growers reacted with everything from shrugs to anger Thursday at the news that the company pushing for an end to field burning now is selling out. On Aug. 1, Jacklin Seed Co. announced it was leading a coalition of growers in a 10-year phaseout of torching of grass fields. At the time, Don Jacklin said the phaseout was the right thing to do, based on public opposition to the practice.

Al Hassell, who upset the only two-term mayor in the Lake City's history four years ago - Ray Stone - will run for a second term. There are strong indications six-year City Council veteran Nancy Sue Wallace also will file for another term. And Susan Servick, appointed in 1995 to fill Dan English's unfinished term, is strongly considering putting her name on the Nov. 4 ballot.