Paula Davenport

POST FALLS – Residents of the 70-unit El Rancho Mobile Home Park near Post Falls say they're still in shock after learning about a week ago their park has been sold and they'll be forced to move. The 8.7-acre trailer park is a 29-year-old residential island. Rundown and full of potholes, it's perched at Highway 41 and Mullan Avenue, surrounded by fast-food eateries and shopping centers.

POST FALLS – Julie Billetz, principal of Post Fall's centralized public kindergarten, said she knew there were lots of twins coming to school this fall. But she didn't know exactly how many until her secretary totaled them up. "We have 16 sets of twins. That's a huge record. We do have all our kindergartners in one building, but this is crazy," Billetz laughed.

POST FALLS – Parents: It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your teenage werewolf is? They might be pulling a night shift at the coolest haunted house around. The intentionally decrepit Idaho Veneer Co. building is at Fourth and Post streets in Post Falls.

POST FALLS – With only 18 days until next month's municipal election, the debate over whether to spare Post Falls' current City Ball building is reaching a crescendo. City officials had planned to demolish the structure next year. Some residents want to save the old building for public use, such as a museum. Others say that would cost too much. The debate has divided the fast-growing city of more than 25,000, and voters will decide in the Nov. 6 city election if the building stays or goes.

A spacious new City Hall is rising not far from the river canyon that gave Post Falls its name. But attention is not on the construction work; instead, it's on the masonry block old City Hall next door – a building city officials had planned to demolish next year. Some residents want to save the old building for public use, such as a museum. Others say that would cost too much. The debate has divided the fast-growing city of more than 25,000, and voters will decide in the Nov. 6 city election if the building stays or goes. Preserving the 7,500-square-foot structure at this late date would cause a financial crisis, said City Administrator Eric Keck. Taxpayers would have to foot the estimated $1.2 million bill, plus pay $60,000 a year in operating costs. And they'd get an aging building fraught with maintenance problems, Keck said.

Growing up in Dana Point, Calif. – a coastal paradise in burgeoning Orange County – Jack Evans saw his once intimate hometown grow into a place overrun with residential developments and traffic, but few good jobs. As a result, the town became a bedroom community for bigger cities, he said.

ATHOL – Homemade barricades springing up on Sheep Springs Road have sparked a lawsuit as the Lakes Highway District and neighborhood landowners tussle over whether the narrow, 4-mile stretch of gravel just northwest of Athol is public or private. If deemed public, the highway district wants landowners barred from putting roadblocks of boulders and barbed wire across the the route, which turns into Rose Mont Drive. But at least three of 28 landowners have put up barricades, and one said the public has no reason to use the road other than to make "mischief."

A Post Falls resident for 22 years, Kerri Thoreson knows the community inside and out. She moved to town when its population was a mere 4,000 and there was only a single stoplight, she said. A former publisher of the Post Falls Tribune, Thoreson still keeps an ear on the police scanner like she did at the newspaper.

Growing up in rural Kansas, Kristy Reed Johnson watched her hometown's residents split over whether the town, located in tornado alley, should pull up stakes and move. Now, she said, she's seeing a similar "destructive" debate swirling around Post Falls. This time, people are taking sides over whether to save Old City Hall from the wrecking ball, she said.

As co-owner of a Post Falls-based business, Skip Hissong said he knows how hard it can be scraping together money to meet a Friday payroll. One of two candidates seeking election to a new two-year term on the Post Falls City Council, Hissong said if elected, he'd bring his frugality along.

Growing up in Post Falls in the 1960s, Linda Wilhelm remembers it as a hard-scrabble place with limited employment and no sidewalks or street lights. "There were an awful lot of people who struggled financially," said Wilhelm, one of three residents running for the new, two-year seat on the Post Falls City Council.

POST FALLS – Carol Nettles knows what it takes to help elderly people live independently in their own homes. She's doing just that for her 85-year-old mother. Now, Nettles is applying her skills to help coordinate a new, free program for Post Falls' senior citizens.

Self-employed residential mortgage broker Anthony Skarisky said he's aware of the spectrum of issues the Post Falls City Council must attend to. Skarisky hopes to be elected to the council in November to steer the city through those matters. He's one of three residents vying for a newly created two-year council term.

Keith Hutcheson knows the bright and the gritty sides of Post Falls. A K-9 officer with the Kootenai County Sheriff's Department for nine years, he now is the Coeur d'Alene Tribe's police chief. Hutcheson is one of three candidates for the newly created two-year seat on the Post Falls City Council.