Idaho Laws Jump Through Hoops Ban On Special Local Laws Forces Creative Bill Writing

They’re not really supposed to, but Idaho’s lawmakers don’t hesitate to pass legislation that just applies to one part of the state.

Some examples: a measure awaiting approval would grant a special liquor license to Hayden Lake’s Clark House.

Last week, the House passed a bill that would lower the sales tax in two counties, Payette and Washington, that border Oregon, where there is no sales tax.

And a law on the books for several years now allows development impact fees to be charged only in Ada County.

Technically, they can’t do that. Idaho’s Constitution bans “local and special laws.” So lawmakers write the bills with carefully contrived definitions that make them apply only to one place.

“I think it’s an insane and arcane way of doing business,” said Sen. Gordon Crow, R-Hayden. Crow is sponsoring the Clark House bill, which says it grants a liquor license to any structure that, among other things, has been on the Historic Register at least 10 years, is within 500 yards of a natural lake with 32 miles of shoreline and is within a county of a least 65,000 population.

“This is the nuttiest system I ever heard of,” Crow said.

“That clause of the constitution is so old,” said Freeman Duncan, legislative liaison for the Idaho Attorney General. “Some of that’s not even relevant any more.”

Court decisions over the years have upheld Idaho’s localized laws. A 1985 Idaho Supreme Court decision held that a law allowing Sun Valley to charge a localized resort tax was valid because it was “not arbitrary, capricious or unreasonable.”

Duncan said that’s how the courts, since then, have interpreted the intent of the constitution.

But Dennis Colson, a professor of law at the University of Idaho and author of “Idaho’s Constitution: The Tie That Binds,” said that’s not really what the framers had in mind when they wrote Idaho’s Constitution.

Around 1885, many territorial legislatures were getting bogged down with special, local legislation, “granting divorces, for example, or locating county seats.”

“Every legislative session would be eaten up with all these very specialized local problems.”

So Congress passed a law that limited territorial legislatures from passing certain types of local and special legislation.

Idaho chose to include the language from that federal law in its constitution. “That’s how it got there,” Colson said.

“The Idaho Supreme Court has never enforced that clause very rigorously.”

Colson believes the provision still has some effect, keeping lawmakers from loading up the law books with special, local provisions. “Has the nature of an Idaho legislator changed in the last 100 years? No,” he said. “The Legislature is supposed to act generally. That’s what law is.”

, DataTimes