Land Board Needs Oversight, Stoicheff Says Legislature Should Review Rules, Fees Put In Place By Agency, Lawmaker Says

Sandpoint Rep. Jim Stoicheff is fed up with the state Land Board making rules and raising fees without consulting the Legislature, especially when the board gets into things like big rent increases for float-home residents on state waters.

Never mind that the Land Board is made up of the state’s top elected officials - the governor, attorney general, secretary of state, superintendent of schools and controller.

“They didn’t come down from Mount Olympus,” Stoicheff, the longtime House minority leader, said. “They make mistakes too.”

So Stoicheff has proposed a constitutional amendment to require legislative review of all “rules, orders, tariffs and other articles” proposed by any state agency, whether it’s an agency created by law or by the Constitution.

The Legislature already reviews all rules and fees set by most state agencies. But those exercising their constitutional powers - like the officials on the Land Board - are exempt.

The law also exempts the state Board of Correction and the judicial branch.

“I don’t think anybody that’s using the state government as a vehicle should be able to deal with money and rules without our knowledge.

Otherwise you have an untouchable section of government,” Stoicheff said.

The Legislature’s authority to review state agency rules was affirmed in a 1990 Idaho Supreme Court decision. Then, in 1995, the Legislature passed a law saying state agency rules can’t go into effect until they’ve been reviewed. In emergency cases, temporary rules can be adopted, but the Legislature still can overturn them.

Carl Bianchi, director of legislative services, said the rules reviews are a little-known but important function of the Legislature.

“I would say that, generally, rules have the same effect on people’s lives as do statutory law,” he said.

The Legislature has designated the first few weeks of its session each year as the time for rules review, and extensive hearings are conducted in committees that oversee the topics addressed by the agencies. If the Legislature takes no action, the rules stand. Or, the Legislature can reject all or a portion of a rule by a majority vote in each house.

“They do this in a very hard-working way,” Bianchi said. “They review each and every line of every rule adopted by state agencies.”

That’s partly because rule-making is an authority that the Legislature has delegated to state agencies, Bianchi said, to allow the agencies to fill in the details when they put new state laws into effect. Legislators want to make sure the rules fit in with how the laws were intended to work.

Idaho went through an extensive rule-making process on how it handles leases on state waters. After nearly a decade of hearings and discussion, the rules were approved by the Legislature last year.

But they left the setting of rents up to the Land Board.

“Those are public meetings,” said Bryce Taylor, chief of range management and surface leasing for the Department of Lands. “Any citizen of the state of Idaho can request an audience with the board.”

Taylor said if Land Board decisions on rents and the like had to wait for legislative review, the decisions could get bogged down. Plus, the board’s current ability to consider individual cases might be affected.

“The Legislature’s in town once a year, we have board meetings every month,” Taylor said. “If we have to wait to resolve some of those issues until the Legislature is in town and then go through that legislative process, I think it would all but stop us from doing business.”

But Stoicheff said the Land Board’s proposal to push float-home rents up to $1,000 a year - which it later revised to about $250 - showed that oversight is needed.

“If they can do that, they can chop down every tree in Bonner County if they feel like it and say that’s their privilege. We can’t allow that to happen. No agency is perfect.

“If this decision can get done without oversight, there may be others who try it later. Then you’ve got a government that is running crazy on its own,” he said.

Lindsay Nothern, spokesman for Gov. Phil Batt, who chairs the Land Board, said board members haven’t heard many complaints about float-home rents since they reached a compromise on the rents with a group of float-home owners.

“I don’t know if you’ll get a majority of voters and a majority of legislators to stand up and say the Land Board is that broken that we need this kind of a step to fix it,” Nothern said. “If the Legislature is second-guessing everything the Land Board does, there may be some that say why even have a Land Board.”

To amend the constitution, Stoicheff’s measure would need two-thirds approval in both houses of the Legislature, plus majority support from voters at the polls. His measure, prefiled for consideration by the Legislature in January, is HJR 3.

Stoicheff acknowledged he might have trouble getting the two-thirds support, since he heads only a tiny band of Democrats in the Legislature and four of the five Land Board members are part of the Republican majority that dominates state government. But he said he thought the issue transcended party lines.

“They (the Land Board) work with all the water in the state, all the woods on state lands, the mining. That’s a little too important to say these five guys never make a mistake.”

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