Kootenai Official Blasts Minority Hiring Program Forest Service Recruits ‘Ethnics’ For Local Jobs, Says Idahoan

Ron Rankin is waging a paper war with the Panhandle National Forests, hoping to sabotage its minority recruitment program.

The Kootenai County commissioner accused forest managers of giving away local jobs to “green card holders” while regional unemployment approaches 10 percent.

He wrote to Idaho’s congressional delegation, seeking to halt the use of taxpayer dollars to recruit “ethnics.”

He used the Freedom of Information Act to unearth salaries and job descriptions for two minority hiring officers he’d read about in a newspaper story.

Two months after his push to make English the official language of county government, the county’s maverick commissioner again is taking on a racially charged issue in a region struggling with a racist image.

And while he has long been opposed to affirmative action, Rankin admits this new battle surfaced because forest officials criticized his official-English resolution.

“They started it,” Rankin said. “Because of their sanctimonious blithering they are trying to make it out like we are racists when in fact they are racists.”

In March, commissioners unanimously passed a controversial resolution stating that official county business would be conducted in English. Rankin said the county would save money by not printing drivers manuals and other documents in other languages.

The following week, Forest Supervisor David Wright and Deputy Pat Aguilar wrote to commissioners that the move was “an unflattering and decisive promotion of the type of image that we have all worked so hard to keep out of our community.” They said it was viewed by some as “a racial declaration of ‘others not welcome.”’

The two men also said they were members of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations - a human rights group Rankin previously had labeled “a paranoid claque” and “the self-anointed high priests of political correctness.”

After reading a newspaper profile of two forest employees who hire minority temporary workers from southern Idaho and other states, Rankin wrote Wright and Aguilar a blistering memo of his own. He criticized the agency for what he called a “racial declaration of ‘locals not wanted.”’

“Your continuing policy of phasing out the hiring of local workers for seasonal lift-and-pack operations at the Forest Service Nursery, replaced by contract hiring of Mexican nationals, is certainly no positive image builder for the community,” Rankin wrote, “especially with local citizens who desperately need the jobs which now go to green card holders.”

Rankin was referring to the occasional hiring of migrant workers by forest contractors.

But he also criticized the agency’s general efforts to diversify its work force.

“I don’t think it’s right and I told them so,” Rankin said Tuesday. “When they use tax dollars to go out and recruit ethnics, the requirement for which is that they not be Anglos, they discriminate against the 9-plus percent of locals here who are out of work.”

Rankin demanded job descriptions and salary grades for the people responsible for hiring minority temporary workers. He wrote to U.S. Sen. Larry Craig and Rep. Helen Chenoweth, complaining about the practice.

Chenoweth responded with a letter outlining her own opposition to affirmative action legislation. Craig did not respond.

“All men are created equal - that’s the message,” Rankin said. “We shouldn’t discriminate against Hispanics, and we shouldn’t discriminate for them. It’s un-American.”

A frustrated Wright argued that most of his 306-person temporary work force is hired locally. All but about 30 are white. Only 19 of the agency’s 295 permanent employees in Kootenai County are nonwhite.

“I couldn’t disagree with him more,” Wright said. “We have a job to do in the diversification of our federal work force. It’s what’s needed and it’s what’s right for our agency and what’s right for our community.

Wright also argued that he rarely gets enough people to fill nursery jobs.

“The point is, when we offer those kind of jobs, we sometimes don’t get local people applying for them at all,” Wright said.

Rankin, who worked 17 years at the nursery during the fall, said there was always a waiting list of people wanting those jobs.

Wright contends the list is of extra people hired specifically to fill in when workers quit and said before season’s end, there were always unfilled jobs.

“We’re damn proud of our outreach program and it’s second to none,” Wright said. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo