House votes to update ‘ignored’ gambling law
BOISE – Idaho law currently makes it a misdemeanor for law enforcement officers or prosecutors who know about unlawful gambling to fail to prosecute it, and “the way gambling is defined in the code, it covers your mother-in-law’s football pool,” according to Rep. Grant Burgoyne, D-Boise.
Law enforcement and prosecutors generally have more discretion than that, says Burgoyne, a lawyer, so he proposed legislation to eliminate the clause. His bill, House Bill 422, zipped through the House last week with just one “no” vote, from Rep. JoAn Wood, R-Rigby, and no debate.
Rep. Bill Killen, D-Boise, said he had some experience with the law when he was a deputy prosecutor in Valley County, and he researched its history. “It came into existence when there was widespread illegal gambling in the state of Idaho that was being routinely ignored by law enforcement,” Killen said. “It probably was appropriate at the time it was passed – I don’t think it’s the case any longer. … I want them to use reason, I want them to exercise judgment.”
Burgoyne told the House, “Fortunately, this archaic law is being ignored by our law enforcement officers. They are today using their discretion. What this would do today is make that discretion lawful.”
The bill needs Senate approval and the governor’s signature to become law.
When boats go bump
The Idaho Sheriff’s Association says it’s currently illegal for a boat operator to fail to report an accident, which would trigger a full county investigation, if the damage comes to $500 or more – and that’s too low. “We are proposing $1,500, to be the same as cars,” said association lobbyist Mike Kane. “It’s a great imposition to the boating public to have to go through what is in the current law for very minor accidents, and also a waste of county resources,” especially when all that happened is “two Chris-Crafts kinda nudge each other.”
Members of a Senate committee that unanimously backed introducing the bill said the legislation could save counties some money.
McDermott confirmed
The Idaho Senate voted 24-10 to confirm Fish and Game Commissioner Tony McDermott, who represents the North Idaho Panhandle, for another term, but only after an extended debate in which Sen. Jeff Siddoway, R-Terreton, tried to frame the vote as a referendum on wolves.
Siddoway criticized the Fish and Game Commission for setting a harvest target of 220 wolves in the current wolf hunting season, rather than a figure double that number. “We have an opportunity here to send the whole Department of Fish and Game a real message,” Siddoway said. “This is not about personality, this is about responsibility. … My objection has nothing to do with me being a rancher. It has everything to do with the responsibility a Fish and Game commissioner has … for the benefit of the hunters and fishermen of this state.”
Siddoway said he’s not swayed by any argument that a lower wolf kill will appease a federal judge in a pending court case over wolf management, as Idaho’s in court over the issue anyway. “That’s how these groups make their money, that’s how they keep this federal thumb on the state of Idaho,” Siddoway declared to the Senate.
Sen. Joyce Broadsword, R-Sagle, said McDermott “has worked tirelessly to support the sportsmen in Idaho,” and said, “He answers the phone no matter what time of day or night I or my constituents call to ask him a question. … He is a good man and he deserves our support.”
Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, who sponsored the confirmation in the Senate, said, “I think those who know me well can count me pretty solidly in the senator’s camp in terms of the wolf being here in the first place. … But they’re here now, and we have to deal with them.”
Keough noted that only 146 wolves have been shot even with the 220 limit, and said that’s the number that would have been killed even if the commission had set the limit at 500, because of the “nature of the critter.”
Sen. John Goedde, R-Coeur d’Alene, noted that when the Fish and Game Commission saw that it wasn’t going to hit its wolf harvest targets, it extended the wolf-hunting season.
McDermott, a semi-retired real estate broker, Vietnam veteran with 28 years in the military, and former professor of military science at the University of Montana, lives in Sagle. He’s a member of the National Rifle Association and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and has served on the commission for four years; he’s now been confirmed to serve another four-year term.
Doubling the Air Guard
Idaho’s top state military official, Brigadier General Gary Sayler, says possible assignment of three F-35 Strike Fighter squadrons to Boise’s Gowen Field as their training base would effectively double the size of the Idaho Air National Guard “and guarantee an Air Guard presence in Boise for the next 40 years.”
The Air Guard’s payroll would double. “Right now there’s really no way for us to calculate the economic impact, but we think it would be significant for southern Idaho,” Sayler said. If Boise is selected for the F-35s, they could start arriving in 2013.