In brief: Man shot at party in south county

Sheriff’s detectives are seeking a suspect in an early morning shooting at a party in south Spokane County.

Deputies responded to a call from a home in the 16000 block of South Molter Road at about 1:40 a.m. on Sunday to find a 23-year-old man injured by a shotgun blast to his leg on the front porch.

The man was taken to a Spokane hospital where he was listed in stable condition Sunday afternoon.

Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to call Crime Check, (509) 456-2233.

Northwest Indians meet in Plummer

American Indian leaders from throughout the Northwestern United States will gather this week at the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel in Plummer.

Today through Thursday, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe is host to hundreds of tribal members from Alaska, California, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Nevada and Washington gathered for the midyear conference of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians.

Speakers will include U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador; Tony Stewart, of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations; Gonzaga University men’s basketball coach Mark Few; and Shoni Schimmel, University of Louisville basketball star.

Contractor faults state supervision

BOISE – A contractor hired by the Idaho Department of Correction is blaming the state agency for failing to adequately supervise work by a subcontractor the state says double-billed Idaho for work the subcontractor actually did for Alaska.

CRI Advantage Inc. officials said oversight of subcontractor AnalyzeSoft Inc. was the responsibility of the state agency, not CRI Advantage.

“We believe that it was understood that CRI was not supervising (AnalyzeSoft) and only acted as a facilitator under its contract status,” CRI Chief Operating Officer Ken Malach wrote in an April 11 letter to the state obtained by the Idaho Statesman.

But Idaho Deputy Attorney General Paul Panther contests that interpretation. In an April 29 letter in reply to Malach’s letter, also obtained by the newspaper, Panther notes that CRI received 20 percent of the money the state paid AnalyzeSoft.

Panther said Malach’s letter suggests that “CRI had no duties under the contract other than ‘passing paper through’ ” and “thus realizing a significant profit for doing next to nothing. Such a position is inconsistent with the contract language and amounts to an admission that CRI was unjustly enriched while IDOC was overbilled while work was not completed.”

AnalyzeSoft-contracted workers creating an Idaho inmate tracking system called the Correctional Integrated System were removed from the state agency’s headquarters in February 2010 following an investigation and some three years of work and $2 million in billings.

Derailed car spills hydrochloric acid

PASCO – A railroad official says several cars have derailed in a switching yard and about 2,000 gallons of a toxic chemical spilled.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe spokesman Gus Melonas said the train was moving at less than 5 mph in the Pasco yard when seven cars went off the tracks about 5 p.m. Sunday.

He said a valve on a tanker car was damaged, allowing about 2,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid to leak out.

Melonas said there were no injuries and there doesn’t appear to be any threat to the public.

The chemical can cause respiratory problems and skin and eye irritation.

Emergency crews are cleaning the spill and putting the cars back on the tracks.

Melonas said the derailment has not affected operations on the mainline, which handles about 30 trains daily.

State reworks stream-poisoning plans

BOZEMAN – Officials with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks are working on a new policy for poisoning streams to kill nonnative fish in the wake of a poisoning attempt last year that went farther downstream and killed more fish than expected.

“We made a mistake and we learned from that mistake, and we’re putting additional safeguards in place,” said fisheries biologist Travis Horton.

The streams will be poisoned with a naturally produced chemical called rotenone. They will then be restocked with native westslope cutthroat trout.

Biologists in the region say nonnative fish – such as brook and rainbow trout – and hybridization have reduced the range of westslope cutthroats to about 5 percent of their historically occupied habitat.

Officials said the new policy should be in place by August when the agency plans to poison some streams.

“There are trade-offs to doing this kind of work, but when talking about saving a sort of keystone species like cutthroat trout in the Yellowstone ecosystem, those kinds of things are worth it,” said Todd Koel, a fisheries biologist for Yellowstone National Park. “The alternative isn’t acceptable because if the fish aren’t restored, then over time we’ll lose them. That’s kind of the bottom line.”