WestViews Opinions from newspapers in Idaho and the West commenting on Western issues

COMPROMISES PAYING OFF FOR SEN. CRAPO

The Times-News, Twin Falls

Mike Crapo, Idaho's junior senator, is often the quietest guy in the room. He's a Republican in a Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate and represents a small state.

Moreover, in a legislative body that reveres seniority, Crapo ranks 58th in the pecking order.

Yet from time to time he achieves remarkable things.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Wednesday he expects a post-election vote on Crapo's legislation to protect the Owyhee Canyonlands and ranching in Owyhee County. It's already been approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

And the Idaho Statesman reported Thursday that Crapo had brokered an agreement that resolves objections by the Idaho Water Users Association and by Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, to the Snake River Headwaters Legacy Act, which would protect a 387-mile stretch of the Snake River and its tributaries in Wyoming. That's a big deal, because they're part of the same legislative package.

The Owyhee bill would set aside 517,000 acres as wilderness and another 315 miles of rivers as wild and scenic. It would help ranchers with a series of land transfers and buyouts and establish a science center.

The fact that the bill made it this far is remarkable: Crapo worked for six years to hold together a wobbly coalition of ranchers and environmentalists.

But satisfying Idaho water users - an association of irrigation districts, canal companies and other agri-business interests - may have been a bigger accomplishment. Last spring, IWUA Executive Director Norm Semanko was threatening to go to the wall to scuttle the Snake River Headwaters Act.

At issue was a 42-mile stretch of the Snake below Wyoming's Jackson Dam. Irrigation districts in the Twin Falls area own the rights to most of the water stored in Jackson Lake, and Craig and the water users argued that a federal Wild and Scenic Rivers designation could alter releases from Jackson Lake Dam - even though there's language in the bill forbidding it - or provide a legal platform for environmentalists to sue to reduce Idaho's control over Wyoming's water.

If these compromises hold and the legislation clears the Senate and then the House of Representatives, Crapo may earn a place alongside Sens. Jim McClure and Frank Church as Idaho's master Capitol Hill dealmakers.

And against all odds, there will be an Owyhee Wilderness area that doesn't freeze out the ranchers.

SEATTLE'S BANKING POWER FADES

The Seattle Times

The failure of Washington Mutual - at its death we cannot call it WaMu - is a business disaster of the first order for Seattle, for its downtown and its people.

The collapse was, institutionally, Washington Mutual's fault. As a company, it created and promoted the Option Adjustable Rate Mortgage, a surprise package under which a borrower might pledge his house for a loan that had neither a fixed rate of interest nor a fixed amount of principal owed, but left them both to sail in the economic winds.

When you hear the term "toxic waste" applied to bank assets, and read that JPMorgan Chase & Co. is writing off $31 billion of its new Washington Mutual loan portfolio, think Option ARMs. At its death, the Seattle bank was said to have $53 billion in face value of Option ARMs.

How many of Washington Mutual's 43,200 employees should be deemed personally responsible for this? Very few. The directors, to be sure. A more useless board of directors would be difficult to find. Former CEO Kerry Killinger, absolutely. A few others.

The rest were following the leader - running the computers, opening new accounts, refilling the cash machines, hiring employees, designing the ads, negotiating property leases, a thousand and one things, most of them done with dedication and skill. The bank failure is not their doing, and the smart employer who sees their rsums in the coming weeks will not tar them with it.

The result, however, will be that a cadre of banking brainpower will be dissipated. Seattle will be a financial center in local terms only. In hindsight, maybe that is what it should have stayed: It is when banks try to get big that they fail.

That was Seattle-First National Bank's case, a generation ago. It went to Texas and Oklahoma in an effort to grow and bought toxic loans. Its branches here became Bank of America, just as Washington Mutual's now become Chase's.

The city that was once the proud headquarters of Seafirst, Rainier, People's, Seattle Trust, University Savings, Puget Sound Mutual and Washington Mutual - "The Friend of the Family" - now feeds bank corporations in Charlotte, N.C., and Manhattan.

There are, of course, small banks that have been started around here in the past 20 years. We wish them the best, but it will be a long time before Seattle has a big one again. It is as if our fishing fleet had one really big boat left, and it just sank.

GOOD RIDDANCE, NEW CARISSA

Oregonian

We've waited nearly 10 years to be able to say this: The ugly wreck of the New Carissa is gone from Oregon's spectacular ocean shore.

For a decade, the ship's mangled, corroding stern remained stuck in the sand and surf off Coos Bay's North Spit - a monument to human error and irresponsibility.

As of last week, however, after workers cut away the last visible evidence of the 639-foot vessel, all that remained were the huge platforms and cranes put in place for the final salvage job - monuments to human perseverance and, yes, courage. Removing the wreckage was a highly dangerous undertaking, and it's a blessing that the worst injury was no more serious than a worker's broken foot.

Oregonians owe a tip of the hat to Titan Maritime, the Florida-based salvage outfit. Years of previous efforts to remove the wreck failed miserably, but Titan's crew delivered on a promise to finish the job and get out before arrival of the heavy seas and high winds of October.

Successful removal of the New Carissa is also a tribute to Oregonians who wouldn't take no for an answer, especially John Kitzhaber. He was governor when the chip carrier ran aground in February 1999, and he was still in office in 2002 when a salvager for the ship's owners declared that its stern could not be removed from the sand and that Oregon was demanding money "not usually required" in shipwreck removals.

"Oregon," Kitzhaber growled, "is not a usual state."

Nor was the New Carissa a usual shipwreck. Shortly after the freighter ran aground, it broke in half when workers set it on fire to burn off its fuel oil. The stern stayed stuck in the sand, and crews towed the bow out to sea to sink it, only to have it break free in a storm and drift to shore at Waldport. Then it was towed back out to sea and sunk by a U.S. Navy torpedo.

Then came years of failed salvage efforts. The New Carissa became a story like the rusting stern. It wouldn't go away.

But the New Carissa was more than a fascinating story. It became a symbol of an important Oregon value, aptly summarized by Kitzhaber in an interview last week: "There was a certain arrogance on the part of the insurers and the ship's owners, thinking they could just drop that wreck on our beach and walk away from it. And we said, 'No, you can't do that."'

The state's lawsuit against the ship's owners and insurers provided the $16.4 million for the final, successful cleanup. Soon, thanks to a stubborn governor and some brave workers, that scenic, wild shore near Coos Bay will look just as it did before that stormy winter night when the New Carissa arrived.

DON'T FRET ABOUT JAIL WALKAWAYS

Idaho Press-Tribune, Nampa

Recent reports that there has been a rise in inmates who walked away and failed to return to Canyon County's Work Release Center should not be cause for concern for local residents.

The work release center has more than 450 inmates housed there, but they are allowed to leave each morning to go to work. They are required to return to the center each day when work is over, but 13 of them have failed to do so this year. Just two of 650 work-release inmates in Ada County have walked away.

Whatever the reason for the disparity, keep in mind that these are low-risk inmates. They're not murderers or rapists. More along the lines of people driving without a license or petty theft. If they were a risk to public safety, they wouldn't be afforded the freedom of being able to leave and return each day.

We strongly support work release centers. The money inmates earn helps pay their incarceration expenses, easing the burden on taxpayers. It also helps ease jail overcrowding.

But perhaps the biggest benefit is that it helps inmates believe there is a future for themselves. Many more violent offenders have been in and out of prison since their late teens or early 20s, and many are significant risks to reoffend. And if they know they stand little chance of getting hired when their sentences are up, enabling them to live life on the straight and narrow, they have no hope. And nothing drives people to crime like having no hope.

The system is a good one. The fact a few people aren't abiding by it doesn't change that.