Rights ‘undone’: North Idaho city repeals ban on discrimination
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- Sandpoint repealed its 2011 nondiscrimination ordinance, removing local protections.
- Mayor cast tiebreaking votes to align city policy with state and federal law.
- Debate centered on transgender locker-room concerns and claims of fear, misinformation.
After hours of heated testimony and debate, Sandpoint’s City Council voted to repeal the city’s rules protecting residents and visitors from discrimination.
The city was the first of 13 in Idaho to pass an ordinance barring discrimination, said Nicole Erwin, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates. Its decision Wednesday marked the first time an Idaho city has dialed back such an ordinance, she said.
The ordinance, enacted in 2011, stated that everyone could enjoy the “full benefits of citizenship” and equal opportunity “regardless of sexual orientation” or “gender identity/expression.” It defined the latter term as a “gender-related identity, appearance, expression or behavior of an individual regardless of a person’s assigned sex at birth.”
City Council members on Wednesday voted narrowly — with tiebreaking votes from Mayor Jeremy Grimm — to replace that ordinance with a “concise reference” to federal and state law, according to a Nov. 13 memo written by Grimm, who pushed for the change. The new policy removes Sandpoint’s local definitions of protected classes and its local complaint process.
“With this amendment, the city of Sandpoint seeks to align its nondiscrimination provisions with existing federal and state civil rights law,” the new language reads. It aims to “clarify that the city does not establish or enforce independent local definitions, protected classes or complaint-investigation procedures beyond those set forth” by Congress, the courts or the Idaho Legislature.
The change will remove what the city’s legal counsel on Wednesday called an “extra layer of protection” for minority groups beyond what federal and state laws offer.
Discrimination debate started in YMCA locker room
The debate over the city’s longstanding anti-discrimination rules started with a Facebook post, the Sandpoint Reader reported. In October, a YMCA lifeguard posted that she had seen “a man semi-dressed … as a woman” using the facility’s women’s locker room. The YMCA and the Sandpoint police told the lifeguard that this was permitted because the city’s ordinance allowed people to “use the locker room that aligns with their gender identity.”
The post unleashed a “torrent” of responses from the community, the Reader reported, about whether the rule was treating all members, including transgender individuals, fairly — or whether it was endangering women in shared changing-room spaces like the YMCA’s.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Grimm argued that deliberations over such issues are “complex civil rights questions that, in my opinion, belong to the state or federal law.”
“I believe it’s inappropriate for the city of Sandpoint to insert itself into intimate spaces where privacy norms, safety expectation and longstanding social boundaries already exist,” he said.
Many of those who supported the repeal spoke about their desire to protect women from sexual harassment or assault. City Council Member Kyle Schreiber said he takes those concerns “very seriously” — but that the focus on transgender individuals’ use of one locker room or another is misplaced.
“It seems like every other day there’s another article in our local paper about a sexual predator,” he said Wednesday. “Here’s the thing, though. None of those incidents involved a man dressed as a woman in order to gain access to his victims. I couldn’t find a single one.”
It was a sentiment echoed by Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman, the Idaho director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, who called the fears raised about locker room use “manufactured.”
“The city council was persuaded by fear and misinformation,” she said in a Friday news release. “Sandpoint is now a bellwether for how quickly established rights can be undone when misinformation and political pressure go unchecked.”
This story was originally published November 21, 2025 at 2:53 PM.
