Bogus Republican thinking applied to city of Boise’s purchase of a mobile home park

Over three-fourths of city councils in America enjoy a tradition of nonpartisan elections with their roots in an era when cities were plagued with graft and corruption often blamed on the stronghold that political parties had on local governments.

Reformers proposed nonpartisan elections to rid their cities of ward bosses and party patronage. The reform mayor of New York City during the Depression, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, would famously declare there was no Democrat or Republican way to clean city streets. Many city councils are also elected at-large, as Boise’s City Council members were until the recent state law creating districts for city councils.

Just because city council elections are nonpartisan doesn’t mean political parties are absent from the scene. Some cities create their own parties that offer a slate of candidates to the voters, and some are captured by the Republican and Democratic parties who work quietly or otherwise to elect members to the city council.

The city of Boise managed to avoid the active and public involvement of Idaho’s two major political parties until last year when the Republican Party of Idaho publicly supported and campaigned for Luci Willits, who was elected from District 1.

What brought forth the active engagement of the Idaho Republican Party in a nonpartisan election?

It may have its roots in the election of Mayor Lauren McLean when she created transition committees to formulate an agenda for her first term in office. A few of the many proposals created quite a stir in Boise, including politically preposterous recommendations to make Boise a sanctuary city, free abortions, free internet service citywide, public funding of municipal campaigns and sex education classes that would run from pre-K through the 12th grade.

McLean would wear the collar for her liberal friends’ agenda that had little hope of ever seeing the light of day in Boise, Idaho. And deservedly so since she did appoint the transition committee members and released their findings. Still, some of her liberal friends did her no favors by tagging the transition reports with proposals that would create such controversy and shift Republican Party leadership into high gear.

Debate societies could have a field day with any one of these issues, but suffice it to say that it was not only about the issues. It was more about how calling out such divisive issues immediately after the election robs a mayor of that honeymoon many public officials enjoy in the first few weeks or months of tenure. It’s a moment when an elected official’s most loyal supporters should respect the various constituencies a mayor serves and avoid tactics that divide rather than unite a city, especially in the politically charged atmosphere of the capital city.

Although most Boiseans have forgotten this moment of controversy, the Republican Party of Idaho did not.

Its chairman, Tom Luna, jumped on it like a shot out of a cannon. He decried the recommendations, attributing all of them to the new mayor, a bit of a stretch since she did create the committees but may not have known what they would produce nor agree with all of them.

Luna called it a “rallying cry” for the Republican Party and labeled the transition reports “the liberal, socialist agenda of the Democratic Party.”

The transition kerfuffle energized Republican loyalists to wage a successful campaign to elect Willits so she could enter the City Council stage right. It didn’t take her long to show the true colors of the Republican Party when she voted “no” recently on the city’s purchase of a mobile home park so its residents and their families would not lose their homes.

The city’s plan was to buy the park for $3.25 million. No doubt, if this property had gone on the frenzied and inflated real estate market of today, residents of that mobile home park would be out on the street. An equally disastrous outcome for mobile homeowners is what the New York Times reported as a growing trend where investors buy up mobile home parks and then raise rents, as they did by 50% in Colorado recently.

Willits claimed that taking this mobile home park off the taxpayer rolls would increase property taxes on the rest of Boise’s property taxpayers. Property taxes collected on the mobile home park totaled $14,000, which when shifted to all of Boise’s property taxpayers is negligible, but it gave Willits the opportunity to stake her claim to the kind of bogus Republican thinking that characterizes the party in Idaho today and has now gained a foothold on the Boise City Council.

She also objected to Boise becoming a landlord, even though the city already manages a small stock of 200 rental units, and these residents could easily be incorporated into the existing stock.

Willits gave her Republican friends in the state Legislature a shoutout when she claimed the purchase would have the City Council doing something opposite what the state Legislature was trying to do on the property tax issue.

First, let’s hope someone, somewhere in local governments across Idaho does something opposite what the ham-handed and fanatical Republicans in the state Legislature are doing. Since when is it the job of a city council to knee-jerk to the whims of the increasingly extreme agenda of the Republican-controlled Legislature?

Willits’ vote is a preview of coming attractions as to how the Republican Party would govern at the local level and how they regard residents victimized by the aggressive forces of a real estate market beyond their control.

For Republicans at ground zero of an affordable housing crisis and Lucy Willits in particular, take a lesson from the Tin Woodman in search of a heart in the Wizard of Oz. Instead of opposing an opportunity to help a few of Boise’s citizens in a time of crisis, throw a little heart into your work and ignore the callous disregard your party too often has for those in need.

Republican majorities in the state Legislature already reign supreme in that category.