North Idaho College board doesn’t seem good for anything. Except paying its friends | Opinion
The far-right takeover of North Idaho College seems close to fulfilling its destiny. As the Coeur d’Alene Press reported, the community college received a “show cause” letter from its accrediting body, asking for the college to explain why it shouldn’t lose its accreditation. It could well be the final step before accreditation is withdrawn, and the college ceases to serve any real purpose.
North Idaho College was already in hot water before the recent election. The partial takeover by the far-right in 2020 led to a series of governance failures, as Kevin Richert of Idaho Education News reported, that placed its accreditation status in jeopardy. The 2022 election presented a chance for normal people to take back control of the school — but only two of three won, and the election of Mike Waggoner cemented the far-right’s majority on the board.
Since then, we’ve seen a dramatization of why it would be a terrible failure to make institutions like school boards partisan.
Since the 2022 election, the board has placed the college’s qualified and apparently competent president Nick Swayne on administrative leave without cause. The board is being sued for that decision.
And the board decided to hire failed Republican attorney general candidate Art Macomber — who comes from the same far-right political camp as trustees Todd Banducci, Greg McKenzie and Waggoner — in a manner that likely violated both open meetings law and state procurement law.
Now we have a chance to see him on the job. Macomber promptly began billing, and flinging around subpoenas. The subpoenas, predictably, were meaningless.
The latest development, documented by Kaye Thornbrugh of the Coeur d’Alene Press, is that 17 subpoenas Macomber issued to North Idaho College employees, former board members and its former attorney are being withdrawn.
Subpoenas are orders to show up and answer questions. Normally, especially when questioning your own employees, you just call them into the office. And Judge Cynthia Meyer ruled that the three subpoenas issued to former board members and the board’s former attorney were “unreasonable and oppressive” and quashed them, Thornbrugh reported.
So nothing was achieved by issuing these subpoenas — except, of course, the most important thing: racking up billable hours.
According to Thornbrugh, Macomber billed just under $25,000 in December, and just under $23,000 in January — nearly all of it for billable hours, not expenses. So at the current average monthly rate, Macomber is on track to rake in well over $250,000 in taxpayer money this year.
In a tweet, Thornbrugh noted that Macomber even billed taxpayers $32.50 for the time he spent sending her an insulting email in reply to an interview request.
That is what the voters in the North Idaho College taxing district have decided to buy by voting in the far-right majority on the board — a community college that stumbles aimlessly toward unaccredited status while the board’s political ally pockets tax dollars to indulge harebrained legal theories that are immediately laughed out of court.
It’s worth asking hypothetically: Would things have been better or worse if the board simply disbanded after the election? It seems rather obvious it would be better.
The board has made no apparent progress toward saving the North Idaho College — which isn’t surprising because the only part of the institution that’s ever shown itself to be a systematic failure is its far-right-dominated board. The staff are as good as they ever were. So are the students, the chief victims of this catastrophe of misgovernment.
And if there were no board, at least taxpayers wouldn’t be paying their buddy tens of thousands per month while he blunders around issuing illegitimate subpoenas.
Dysfunction alone seems preferable to dysfunction plus graft, doesn’t it?