Idaho bill would dissolve ACHD commission for partisan seats. How would it work?

Ian Max Stevenson
·4 min read
Timing of the stop lights has been adjusted so pedestrians are crossing while all lanes are at a stop at the intersection of 11th and State Street near the YMCA. New signage alerts drivers turning left or right to yield to pedestrians.

The unusual highway district in Ada County that controls most roads, including in Boise, would be upended if a bill proposed in the Idaho Legislature becomes law.

Rep. Josh Tanner, R-Eagle, proposed a bill Friday to dissolve the existing five-member Ada County Highway District board and replace it with a seven-member, partisan board with redrawn boundaries overseen by the Republican Ada County commission. The bill aims to increase rural representation on the highway commission and would also cut commissioners’ salaries in half.

Attempts to recraft ACHD came after voters elected a new highway commission with greater support for pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure.

Candidates who support multi-modal transportation — which includes biking, walking and public transit — took control of the highway district after the November 2022 elections. Republican lawmakers just months later passed a law targeting ACHD to limit spending on projects not directly tied to cars. A similar bill last year that would have also made the ACHD board a partisan entity failed to become law.

“The idea is to get this cleaned up so that we have a better process in place,” Tanner told the Idaho Statesman by phone. He added that ACHD commissioners make too much money for part-time work. ACHD is the only countywide highway district in the state. Commissioners make $26,868 per year now, and the bill would limit their salaries to $14,400.

Tanner said the board has “already become partisan without the partisan labels” and said he wants to boost representation for rural parts of the county. The bill directs the commission’s elections to become partisan in 2026.

ACHD is the only highway district in the state that would be affected by Tanner’s bill, but Tanner said he hopes the new model could later be applied to other counties that create new highway districts. After each census, the highway commission approves new district maps. The proposed bill would hand that process over to the Republican-controlled Ada County commission.

House Assistant Minority Leader Lauren Necochea, D-Boise, said the motivations for Tanner’s bill are obvious.

“This looks like a blatant attempt to unseat duly elected commissioners over policy disagreements,” Necochea told the Statesman by phone. “It’s very dangerous to go down the road of rewriting the rules of our democracy because you disagree with who won a free and fair election.”

Tanner denied that his bill is a partisan effort to remake the commission. He said several legislators have considered making this move for a long time.

“The frustration part right now in ACHD is no one knows what they’re doing,” he said. “We just pay a lot of taxes and everything’s congested.”

A version of Tanner’s bill failed to be introduced into a House committee last week after the absence of a Republican lawmaker meant the committee deadlocked at a 3-3 tie, with the three Democrats in opposition. A similar version of the bill was on the agenda the following day, when the full committee voted to introduce it.

‘What is the problem that it’s trying to solve?’

The board’s current map splits up the county’s population by allowing districts to cross into multiple cities. One large district covers the swath of a largely unincorporated part of the county to the south; three others cover parts of Boise, Meridian, Eagle and Star; and a fifth is mostly Meridian.

Under the bill, that process would be reformatted with the aim of keeping individual cities “within a unique subdistrict that contains no portion of another incorporated city” whenever possible.

Ada County has six cities, in order of declining population: Boise, Meridian, Eagle, Kuna, Garden City, and Star. While Boise has more than 240,000 people, Star has fewer than 12,000, according to Ada County. The county’s cities would still have to be sliced up, since the bill also directs the commission to create districts with no more than 10% population variance. The largest and smallest current districts vary by 0.5%.

“For the Legislature to come in and rewrite the rules on how we can even operate and get elected is really concerning,” ACHD Board Chair Alexis Pickering told the Statesman by phone.

Commissioners Miranda Gold and Kent Goldthorpe were elected in 2022 and are not up for reelection until 2026.

Pickering said lawmakers hadn’t told her about the bill. She said she was surprised by it and has not received any complaints about rural parts of the county being inadequately represented.

Pickering added that ACHD has looked to expand bicycle and pedestrian street improvements because residents and cities have asked for those changes, and those are the candidates voters have chosen.

“What is the problem that it’s trying to solve?” she said. “I have not heard from a single person that making this board partisan would somehow solve something or improve something.”