North Idaho College’s board has achieved the impossible: It is pure government waste | Opinion

Bryan Clark
·3 min read

Taxpayers in and around Coeur d’Alene have been taken for one hell of a ride.

The board of North Idaho College, dominated by far-right members since a takeover beginning in 2020 and coming to full fruition in 2022, has been wasting taxpayer funds at a truly mind-boggling rate for such a tiny government agency.

According to numbers compiled by Kaye Thornbrugh of the Coeur d’Alene Press, here’s how the board has recently used taxpayer money:

  • $511,404 to a variety of attorneys who represented it, most of whose sole qualification seems to be that they are part of North Idaho’s far-right political clique.

  • $151,316 to wrongfully-fired-then-forcibly-rehired President Nick Swayne for attorney fees and costs that those expensive lawyers failed to challenge.

  • $368,250 to briefly hire President Greg South, who worked a grand total of 75 days before the court ordered Swayne’s rehiring — a rate of just under $5,000 per day.

  • $62,622 to pay officials from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities to make trips to NIC to review its worthiness for accreditation, which was called into question primarily by the board’s poor governance.

  • $69,031 to pay for training so the board could stop being so bad at governance.

  • $18,979 to the Coeur d’Alene Press for court costs stemming from wrongfully denying a lawful public records request.

So this “fiscally conservative” board cost North Idaho College taxpayers about $1.2 million in what might be termed “incompetence tax.”

Tales of government waste are often overblown.

Having watched scores of newcomers campaign for local office promising to “run government like a business” or “cut out the fat,” I’ve seen a consistent pattern across years, states and municipalities: They usually get into office, realize there isn’t that much fat, and have to either cut essential services or, more often, go back on their promises.

But this situation isn’t like most.

This wasteful spending could have been avoided by not having an incompetent board. Taxpayer funds were either spent by the board in the process of breaking something or trying to fix something it broke (usually after a judge ordered it).

It truly has been remarkable.

The way heat, time and pressure convert coal into a diamond, their far-right fever dreams of socialist indoctrination and fiscal profligacy turned a ho-hum community college board into pure, crystalline government waste. A dollar-bill incinerator would be less efficient at turning money into nothing; it would at least leave ash.

But the good news for actual fiscal conservatives in the North Idaho College tax district is this: They have a rare chance to eliminate government waste and inefficiency — easily and painlessly.

The $1.2 million incompetence tax amounts to about 6.6% of the $17.8 million in property tax the college expects to collect in fiscal year 2024.

You can rarely chop that kind of waste out of your budget and simultaneously improve the level of service of a public agency. But if voters “throw the bums out” of NIC at the next available opportunity, they’ll do just that.

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer with the Idaho Statesman.