2024 Year in Review

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

We’ve been publishing the “Year in Review” for a while now, and every installment seems to get bigger and bigger. Maybe that’s because there’s always more and more news, or we’re just getting windier in our advancing age. Regardless, here’s the 2024 edition, with a selection of stories that we reckoned made some of our biggest headlines during the year. While by no means exhaustive, it certainly felt that way to write it. 

Congratulations on making it through 2024, and best wishes for 2025.

Days of Our [Commissioners’] Lives

We could fill this entire “Year in Review” space just with the tragi-comic soap opera of the Bonner County board of commissioners. Most of it probably will be, in some form or another. The word of the year — or really any of the most recent years — for the BOCC is “theatrical.” 

Commissioners Steve Bradshaw, Luke Omodt and Asia Williams rang in 2024 with the continuation of a long-running spat over various rules and procedures for how to even run their meetings, with an order less than a week after the new year that legal counsel would be compelled to attend their sessions.

There were power struggles over standing rules and the fairgrounds audit; cat fights over when, where, and how it was appropriate to include public comment (also a long-running battle); and the trespassing of county residents Rick Cramer and Dave Bowman from the county meeting room over alleged “threats” made by Bowman in emails to Omodt.

That was all just between the first Tuesday of January and the first Tuesday of February; and, lest we forget, this all transpired amid a protection order upheld in court against Bradshaw, who wasn’t allowed to be near Williams because of his own alleged “threats” against her. 

Damn… we’re only a few grafs in and already exhausted.

From power struggles to censures to resignations galore, the Bonner County government seemed more like a soap opera in 2024 than ever before. Courtesy photo.

Whatever. Both Cramer and Bowman ended up suing after Omodt conducted a citizens’ arrest to enforce the trespassing order, which was carried out by Sandpoint police (Mayor Jeremy Grimm later said that the city’s officers would never be put in that position again.)

Cramer and Bowman are part of a group of habitual BOCC business meeting attendees whose Tuesday morning entertainment for years has been to Thunderdome the place with various accusations, condemnations and general speechifying of figurative and literal Biblical proportions on everything from who’s paying for picnic tables to the collapse of the American system of government.

So many pearls were clutched, so many teeth were gnashed, so many knickers were in so many twists that it got hard not to consider that, perhaps, an entire unit of Idaho government existed solely for the daytime entertainment of about 30 residents with nothing better to do on every Tuesday morning.

And so Omodt gave both of those guys the boot and they bit back with civil suits. Cramer petitioned the commissioners to lift his trespass order and he’d drop his case (which they and he did in April). Bowman, however, went all in and ended up coming out $200,000 ahead in a settlement: $199,999 for physical harm (he wouldn’t answer a question about what, exactly, physical harm he suffered) and $1 for the abridgment of his constitutional rights. The BOCC even had to read a public apology at the Dec. 10 meeting.

The Bowman settlement came in early December — making it nearly a yearlong episode. Lots of other stuff happened, too, like more fighting about public comment, paying out a big severance package to a departing employee who most likely knows a lot about whatever’s been going on in the admin building over the past few years (but has yet to spill the beans), and finding out that the emergency medical services budget was about $2 million short. Whoops!

There was also a primary election in May, in which Omodt lost to Ron “III%-er/Seven Bravo militiaman/Independence Day-saver” Korn. 

Omodt resigned from his position in September, leading the Bonner County Republican Central Committee to undertake what was once a pretty unusual — but now routine — process of selecting a replacement… who was Ron Korn. His favorite prop at business meetings is his 10-gallon Gadsden Flag mug. You know, the, “Don’t tread on me” thing. Priceless!

It’s been Korn on the job ever since, and he also won the November general election over Independent Glenn Lefebvre, who had some signs here and there.

Finally, in the dying days of the year, BCRCC chair and outgoing Dist. 1 Republican Sen. Scott Herndon — who lost his primary bid to former-Dist. 1 Republican Sen. Jim Woodward — led an effort to remove Bradshaw from his seat on the BOCC. 

But more on that later. That is a “developing story,” as they say.

War on words

Not content with dismantling women’s reproductive health care, the hard-right wing of the Idaho Republican Party finally achieved its long-sought-after goal of inserting without consent into the state’s library system.

After multiple failed attempts in past sessions, a version of the “porn-in-libraries” legislation made it through both House and Senate, and received an exasperated signature from Gov. Brad Little in April. 

House Bill 710 (which in a   previous session was H.B. 666 — aptly named, according to outgoing Republican Senate Pro Tem Chuck Winder, who got primaried out in May by some whackadoo) was the product of a wide-ranging and longstanding moral panic among the most morally panicked legislators that minors had access to “harmful” materials in Idaho libraries.

By “harmful,” of course, they meant everything from snuff films to the fact that queer and trans people exist and are represented in various types of media.

OMGOP!

In January, amid early debates over the bill, a Boise State University survey found that a supermajority of Idaho librarians were following doctors and teachers in either leaving the state or contemplating doing so because of the adverse political climate.

Of course, not a single piece of credible evidence was ever produced in the 2024 legislative session — or any previous session — to prove that kids were being “harmed” by the materials they accessed in the library; but, no matter. 

H.B. 710 went through with a “hurrah” from the hardliners, and libraries around the state had to figure out how to navigate a new legal matrix in which they could be hit with civil penalties for making a broad range of subjectively defined materials “available” to minors, resulting in the effective closure of many rural libraries that couldn’t run the financial risk of getting sued because someone wanted to collect on the “library bounty,” as Gov. Little had previously called it. That is, before he signed it. Bad, Brad.

Dam nuisance

USACE Col. Kate Sanborn visits Albeni Falls Dam near Oldtown to address the gate defects with stakeholders in May 2024. Photo by Ben Olson.

As winter turned to spring, folks around the area couldn’t help but notice that the waters of Lake Pend Oreille weren’t rising as they have since the 1950s, when the Albeni Falls and Cabinet Gorge dams started regulating it.

In May, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the dams, went public that it had found some potentially serious structural flaws in a gate at Albeni Falls, which, if left unaddressed, risked a worst-case scenario of failure and downstream floods.

Abundantly cautious, the Corps looked at the other gates — all fabricated around the same time in the ’50s — and realized that they probably had the same problem, and so opted for restricted operations. That meant the waters didn’t rise and the boats didn’t get in the water when people wanted.

That peeved a lot of folks Who Moved Here So They Could Go Boating When They Want, but it also struck some others as too cautious — including Gov. Little, who criticized the Corps for slow-playing the identification of the flaw(s) and failing to find a swifter solution to the problem.

Everyone was super pissed off about it for a few months, but the lake level ended up reaching full pool at 2,062-2,062.5 about a week or so later than normal.

In October, we learned that the issue might not get resolved for a decade or so; but, as this past summer showed, it ended up being more of a nuisance than a crisis — which is better than can be said about a lot of other happenings in 2024.

City Hall monitor

The power players at the Bonner County administration building don’t have a corner on big doings. Sandpoint City Hall made its share of headlines in 2024. After a 2023 election season whose essential politeness masked an underlying current of discontent, Mayor Jeremy Grimm, City Councilors Pam Duquette and Kyle Schreiber were all elected by comfortable margins, running on platforms of various types but all united on one theme: Getting rid of the city administrator position, which had been filled by Jennifer Stapleton since 2014.

The ins and outs of that are all last year’s news, though. Suffice it to say, the mood of the January swearing-in of the new mayor and councilors (including incumbent Councilor Deb Ruehle, who didn’t attend the ceremony) was of a change in direction. Indeed, Stapleton attended that first meeting of the year in her role as administrator; and, somewhere before the middle of the proceedings, left after having announced a week or so earlier that she’d be leaving City Hall. 

Once sworn-in, Grimm promised to work full-time as both mayor and administrator until the city’s bureaucracy could be rebuilt along its former department head-directed structure. That happened. Under the Stapleton model, department silos were broken down and all roads led to her office for coordination — then to the council and mayor for advice and direction. The Grimm regime promised to put departments in the driver’s seat(s) and get stuff done, like the long-delayed Comprehensive Plan and motion on rebuilding the wastewater treatment plant.

A lot of that did happen during the year: the weird downtown design competition got canceled, then we had a string of Comp Plan sessions, which culminated with final approval in July. 

In June, the council approved a program that allowed specially approved dogs and their owners to walk around City Beach to scare off the geese (and, God willing, end this issue forever). Also in Beach News, Montana-based Averill Hospitality announced it would redevelop the current Edgewater Best Western into an $80 million+, 180-ish-room resort hotel. That work is expected to begin in 2025, and we haven’t heard anything to the contrary.

About a week after the Comp Plan was finally finalized, the council voted to officially eliminate the city administrator position. Another week or so later, it was time to talk about the wastewater treatment plant, with preliminary engineering and analysis happening in August and extending into late November.

Super long story short: Things are “moving,” so to speak, at the poop plant and we’re looking at about a $180 million project phased out over years that will rely on a basket of funds including federal, state and local sources — including some pretty dramatic increases in sewer bills come the new year. 

Later in 2024, the city unveiled the new stoplight at Fifth Avenue and Pine Street, which illustrated the quickness with which officials were willing to kick the so-called Curve to the literal curb. 

In another civic denouement, the James E. Russell Sports Center officially opened in December, to the rejoicing of (some) of the people who voted for it, worked on it and will play tennis and/or pickleball in it. 

They say if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. In this case, I’ll end it here.

BCRCCage match(es)

Scott Herndon. Courtesy photo.

The Bonner County Republican Central Committee is pretty peeved at its own “supposed” party members. They called on then-Dist. 1 Sen. Jim Woodward to “disaffiliate” with the party in 2021, then in 2023 censured Dist. 1A Rep. Mark Sauter, Dist. 1 Bonner County Commissioner Bradshaw and former-Dist. 3 Commissioner Omodt for not being “Republican” enough. 

It was a spectacle that continued into 2024.

Herndon lost in the May GOP primary to Woodward, who’d previously served two terms in the Senate representing Dist. 1, and there was no shortage of public ill will in that race — mostly coming from the former’s camp.

There were other internal divisions — one of which spilled out in schoolyard fashion, with an old-school but late-middle-aged parking lot tussle in late May involving Spencer Hutchings, Dan Rose and Mike Franco. 

The first lost his primary run for Idaho House. The second was running a doomed protest campaign as an “Independent” against Woodward in the November election (an IINO?). The third described himself to the Reader as a “grassroots volunteer” for the local Republican Party.

Apparently, Franco was upset that Rose — whom he considered a friend, going back to their days as fellow right-wing Bay Staters — had supported Republicans he didn’t like, and showed up to Hutchings’ roadside gunshop to address that issue with him in some form (sources vary). 

According to security camera footage, that conversation didn’t get much further than Rose trying to shove Franco out of the door of the store, resulting in a fracas involving all three men with Franco ultimately being charged with battery and malicious injury to property. 

As they say at the bar after a stupid story: “Huh… anyway…”

Resignations all around

Between the parking lot brawl and Bowman’s big $200,000, “99/1” judgment to succor his physical harm and social justice wounds (respectively), Omodt resigned from the BOCC in September following his May primary loss, as mentioned above.

A fun aside is that the BCRCC ranked their choices in that vote for his replacement via voting to rank their choices in order of preference, but refused to admit that it was a form of ranked-choice voting… and got really pissed off when people pointed that out.

There was no time for that kind of nuance, because longtime Dist. 1B Republican Rep. Sage Dixon resigned later in the month, requiring the deployment of the replacement process once again. Cornel Rasor (more on him later) was accepted by the governor as the interim officeholder, which was convenient since he’d won the House 1B seat in the May GOP primary.

Dixon will now work in the Idaho Department of Education to direct “faith-based” programs in public schools… almost like there’s a concerted effort to convert the state’s public education system into a honeypot for right-wing Christian grifters. But who knows, amiright?

Then, in October, Spirit Lake BCRCC Precinct Committeeman Steve Rezac resigned amid revelations that he’d been convicted of multiple felonies in California related to domestic abuse, the details of which — according to court documents shared by Herndon — are harrowing. 

Again, Herndon et al. had to undertake the task of nominating a replacement. Pretty par for the course, at this point.

Things got really interesting in December when the BCRCC determined that Bonner County Commissioner Steve Bradshaw had “vacated” his seat by moving to Texas.

Bradshaw decided to run for Bonner County Sheriff against incumbent Daryl Wheeler (who he’s called a man without “honor” beyond his uniform) and failed disastrously. Doing so meant he’d have to leave his BOCC seat in January 2025. 

Knowing this, Bradshaw packed up his signature 10,000-gallon hat and pulled up stakes from his “cowboy church” in Cocolalla to some place in his home state of Texas to do whatever it is he’ll be doing there. Not that it’s any of our business.

Herndon brought the BCRCC together in late November and decided that Bradshaw had “vacated” his seat. That was despite the fact that Bradshaw had maintained his residential address through a rental agreement with the church that he sold his home to and had not resigned his seat. 

Regardless, the BCRCC submitted three nominees to the governor, one of whom Little was supposed to select to replace Bradshaw. The Governor’s Office was very demure, very mindful in its response, which was (in paraphrase): “Is there a vacancy or isn’t there? Tell the BOCC to tell us if the BOCC is short one 10,000-gallon hat and we’ll talk about it.”

There was some back and forth: In a bit of mind-bending political surrealism, Bradshaw told the Gov’s Office that he was still a resident, Korn kind of shrugged and Williams (as far as we know) didn’t say a thing. The issue then died… or so we thought.

On Dec. 17, the BCRCC again met to take up the Bradshaw issue, and in a resolution voted to appoint Brian Domke as the Dist. 1 commissioner — a seat he’ll take anyway when he’s sworn in on Monday, Jan. 13 following his win in the November general election. However, on Dec. 20, Domke said he’d reject the appointment over concerns that it would put the county at risk for a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Daryl Wheeler announced on Dec. 13 that he would be “resigning” from his position, but only until Jan. 13 when he’d be sworn in for a fifth term as the county’s top cop. The move was intended to make him eligible to draw public employee retirement benefits before actually retiring. That didn’t sit too well with Herndon, who called on Wheeler to rescind his resignation while also doubting whether it was even an official resignation since the BOCC hadn’t voted to accept it. As the commissioners won’t have another meeting until after the week of Christmas — at least according to the current schedule — it follows that they won’t be able to vote on whether Wheeler’s seat is now vacant within the statutorily required 30-day period of separation before reemployment.

Whether Wheeler is technically applying the statute correctly is still up for debate, but as with the Bradshaw conundrum, it’s all likely to be moot after the Jan. 13 swearing-in(s).

Army Surplus 1 burned on the evening of July 4, 2024. Photo by Zach Hagadone.

Army Surplus up in smoke

From the You Can’t Make Up This Stuff Department, Sandpointians celebrating the Fourth of July fireworks found themselves watching a fiery display of a different type. 

Right around the time that the Lion’s Club’s annual fireworks show was wrapping up at City Beach — and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were moving through town on their way home or to further revelry — the night sky was aglow with a dramatic fire engulfing the Army Surplus 1 store on Fifth Avenue and Oak Street.

Fire and police personnel secured the corner while onlookers took in the scene, which featured billowing, noxious black smoke and the sound of an unknown amount of ammunition exploding inside the building.

There were no injuries, but the building was a total loss, along with about a half million dollars worth of inventory and a large amount of personal belongings that were being stored there by longtime Army Surplus manager and owner Cornel Rasor (who about two months earlier had won the GOP primary to serve as Idaho House 1B representative).

Given Rasor’s long history of political involvement — and the nature of the business — speculation immediately ran rampant that the fire was a politically motivated arson.

After only a few weeks of investigation, Sandpoint police announced that evidence indeed suggested that the fire had been set intentionally, and local woman Stephanie S. Meyer was arrested on suspicion of setting off the blaze.

Following court appearances in the summer and fall, the court determined that Meyer was not mentally fit to stand trial, and — as of press time — is still under observation in a state facility. Her motive(s) are still unknown.

Lightning round

The year was full of other news, including movement on some big municipal projects. Ponderay celebrated the ribbon cutting on its long-envisioned Field of Dreams sports complex in September, followed by the opening of its public ice rink in late November.

In October, the Carousel of Smiles finally secured a permanent location for its vintage, restored carousel, which will be housed at the former Bizarre Bazaar building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Church Street. Carousel organizers hosted two unveilings at the fairgrounds in November, where the community applauded the success of a worthy cause.

Also in October, Kaniksu Land Trust announced that it had purchased the Sled Hill at Pine Street Woods, bringing to a close the long effort to protect the amenity for future generations of sledders.

In other development developments, the Idaho Club’s controversial effort to build housing and moorage near the mouth of Trestle Creek went through a number of hurdles during the year, including a public comment period that drew some fiery testimony in opposition. It all culminated in November when the Idaho Department of Lands granted a permit for the project.

Finally, from the Lots of News is Good News Department, the Sandpoint Reader had one of its best years ever in 2024, beginning in February with the news that the racist homophobe who for years bedeviled the paper, certain public officials and local businesses with hateful robocalls would be fined upward of $10 million by the FCC for his misdeeds.

In September, the Reader won the Sand Creek Regatta, reclaiming the trophy after its defeat in 2023. It followed up that victory with the release in September of the fundraising “community can” from Matchwood Brewing Co., titled “Drink the Reader” — an American Pale Ale, the sale of which is intended to benefit the paper. 

The Reader approached the close of the year with news in October that it had been one of only two news organizations in the state — and the only newspaper in Idaho — to receive funding from Press Forward. The paper received an award of $100,000, to be distributed over 2024 and 2025, which means we can go into the new year with no worries about keeping the lights on.