By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
It seems like every year or so, The New York Times finds an opportunity to write about Sandpoint and surrounds — sometimes telling everyone in the world they should move here but, more often, examining how stupid some of us are and how that stupidity leaks onto the national scene.
The latest example of the latter was published on July 21, with Pacific Northwest Bureau Chief Anna Griffin’s byline and focused on Sandpoint’s now-defunct nondiscrimination ordinance. Griffin interviewed Mayor Jeremy Grimm, Dist. 1 Sen. Jim Woodward, Matchwood Brewing Co. co-owner Andrea Marcoccio, longtime local artist Doug Jones and others, including yours truly and Reader co-founder and Editor Emeritus John Reuter, who served as Sandpoint City Council president and shepherd of the NDO when it was introduced about 15 years ago.
The story explored how and why the NDO was “amended” out of existence in the fall of 2025, based on what both Woodward and I referred to as a “nonevent” that allegedly took place in the local YMCA women’s changing room.
I assure readers that Woodward and I did not correspond prior to talking with The Times, but I’m glad that we independently agreed on a central theme to that story: Nothing happened at the YMCA. No one was harmed, there was no assault or indecency of any kind. There was no “there” there. Yet the Facebook moral panic mob activated itself and horrifyingly bullied its way into City Code. Such are our times.
Here’s what I told The Times: “I’ve heard people call it an ‘incident.’ It wasn’t an incident. It was a nonevent that certain people used for their own purposes.”
Here’s what Woodward said: “[It was] a nonevent turned into part of an ideological battle.”
Here’s what the so-called “Jennifer Hook” (an alleged YMCA lifeguard and apparent Facebook account holder) told The Times: Nothing. She declined requests for comment, as she has all along.
Here’s what former-Dist. 1 Sen. Scott Herndon had to say to the most consequential newspaper in the history of the world: Nothing.
Of course, I’m not sure if Herndon was even contacted for an interview, but regardless he’s a proud anti-NDO opportunist, who is alley-ooping this “incident” and its resulting legislation into a campaign plank supporting his bid for a legislative seat in November after somehow beating Woodward in the May GOP primary. (His other campaign hobby horse is the canard of eliminating Idaho’s property tax. I was a student council member from sixth grade at Sagle Elementary until my junior year at SHS, and Herndon’s loaded diaper of a political philosophy is tantamount to a teenage politico promising to put root beer in all the drinking fountains. Read more about that nonsense on Page 11.)
Meanwhile, here’s what current-Dist. 1B Rep. Cornel Rasor had to say about the matter: Nothing. Again, I don’t know if The Times tried to contact him, but he’s the one who carried the putrid water for a statewide push against trans people’s access to public accommodations in House Bill 752 — Idaho’s “bathroom bill,” which has provided a template for other states to also criminalize trans citizens who just want to go to the gym or use a toilet. It’s pretty much the only thing he’s done in his entire time at the Statehouse in Boise.
And here’s what Mayor Grimm had to say: “Cities should be in the business of water, sewer, parks, police. I thought the easiest solution was to get us back to basics.”
Later, he told The Times, “we maybe threw the baby out with the bath water” by effectively gutting the NDO into oblivion at the insistence of a hostile audience in council chambers that mostly didn’t live in the city but nonetheless got herded into the room to spout transphobic terror-mongering rhetoric at stunned councilors until they got their way.
As Grimm said, “it was swift, and then it was over, maybe not for someone who feels vulnerable now because of that, but it was generally over.”
I believe the mayor’s commitment to the basic functions of city government. In the more than 20 years I’ve known him, going back to his time as city planner, he’s been a steadfast nuts-and-bolts kind of guy. And he’s not dumb. He reads books, and when we talked last about this NDO issue we parsed it out via hypotheticals involving Buddhism and Islam. However, and despite what he told me about his quotes being taken at least somewhat out of context, I hope that if the NDO comes back before council for reinstatement, he won’t break multiple tied votes to block that restoration of rights for people who are overwhelmingly the victims, rather than perpetrators, of any violent crime against anyone of any age or gender. That way, the city can extricate itself from propping up bigoted, cynical political hacks like Herndon, Rasor and their fellow Christo-fascist bums. They’re all opposed in the November election. Vote accordingly.
