YEAR IN REVIEW: 2023

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

We’ve been doing these retrospectives every year since 2020, and so far the ’20s have lived up to their reputation for being “roaring.” Just reading the list of big stories that dominated our news coverage over the course of 2023 is exhausting.

Other media outlets and various institutions try to wrap up the year with a word. This time around, dictionary.com has decided “hallucinate” sums things up. Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary reckons “authentic” to be our central theme, citing searches for the word reaching “new heights,” according to the Associated Press. Finally, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary went all Gen Z with its word of the year, selecting “rizz,” which, for those of a more aged vintage, is what the kids mean when they’re saying someone or something has “charisma.” 

Reader Publisher Ben Olson and I chatted for a few minutes on a misty Friday morning ahead of the holiday and decided that our word of the year would be “pushback.” As he put it, “People are just not happy this year.”

Our list of top stories confirmed that sentiment. Just in the 50 or so pieces we published this year about the weekly Bonner County board of commissioners meetings, headlines included terms like “hostilities,” “battle,” “concerns,” “serious concerns,” “infighting,” “controversy,” “tensions,” “drama,” “boiling point,” “spar,” “hotly debated,” “contested” and “tussle.”

The mood surrounding — or directed at — City Hall has been likewise, though slightly less so, prickly coming from the public. Following that, one of our biggest stories came at the 11th hour, with the announcement dated Dec. 21 by Sandpoint City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton that she would resign from her position, effective Wednesday, Jan. 3. We’ll save that one for Page 4 of this week’s paper, since we’re only now reporting it.

So let’s dive in.

Board of Bonner County chaos

Bonner County Commissioners Luke Omodt, left; Asia Williams, center; and Steve Bradshaw, right. Photo by Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey.

The current BOCC, which includes Commissioners Steve Bradshaw, Luke Omodt and Asia Williams, came in like a lion in January 2023. For example, former-News Editor Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey wrote on Jan. 26 about “one of the longest and most well-attended Tuesday business meetings in recent memory,” which has turned out to be a major trend. The issue that riled everyone up then is still one that animates a lot of emotion and conflict about a year later: open meeting procedures and public comment.

As recently as the Dec. 21 edition of the Reader, we had yet another article about public comment and how commissioners’ meetings are conducted, with current Chair Omodt laying down 10 rules that are intended to keep the peace. The reasons why this has been felt necessary are too numerous and detailed to adequately unfold here, but the shorthand explanation is that our current commissioners get along like a literal house on fire — that is, a structural blaze — and there are a few dozen county residents whose sole purpose in life, at least on Tuesday mornings, seems to be to pour fuel on it.

Again: The situation is too complex for this space, but we feel pretty confident in summarizing it as a battle of wills pitting Omodt and Bradshaw against Williams, with the former framing their stance as keeping the “business” in “business meetings” and the latter crusading for what she phrases as “transparency” and accountability. Behind them are certain elements of the county bureaucracy, alternately fighting for power and attempting to keep their names out of lawsuits, as well as county political factions that have myriad interests in keeping “their” people or person at the helm.

Among the many issues animating that battle is the ongoing fallout from an investigation into alleged fraudulent financial practices at the Bonner County Fairgrounds, during the onset of which the former-fair director, Darcey Smith, apparently took her own life in October 2022.

The fairgrounds and its managing body the Fair Board have been at the center of much of the county’s politics for more than a year, dating back to what many have described as a “land war” over a portion of the property that Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler thinks has been, and should be, earmarked for expansion of the justice center. Others have argued that it could and should be put to use as an ice rink (that idea has passed into history) or, more recently, an RV park. 

The latter idea also seems to have been put on the shelf, in large part because of the utter chaos at the county administration building scaring off the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation, which had extended a grant opportunity to the county for pursuing the RV park concept, but pulled it back, citing “serious concerns” about the county’s ability to actually pull off the project given its incessant infighting.

Layer onto that the accusations and counter-accusations of dereliction of duty and outright malfeasance that have been flung in various directions from and toward the Fair Board, BOCC, Clerk’s Office, Prosecutor’s Office and Sheriff’s Office on everything from financial auditing to public records handling to Robert’s Rules of Order (not to mention numerous lawsuits, an unsuccessful censure of Omodt and Bradshaw by the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, and even a protective order granted to Williams against Bradshaw for a threat of physical harm), and you have the ingredients for our current stew of dysfunction.

We’ll leave the predictions for how this all might play out to a future article; but, for now, it’s a mess so messy that I want to take a shower after even summarizing it.

Designing downtown

Jennifer Stapleton. File photo.

The unease and downright unrest at the county has been mirrored in a somewhat more minor form at Sandpoint City Hall over the past year, with citizens butting heads with elected officials and staff — rather than electeds and staff going to battle with each other — over ideas of public involvement, transparency, accountability and the unsettling sense that growth and development have been allowed to run amok through a pattern of bureaucratic mission creep that many argue has put the city out of touch with its residents.

As with the county, the parts and pieces that go into this sentiment are too various to examine in full, but one mounting community issue started with the city’s longtime goal of managing stormwater on the west bank of Sand Creek, which over time morphed into a full-scale redevelopment of the entire downtown core, resulting in an expensive “design competition” that even its supporters on the council came to question at its conclusion in the fall. The winning team’s concept delivered a bunch of colorful images of future Sandpoint and the recommendation to do some more study on code changes.

“Further study? … [T]he deliverable we expected was language” to be adopted in code, Councilor Jason Welker said in October 2023, later adding, “We could do this ourselves, why do we need another study?”

City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton and Don Stastny — an architect from Portland, Ore., contracted by the city to run the project — both reiterated that the design competition was intended to be a “framework” for further discussion about how to redevelop downtown, and meant to provide a “vision” that could inspire future discussion and provide clarity for developers. Not before dividing public opinion on its many aspects, which more than a few residents considered “over the top” in terms of scale and general grandiosity.

Lifelong Sandpoint resident, retired Sandpoint city clerk and former councilor Helen Newton summed up the feelings of many in the community on the usefulness of the design competition, when she said in November, “I do not give two hoots about accommodating the economic feasibility for developers and I don’t think the City Council should either.”

A Curveball

Another municipal tempest kicked up in the spring when the city of Sandpoint highlighted concepts in the Multimodal Transportation Master Plan — adopted in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic — that envisioned an “East-West Connection,” realigning U.S. Highway 2 to provide a direct connection from a new intersection east of where Pine Street and Boyer Avenue currently meet, then north along the former railroad right of way, and joining U.S. 95 at Fifth Avenue and Cedar Street.

Longtime locals remembered a similar idea nicknamed “the Curve,” which was shot down by the community more than 10 years ago, and seeing it return in 2023 elicited widespread opposition. So much so that the Reader hosted a public town hall meeting on the topic at the East Bonner County Library Sandpoint branch in March, to which about 100 residents showed up — the vast majority expressing deep concern about the potential impacts of the highway realignment and widening.

Shot through the pushback directed at the reanimated Curve was the sense among many in the public that they hadn’t been adequately consulted about the concept being included in the transportation master plan — nor that they’d been fully in the loop on the plan itself, having gone through the approval process during a time when most people were hunkered down in their homes to avoid exposure to the novel coronavirus.

Ultimately, the city heard what its citizens were saying and backed away from the Curve concept, deciding in April to go with a less dramatic option for improving traffic flow on U.S. 2, Pine Street, Superior Street and First Avenue. As of today, the idea is to realign Pine back to two-way traffic; move the signal from Church Street to the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Pine; and eliminate truck routes on Pine, First and Superior.

Despite that course correction, the sense of disconnection with City Hall felt by some vocal members of the community continued, with yet more civic controversies to come.

Throwing the babies out with the bathwater

State and federal politics have also had dramatic effects on local goings on, most notably with hardline legislation banning almost all abortions in Idaho in the wake of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and its constitutional guarantee of access to abortion.

Almost immediately after the federal ruling, Idaho and other ultra-conservative states put into place “trigger laws” that dramatically curtailed access to abortion, with Dist. 1 Republican Sen. Scott Herndon positioned as among the most committed anti-abortion lawmakers in the state.

The Idaho Supreme Court in January 2023 ruled the trigger laws to be constitutional and, in March, Bonner General Hospital announced that because of the “legal and political climate” in the state, it couldn’t attract or retain qualified physicians to work in its labor and delivery services.

That news hit Bonner County residents hard, and drew national and international headlines.

“Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving. Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult. In addition, the Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care,” the hospital stated in a March 17 news release. “Consequences for Idaho physicians providing the standard of care may include civil litigation and criminal prosecution, leading to jail time or fines.”

Regional hospitals pledged their support, offering to take patients from BGH’s service area in need of labor, delivery and general obstetrics procedures.

Beyond the immediate, potentially life-threatening lack of critical services, the news also affected residents emotionally, realizing that for the first time in anyone’s living memory, Idaho politics had made it so that no babies would be born at the local hospital.

The culture wars come for the library

The East Bonner County Library District’s Sandpoint branch. Photo by Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey.

While the culture wars played havoc with local health care institutions, they also threatened local institutions of learning with a hotly contested race for the East Bonner County Library Board of Trustees that drew one candidate whose campaign centered on eliminating so-called “obscenity” from library materials.

Challenger Stacy Rodriguez, a lawyer who moved from San Diego in 2016, raised eyebrows in April when she spoke at a candidates’ forum at the Sandpoint library where she said that “things at the library” “reflected a one-sided political agenda, one that doesn’t match the values held by most of Bonner County’s voters.”

Specifically, she said that “progressive themes” prevailed, and “rarely did I see a display that showed a conservative author that talked about conservative viewpoints.” What’s more, she alleged that the library housed “obscene material” used to “cudgel and to sexualize children” under the “radical dictates” of the American Library Association and its “Marxist lesbian” leader.

Rodriguez also opined on the definition of a “drag queen,” claiming that “a grown man who wants to dress as a woman” is “not transgender usually because they still have a package,” and suggesting that Shea favored bringing “drag queens” to the library.

Finally, in a particularly despicable statement, Rodriguez also suggested that Shea supported putting “stripper poles” in the library, which of course the latter did not.  

About a week before the May 17 election, the library filed a report with Sandpoint police citing an online threat to staff over supposed “obscene” materials being allegedly made available to minors. That uproar followed Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s veto of House Bill 314, which put in place penalties for libraries and library staff found to have made such material available, and the unsuccessful attempt by conservative legislators to overturn the governor’s kibosh.

Amid all that, and despite a vigorous and highly visible campaign by Rodriguez, voters pushed back and incumbent Susan Shea retained her seat with a whopping 59% of the vote in the May 2023 election.

Big politics in West Bonner County

Branden Durst prepares for an interview with the press at a West Bonner County School District board meeting in September. Photo by Ben Olson.

Another right-wing politician made big news for trying — and failing — to hijack a local learning institution, with the saga of the West Bonner County School District’s ill-advised hiring of unqualified former lawmaker and one-time Idaho Freedom Foundation “education policy analyst” Branden Durst, sometimes of Boise, to serve as superintendent. 

Durst started out his political life as a Democratic legislator in the capital, but switched to the GOP and continued to grow more hardcore in his conservatism over the years, including a failed run for state superintendent of public instruction in 2022.

His hiring by the WBCSD Board of Trustees in June 2023 — over the more qualified Susan Luckey, who had served as an educator and administrator in the district for decades, including as interim superintendent since 2022 — drew howls of opposition from patrons of the district.

Those howls turned into a dramatic organized opposition that united residents from across the political spectrum, who all agreed that Durst had no business running their schools and, furthermore, that two of the trustees who advocated for him should be removed from their seats on the board.

Board Chair Keith Rutledge and Vice-Chair Susan Brown both found their names on a recall petition that turned into a ballot measure in a special election in August 2023, in which they were resoundingly turned out from their positions by far wider margins than elected them in the first place.

About a month later and on the tail of numerous highly charged public meetings, Durst announced he would seek an “amicable and fair exit” from the job, which he’d spent the previous several months trying to negotiate into the sweetest deal possible — from a hefty six-figure salary to mileage reimbursements, housing and relocation money, the option to do sideline work as a speaker and legal coverage for his wife, to free lunches at all the district schools and other contract items that onlookers around the state considered outlandish, especially considering that he lacked a critical qualification for the position: that of actually having worked in a classroom. 

Those in the “Recall, Replace, Rebuild” effort who managed to oust Rutledge and Brown, and ultimately pave the way for Durst’s departure, celebrated their victories. Just before the November election, the board hired Joe Kren as interim superintendent and appointed Paul Turco and Ann Yount to the board. At the polls, however, incumbent Trustee Margaret Hall — who had been an opponent of Durst’s hiring — retained her seat while fellow anti-Durst Trustee Carlyn Barton lost to challenger Kathy Nash. Incumbent Troy Reinbold, who had supported Durst when he actually attended meetings, also won reelection.

In the meantime, the hubbub in West Bonner has made big waves as far afield and as recently as the Dec. 11 edition of Vanity Fair. 

Travers Aparkalypse and the 2023 city election

Molly McCahon chained herself to a willow tree at Travers Park for several days to protest the city of Sandpoint’s decision to cut down 20 mature trees for the installation of a new indoor sports complex for pickleball and tennis players. Photo by Ben Olson.

Another major project grabbed the public’s attention in the form of the James E. Russell Sports Center — an indoor tennis and pickleball facility made possible by a $7.5 million gift from the Russell family in 2022 — which the city of Sandpoint broke ground on in October amid vigorous protests by citizens who objected to its location at Travers Park, necessitating the removal of dozens of mature shade trees. (Though with replacements to be planted.)

A handful of residents were so angered by the city’s decision to cut down the trees and relocate the playground at the park in favor of the facility, that they chained themselves to a willow tree for a week in opposition. The groundbreaking ceremony took place anyway in mid-October, with the protesters (including members of the Travers family) being moved to an area in the parking lot behind a chain-link fence, where they chanted and generally made their displeasure known.

City officials stated repeatedly that the public had ample opportunity to sound off on the Russell facility’s location in the 18 months prior to groundbreaking. However, Councilor Andy Groat had an 11th-hour change of heart, stating that he regretted his decision to vote in favor of locating the facility at Travers Park because he hadn’t been aware at the time of the long and personal association of the Travers family with the park that bears their name.

“Is this body willing to reconsider?” he asked the council Oct. 19, referring to selecting another, less sensitive location for the sports center.

Noting that he did not expect the body to go back on its decision, Groat then resigned mid-meeting.

That left a vacant seat, which the council didn’t fill ahead of the 2023 election, in which Groat hadn’t planned to run.

That election turned out to be something of a referendum on the direction of city leadership, with former City Planner Jeremy Grimm handily winning the race for mayor over outgoing City Council President Kate McAlister, and Pam Duquette and Kyle Schreiber both winning council seats on a shared platform of increasing citizen involvement and participation with city decisions. In candidates’ forums and questionnaires, Grimm, Duquette and Schreiber all indicated that they would also like to see the position of city administrator eliminated in favor of a return to department heads under the direct management of the mayor and council, which the city moved away from in 2015 with the hiring of Stapleton to fill the role. (Again: See Page 4.)

Councilor Deb Ruehle retained her seat, which means the council will consist of incumbents Joel Aispuro, Justin Dick, Duquette, Ruehle, Schreiber and Welker beginning in January 2024. Current Mayor Shelby Rognstad decided not to run for a third term.

Lightning round

We could go on and on (and have), but there’s only so much retrospection that anyone can bear, and I’m about ready for a long winter’s nap after this exercise. However, there are a few other stories from 2023 that bear mentioning. 

First of all, there was the huge news in early June that Alterra Mountain Company would purchase Schweitzer — signaling a major development not only for Sandpoint’s signature piece of property, but representing a power play between mega resort conglomerates Alterra and Vail Resorts, which through their holdings and Ikon and Epic passes (respectively) have “turned the ski industry into a duopoly,” Powder Magazine wrote in 2018.

Meanwhile, Schweitzer has undertaken a range of developments and improvements for the 2023 season and beyond, including a new high-speed detachable quad, which marks the first phase of the new Schweitzer Creek Village project. That larger effort will include a 1,400-space parking lodge, day lodge, improved access to the mountain, and expanded beginner and intermediate terrain. In addition, the mountain welcomed the Cambium Spa to its offerings, and celebrated a new employee housing project representing a $22 million investment.

One thing’s for certain going into 2024: Schweitzer has moved to a new elevation.

The new stage tent after it had been erected July 26 at War Memorial Field. Photo by Ben Olson.

Another community icon underwent a profound change in 2023, with the announcement in late July that the Festival at Sandpoint would retire its famous big white tent in favor of a pop-up stage venue. The reason for that: The dual-peaked tensile fabric tent had outlived its useful life, in large part because technology had improved and made the system unsafe. In short, if even one of the cables had snapped, it would have been a disaster.

No matter, festival goers and organizers alike reported a successful 2023 concert series — more than that, a record-breaking season for attendance and revenues, which go to support the nonprofit organizations year-round arts programs.

In other Festival news, earlier this summer the benighted gun suit finally, finally ended, putting to a close a yearslong legal battle over whether the organization could ban weapons from publicly owned War Memorial Field, which it leases from the city. The kerfuffle started in 2019 when now-Sen. Herndon and fellow county resident Jeff Avery tried to get into the Festival with their sidearms. They were told to leave their guns in their vehicles or be trespassed, triggering (so to speak) a whole heap of legal challenges on which we’ve already expended tens of thousands of words. 

Super long story short: The Idaho Supreme Court on June 22 dismissed an appeal from Herndon, upholding what the city of Sandpoint had been saying all along, that the power and responsibility to manage the field rested with the Festival as a lessee, and any prohibition on weapons came from the organization, not City Hall, and therefore did not violate Idaho’s firearms preemption law.

Meanwhile, we all got to learn an awful lot about Idaho lease and firearms laws, and spend a couple hundred thousand dollars of tax money so various lawyers could get some practice in the courtroom.

Beyond all that, we had another year of goose hunting at Sandpoint City Beach (though as of press time it’s unclear how the 2023 hunt went), which included all the pushback that anything related to the Canada goose population in Sandpoint elicits; the second train bridge opened over Lake Pend Oreille; and residents got up in arms about big developments throughout the county, including one at Trestle Creek, where the Idaho Club is angling to build luxury homes and a community dock, which opponents claim will threaten sensitive bull trout populations and supporters say will actually help the fish.

How any of that shakes out is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, have a happy new year and here’s to another 12 months of “interesting times.”