To address your concerns - my law degree from a regular old state school in Idaho makes me keenly aware of the precepts of the U.S. Constitution, and yes, the Idaho Statesman got the story wrong. It’s unfortunate that when you reviewed my website at the time, that you didn’t pick up my actual platform: supporting new business, supporting managed growth, supporting city responsibility, encouraging citizen involvement, and encouraging accountable leadership. Since it was on the home page, I can see how you may have missed it.

My concern did not go beyond the statement you cited above. I know its shocking, but believe it or not, there are people who seek public office for personal gain. My effort was to get people thinking about the candidates and what they may or may not have to gain from being in office. Surely this isn’t a novel campaign approach. Further research would have shown, Kuna public offices have always been well represented by local business owners.

I think the take away is this - when you rely on sound bites as the basis for decision making or judgement calls, you place yourself in a very large demographic who makes uninformed political decisions. And unfortunately, sometimes even an education doesn’t prevent this.

The take away from this post is that we often times come up with kooky ideas such as banning business owners from serving on the City Council when no municipality in their right mind would actually do something like that. Yet to these people, it seems like a perfectly sane idea. Then again, we implemented a county road department (ACHD) and that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world either. Worst practices are still worst practices . . .

The “ding dong fight” sounds interesting, but I didn’t learn as much (starting from zero) here as I’d hoped to. (I’m a Boise voter, “just curious.”)

Honestly, what I believe Kuna’s biggest problem is right now is that 83% of its workforce heads out to Boise every morning. That statistic comes from planning director Steve Hasson, who says he gets it from COMPASS. With that amount of commuting, we have fewer people supporting the business, social, and civic institutions in town, which reduces the social capital.

This whole thing is ironic because I think the current city council has the *least* amount of such potential conflicts in the past ten years. It’s true that Trina Stroebel works, or worked, with Larry Hansen, who owned Cowgirls. On the other hand, Larry recently sold out and moved, partly because he felt he wasn’t getting a fair break from the city council. Or is the contention that Trina will plan lots of parties, in order to drive business to her party store?

Kuna is a small town and its political roles are not full-time jobs. (Thank God.) As with state elected positions — the way Idaho prides itself on its “citizen legislature” — the goal is not for elected officials to have some sort of mythical no-conflict job, but for citizens to be aware of what the potential conflicts are and for elected officials to recuse themselves when appropriate.

Doug Hoiland’s wife, for example, is a schoolteacher, who taught my daughter. Shall we be concerned that, as a city council member, Doug Hoiland would unfairly favor schools? Or that his familiarity with the Kuna school system would make him more aware of potential issues?

Part of what appeals to me about Corinna Stiles *is* her job — not because I think she’d have less of a conflict of interest than other candidates, but because, as a disability advocate, I believe she’d bring more of that sensibility to Kuna and, as our population ages, make us as a community more conscious of that segment of our population and their needs.