All Shook Up

It seems like affronts to public process can't even take a break for our election posts. So here are some that piled up while were otherwise occupied + more thoughts on McCity's water bond

Tomi Grote and Tom Grote

May 17, 2026

In this post:

• More on McCity’s water bond proposal

• The McCity Real Estate Company’s idea of lakefront property value

• A thickness measurement of the Cascade Medical Center board’s skulls

• Afterthoughts: McCall’s hospital board’s allergy to thoughts they can’t control...pardon while we sneeze

Authors’ Note: Our Substack is a crusade to promote and police public process. That quest includes exposing poor process, which is the subject of our comments on McCity’s water bond proposal below. It’s really the continuation of a serial point we make often here: a vote against a proposal doesn’t scrap it. It merely forces governments to more carefully separate their to-do list from actual needs. And, as we have also repeatedly chronicled many times here, there always ends up being a cavern of difference between wish lists and needs. Improvements to public infrastructure are a fact of civic life. But good process calls for justification of ballot measures, not the you can go easy or you can go hard bullying McCity is using. If McCity had made a sincere effort to validate this funding request with a lucid, complete slate of alternatives posted on the official website, resorting to strong-arming the electorate would not have been necessary.

🟧 McCity Water Bond: The Power of No v.s. As Long as We’re At It

Anybody who has ever embarked on a major home improvement project knows why McCall voters should send McCity’s water bond proposal back for revisions on Election Day. This thing all started reportedly when the city self reported to the DEQ minor drinking water standard failures over summer peak two-week period, attributed to morning showers and irrigation (see Links section for more details). As homeowners know very well (we can see the smile of recognition on your faces from here :), a home improvement always grows into, “well, as long as we’re going to do this, we might as well do that.” Planning is great fun—until the sobering ice water splash of the cost estimate. At that point, private citizens start pruning their project’s scope, prioritizing what needs doing now, then making a plan to revisit the rest as the budget allows. And, there’s always some stuff that ends up being good to put off, because as time goes by and circumstances change, so did the need and the available solutions.

Bonding authority is the elastic budget the private citizen lacks. In public improvements, all the wish list gets in. Then, every element of the master plan is sold as being equally dire. Even the solution to the minor problem that started all this was never publicly vetted for alternative solutions.

We call this the As Long as We’re At It public project strategy. It is stunningly effective in convincing citizens that voting against a proposal is just kicking the can down the road to the inevitable. Two years from the first bond, the public is told that the price of Yes was underestimated by more than half. Then the penalty for questioning the bungled estimate escalates to an open threat: vote yes...or else we’ll triple your water rates. But the else is carefully couched in words like “might” and “could,” which translates to “lots of wiggle room.”

McCity is heavily playing the ace it has in the hole. If the measure does not pass, they do indeed have the authority to triple water rates. By not being upfront about what the option of “reevaluating project timing and financing options” might look like, they are essentially calling the voter’s bluff. That’s a lovely way to think about your constituents isn’t it? Never say never, but McCity is highly unlikely to deliver on the threat to triple rates. And even if they do, it just means that in the end, the rate payer will save a bundle in interest costs.

The effectiveness of the bluff messaging is more deeply mystifying when factional dynamics are factored in. Even our beloved Sole Source of Drinking Water Society gripes constantly about how lousy McCity is in managing ecologically sensitive infrastructure. So why would anybody trust McCity so implicitly to develop and manage this situation without any skeptical oversight? Even the Anything Tops Nothing, No Matter What it Costs argument stalls out in this context.

A No vote on this measure has no downside, trust us—unless McCouncil calls the bluff and launches a punitive rate-hike war on its public. Instead, checking the No box will slow this train long enough (only six months) for citizens to evaluate whether or not $26+M right now is justified. City officials will take a Yes vote as implicit trust in their judgment. “Bullying works great,” they will note. “Let’s do more of it.” A No vote is not can-kicking. It’s due-diligence prudence voters are wise to exercise whenever this very rare opportunity is given them. Instead of we are against water system improvements, it sends the message, let’s see what else you got.

Know somebody who likes poking fun at the Establishment?

🟧 McCall Property Buyer Advisory: if McCity Real Estate Company comes up in search results, keep scrolling...

The City of McCall donated $347,000 to the State of Idaho because the McCall City Council did not have the sense to reject a bogus appraisal of lakefront land and get a second opinion. We wish we knew more about how this intergovernmental largess occurred, but all discussion was wrongly held behind closed doors. We were still able to find out some of the unseemly facts through a public records request.

The council approved pulling that amount from its seemingly bottomless reserves to complete its condemnation of a narrow strip of sand along Payette Lake between Mile High Marina and Brown Park. The strip has been coveted for years by the city to add to the sparse public access to the lake, so it went to court to seize the land.

In condemnation cases, governments must pay a fair price to the owners. But in this case, there were no owners listed on property records. In fact, the land isn’t even a formal parcel. And at 50 feet at its widest point, nothing can be built on it, making it worthless. But a court needs a formal appraisal, so the McCouncil got one and was shocked at the result - an eye-popping $3.47 million.

The appraiser acknowledged the strip was good only “just as an access point,” but then turned around and set its value based on recent sales of lakefront homes, which of course, were in the multi-millions. McCouncil apparently unleashed its private attorney on the appraiser, because he wrote a letter stating the obvious: 1. Nobody could buy the land even if they wanted, because there was no clear owner. 2. The public has been using the land for years and has the legal right to keep using it. 3. Nothing can be built on the land. 4. There is no access to the property.

The letter seemed to come as a great revelation to the appraiser, who immediately backtracked. But instead of changing the value to $0, the appraiser said, “due to the nature of the property, it is likely that it still has some value,” offering no justification for this amazing claim. Based solely on the city’s letter, the appraiser chopped the value by 90%, which still resulted in an outrageous $347,000.

None of this back-and-forth was discussed in public. Rather, the council retreated to the back room using a frequently abused exception to the Idaho Open Meeting Law. The law does not require closed meetings in any circumstance - all meetings are required to be open. The law only allows voluntary exceptions for a select number of topics, one of which is for pending lawsuits.

The law is intended to prevent the disclosure of discussions for the settlement of a lawsuit, but in this case, there was no defendant because there was no owner, so there was no justification for the closed meeting. As such, we don’t know if the council realized that anyone who had to be told its business by the city attorney was not qualified. We also don’t know if there was a discussion about whether a second opinion was needed to get to the correct value.

Back to the “donation” to the state of Idaho. Once the $347,000 is paid to the court, it sits there waiting for the previous owners - who do not exist - to prove ownership and collect. If no one steps forward, the money is declared “unclaimed property” and gets put into the state’s general fund and the city’s tax money goes “poof.”

All of this because McCouncil couldn’t make the easy call to get a second opinion, just as you would when a doctor recommends surgery when only aspirin is needed. And it didn’t help they did their bumbling in private.

🟧 The packet that the CMC board doesn’t want you to see

During its March monthly meeting, the Cascade Medical Center Board of Trustees made it clear they don’t want the public peeking too far into its business of overseeing a public hospital (SEE LINK BELOW). After months of wrangling, we got them to at least comply with the state’s open meeting law. But allowing the public to see the financial and department reports (called “packets”) that bring the meeting minutes to life was just a bridge too far.

It was really as if the half-year of exchanges we had on the board’s responsibility to their public had never taken place. Even their reasoning was identical. They were reluctant to publish the packets because they contain “sensitive information” that would require time-consuming work by staff to black out these so-called state secrets. Yet, when they took the first steps into treating their public as equals by posting advisory group minutes, none of the boogie men they were so deathly afraid of materialized.

Having talked them off the ledge over the Idaho Open Meeting Law, we introduced them to the Idaho Public Records Law. The IRPL covers meeting packets and compels public bodies to fork them over to anyone who files a request. That means that if citizens want to see a meeting packet, the CMC board forces them to jump hoops and wait up to three days (or longer) instead of pleasantly making it as easy as a website page view. The packet gets into public hands either way, so why all the obstruction? Other agencies, such as the McCall City Council and the McCall Memorial Hospital District, routinely post their meeting packets, so what earthly reason is there to draw this line in the sand—other than to just be pissy?

We filed such a request. It’s known in the newzbiz as a PRR, if anybody wants to look cool when filing one. And guess what? There were no blackouts, no secrets that needed protecting. Rather, there is much of interest in the packet that gives insight into the complexity of running a public hospital. We share some of the highlights in Afterthoughts, and a link to the packet in Links.

It is puzzling why trustees would not want such useful information available to the taxpayer. Once again, we have had to remind a taxing district board that the institution they govern is not their private, gated community. The real owners should be allowed to come in and look around anytime they like—or not. The “or not” is the hardest point to land. Why put us (the board) to all this “make-work” when nobody but us really cares?

One of several answers to that question is a vibe of openness, common decency and institutional cordiality. It might not be anything seen, felt and touched until a building expansion measure goes on the ballot. That is what is most baffling. Is all this opposition simple, provincial turf protection? Do board members resent a couple outsiders telling them what to do? If so, we hope they get over their abandonment of logic soon. In the meantime. we will be requesting CMC packets via PRR every month. We will be happy to do what the board won’t do and share the packets on our Substack page or even email them directly to anyone who asks (use the contact info that follows every post).

To all of the above: Just. Sayin’.

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Scroll down for the Afterthoughts after this commercial break:

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Afterthoughts, Observations and Authentications

• Here they go again. The board of McCall Memorial Hospital District recently affirmed its famous aversion to any public input that it can’t control. In a recent meeting, the idea of publicly advertising a vacancy on the board didn’t enter their minds. That’s not surprising, given the board’s commitment to only consider “appropriate” applicants (in the vernacular of the board chair). Appropriate, was never defined, but the board’s past appointments are a strong clue. They have all gone to recruited members who lockstep with their self-described mission to funnel as much public money as possible into St. Luke’s—itself a private and highly profitable medical conglomerate. Astonishingly, public bodies with taxing authority are not required by law to publicly advertise openings. That statute needs a rewrite. Perhaps if there were more skeptics on the MMHD board, the district wouldn’t be spending sumptuous publicly funded legal fees to defend itself against its second state attorney general inquiry in a decade. But maybe the board is just being practical. It’s likely, under the current circumstances, that no fresh-thinking individual is altruistic enough to take a no-win seat as a 1-6 minority. Given that, why not extend an invitation to the public to apply just for show? Probably it’s the same fear that keeps them from giving their constituents an advisory vote on whether or not they should exist at all.

• Caught Ya Being Good Award goes to Cascade Medical Center Board of Trustees - During their April meeting, something remarkable and most welcome happened. Board members actually questioned their staff. We monitor their meetings and sometimes we honestly wonder if any of them are awake. The topic was the proposed CMC medical clinic at the Perpetua Resources mine at Stibnite that CMC hopes will pump more than $500,000 per year into hospital coffers. Board members asked how clinic staffers would be protected from arsenic, cyanide and other nasty poisons that will be part of the processing of gold, silver and antimony at the mine. “Are we leaving that risk completely to the employees?” one board member asked. The CMC administrator acknowledged the topic had not been considered and said he would investigate. What a thoughtful, great question. Let there be more!

• Not exactly a beach read but still...the Idaho Public Records Law defines a public document as “any writing prepared, owned, used, or retained by a public agency that relates to the conduct or administration of the public’s business.” Meeting packets fall clearly into that category. In CMC’s April packet, taxpayers learn • what is on the minds of the hospital’s medical staff, including changes in the way they handle heart patients. • A discussion of which drugs to remove from the hospital’s inventory, which to keep, and changes in how some medications are given to patients. • Statistics on how many people used hospital services compared to a year ago. • A report on the hospital’s four-year old program to provide free rides to elderly, poor, and disabled patients who are not able to provide transportation for themselves. The program, funded by a federal grant, provides rides not only to CMC but also to hospitals in Boise. • Financial reports that detail how the federal Rural Emergency Hospital subsidy of $300,000 per month is helping keep the hospital in the black. The reports also show the Cascade Medical Center Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the hospital through donations, had $820,000 on hand as of the end of 2025.

Links

• The Star-News report on the justification for the initial drinking water bond: two weeks of minor distress and a consultant’s off-the-shelf population projection (hint: NEVER accurate in a resort town or anywhere else for that matter). Justification for $26+M in improvements right now?

• The CMC April meeting board packet. What’s all the secrecy about?