(Boise) – Attorney General Lawrence Wasden and Idahoans for Openness in Government (IDOG) invite the public to attend an online seminar addressing current rules and best practices for open meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reporters, public officials and members of the public are invited to attend.

The “IDOG: Open Meetings in the Pandemic” seminar will be held from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m MT on January 7, 2021. Wasden, Deputy Attorney General Brian Kane and IDOG President Betsy Russell will serve as panelists.

The seminar will be hosted on the GoToWebinar platform. Participants can register by visiting https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6596762315239876365. Registrants are encouraged to check system requirements to avoid any connection issues the day of the event.

Together, Wasden and IDOG have conducted 49 open meeting and public records seminars across the state since 2004. The series – held in different parts of the state each year – was postponed in 2020 due to COVID-19. It is expected to resume in 2021 with in-person events in central and eastern Idaho.

From the Idaho Press

By TOMMY SIMMONS

Editor’s note — This story has been updated to reflect the following correction: Officials released the name of the second person in their custody who died after contracting COVID-19.

In a reversal of policy, the Idaho Department of Correction now says it will not identify the people in its custody who die with COVID-19, saying it needs to protect their private medical information.

Department spokesman Jeff Ray confirmed the policy to the Idaho Press in an email.

“Given that we are disclosing when the death is COVID-19 related, we cannot protect the individual’s private medical information if we also release their names,” Ray wrote. “IDOC has determined the only way we can be transparent about COVID-19 related deaths and still protect the private medical information of our residents is to refrain from releasing … the deceased name, but provide notice that it was a COVID-19 related death.”

The department has shifted its stance since July, when it identified Frank Dawson Conover, 65, as the first Idaho inmate to die after contracting COVID-19. In the past, the department has identified people in its custody who have killed themselves or died of natural causes. Ray confirmed in an email Thursday the department has since changed its practice, in reference to people who die with COVID-19.

Officials in September released the name of the second inmate who died after contracting COVID-19. They declined, however, in October to identify the third person who died in department custody after contracting the disease, this time at a private prison in Arizona.

Yet when the Idaho Press asked about the department’s reticence on the October death, Ray didn’t mention private medical concerns — he only said the man’s family asked the department not to release his name.

In an email Tuesday, Ray wrote health officials sanctioned the department’s practice of not releasing the names of inmates who died with COVID-19.

“We have consulted with our State epidemiologists and Health District representatives — they agree with this approach,” Ray wrote. “The health districts (to our knowledge) are not providing identity either.”

From the Idaho Press

From the East Idaho News

by NATE SUNDERLAND

IDAHO FALLS — EastIdahoNews.com joined with a cadre of local, regional and national media Friday in filing a legal objection in the upcoming court proceedings for Chad and Lori Daybell.

The objection is in response to a motion made by Madison County Prosecutor Rob Wood to ban video cameras inside the courtroom in preliminary hearings for the couple. Wood’s motion asked Magistrate Judge Faren Eddins to reconsider his previous order, which allowed cameras to livestream the hearings from inside the courtroom.

The crux of Wood’s argument is that broadcasting the preliminary hearing will make it more difficult to find an unbiased jury in Fremont County. In his motion, Wood acknowledges the defendants have rights to a public hearing and the public has rights when it comes to criminal cases. But he says when it comes time to pick a jury, extra time and effort will have to be made for jurors who have viewed the preliminary hearing.

“The motion is not for a closed or sealed hearing, but simply that the preliminary hearing in this case be treated the same as nearly every other preliminary hearing where there are no video cameras in the courtroom,” Wood wrote.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, if Wood’s motion were approved by Eddins it would effectively close the hearing to the public as a very limited number of people are allowed to attend proceedings in person. Since the pandemic started earlier this year, the Idaho Supreme Court has limited public access to courtrooms and most hearings have been held via livestream with Zoom and YouTube.

Without video cameras, and based on the rules in place by the Idaho Supreme Court, there is no way for the public or media to observe the Daybell hearing if Wood’s motion is approved.

On Friday, EastIdahoNews.com jointly hired Idaho Falls attorney Steve Wright to object to the motion. Other media outlets participating include the Post Register, KIFI Local News 8, KPVI NewsChannel 6, The Idaho Statesman, KIVI Idaho News 6, KSL TV 5, Court TV and NBC News.

In his objection, Wright argues that video cameras are necessary for the public to have access to the court system. He affirms the importance of the public being able to view the hearings to ensure transparency and so they can see that justice is being served.

“When the public is aware that the law is being enforced and the criminal justice system is functioning, an outlet is provided for these understandable reactions and emotions,” the objection states. “The unique and remarkable allegations of this case are the very reason that video coverage of the proceedings is vital.”

Even before COVID-19, EastIdahoNews.com and other outlets have used video cameras to cover high profile cases. Last year, a judge allowed cameras in for the preliminary of Brian L. Dripps, the man accused of killing and raping Angie Dodge. In 2015, EastIdahoNews.com recorded the preliminary hearing for Brian Mitchell, a man accused of murdering another man at an Idaho Falls park.

Wood said that broadcasting the hearing could affect the Daybell’s constitutional right to a fair trial but Wright argues that “the State presents no basis why disallowing video coverage will properly balance the Constitutional rights involved.”

“The State of Idaho’s requested remedy is also drastically disproportionate to the Constitutional burdens it imposes. The State would have the entire country, and world, deprived of a critical instrument to facilitate transparency in order to ensure it is more difficult for the residents of Fremont County to witness the judicial process,” Wright writes. “The State of Idaho seeks to use a sledgehammer where the Constitution requires a scalpel.”

Wright ends his two-page objection by saying that if the hearing is effectively closed, the public loses its Constitutional right to observe the court system in action.

“People in an open society do not demand infallibility from their institutions, but it is difficult for them to accept what they prohibited from observing,” Wright writes.

In addition to the objection filed on behalf of the media, Mark Means, Lori Vallow Daybell’s attorney, and John Prior, Chad Daybell’s attorney, have both filed objections to Wood’s motion. You can view the argument from Means here and Prior’s argument here.

The Daybells are facing felony charges in Fremont County after investigators discovered the remains of 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan buried in the backyard of Chad’s Salem home. Court records indicate Chad’s hearing will start on Aug. 3 and Lori’s will begin on Aug. 10.

A hearing is scheduled on Wood’s motion for Monday at 2:30 p.m. You can read Wright’s entire motion here.

From the East Idaho News

From the Idaho Press

By BETSY RUSSELL

BOISE — Plans for major tech upgrades to the state Capitol to allow more remote access in the age of COVID-19 won unanimous support from a state panel on Wednesday, including an addition to make sure the deaf and hard of hearing can access the service as well.

“The essence of this request is to ensure that the Legislature’s work is conducted in a transparent manner,” Eric Milstead, Legislative Services Office director, told the governor’s Coronavirus Financial Advisory Committee (CFAC) on Wednesday.

“Article 3, Section 12 of the Idaho Constitution prohibits the Legislature from holding sessions in secret,” Milstead said. “And the funding in our request today will enhance the ability of the Legislature to stream its activities to the public, both audio and video, via Idaho Public Television. This includes the Legislature’s committee work and floor sessions.”

Milstead had requested $1,236,000 for the upgrades, but at the urging of Rep. Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, CFAC raised the total by $20,000 so it would also cover closed captioning for streaming of interim legislative committee meetings this fall.

Wintrow noted that the director of the Idaho Council for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing estimates that 200,000 Idahoans are deaf or hard of hearing. The state already provides closed captioning so the deaf and hard of hearing can watch live streams of floor sessions of the full House and Senate, but hasn’t done so for committee meetings in the past.

Milstead noted, “An important component of this upgrade will be to potentially provide more opportunities for the public to testify in committee remotely. We’re driving toward that as a distinct possibility. We’ve got programmers working on that capacity as we speak.”

Wintrow moved to approve the request plus the additional funds for closed captioning, for a total of $1,256,000 from Idaho’s $1.25 billion share of federal coronavirus aid funds under the CARES Act. Her motion passed with unanimous support.

Alex Adams, Gov. Brad Little’s budget director and the chair of CFAC, noted that the panel received a number of emails expressing concerns that the request would allow state legislators to work from home, but not teachers, as Idaho looks to reopen schools in the fall amid the coronavirus pandemic. But the upgrades won’t let lawmakers work from home, he said, and instead are aimed at improving public access to and engagement in the legislative process.

“That’s correct,” Milstead said. “There’s absolutely no funding being requested for personal devices that members could use on their own.”

Milstead said any remote work that lawmakers would do has been discussed as occurring “primarily from their offices in the Statehouse itself,” or from a conference room in the Capitol. That would happen, he said, when, for example, a committee hearing room is so full that social distancing couldn’t otherwise be maintained.

The proposal called for upgrades that would allow for social distancing in the Capitol during legislative meetings this fall and into the future, for remote work, and for a hybrid of the two.

Milstead said they will include installing seven new cameras in seven legislative committee hearing rooms, providing, for the first time, both audio and video streaming capacity from all legislative committee hearing rooms. Currently, all those rooms have audio streaming capacity, but video streaming is available only from two of them, the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee’s ornate meeting room on the Capitol’s third floor, the former Idaho Supreme Court chamber; and Room EW42 in the lower level of the House wing, where the House Revenue & Taxation Committee meets.

The upgrades, he said, will “ensure that the public can observe legislative work and also allow the public to participate, regardless of the approach that the Legislature adopts, whether that’s working in simply a socially distancing fashion in the Statehouse, or if it’s a combination of social distancing and perhaps providing for some remote work.”

After the unanimous vote, Adams told Milstead, “Eric, we thank you for your work in bringing forward this proposal. We’ll finalize the paperwork, and you should be able to move forward early next week.”

From the Idaho Press

From Idaho Education News

by CLARK CORBIN

The public was blocked Monday from much of an inaugural meeting of a new State Department of Education committee engaging in the highly charged process of rewriting academic standards.

SDE officials published incomplete information when they provided public notice for the Idaho Content Standards Mathematics Review Committee remote meeting.

Within five minutes of the meeting’s scheduled starting time, Idaho Education News told three SDE officials, including Director of Communications Karlynn Laraway, that the public could not access the meeting. The SDE did not stop the meeting. Forty-six minutes into the meeting, SDE provided passwords providing public access.

SDE officials could have stopped the meeting as soon as they realized there was an access issue, Idaho Press Club Vice President Melissa Davlin said.

“The governor’s March 13 executive order on open meetings specifically says the public must be allowed to attend via video teleconferencing,” Davlin said.

There is significant public interest in the standards committee’s work. Hundreds of people have packed the Statehouse in recent years to provide testimony during the ongoing standards debate.

Earlier this year, the House Education Committee voted to repeal all academic standards in math, science and English before it was overruled by the Senate Education Committee.

Several legislators who were outspoken during the debate now have a seat on the committees rewriting the standards.

The process has such a high profile that at least four committees are looking at the issue — a legislative interim committee that convened last week and three SDE Content Standards Review Committees. The SDE has separate committees for science, English and math standards.

“Now more than ever, the public needs to know what their government agencies are doing,” Davlin said. “We understand the learning curve involved with conducting public meetings via video teleconferencing, but the Idaho Press Club urges officials to err on the side of transparency and follow Idaho’s Open Meeting Laws, including, but not limited to, pausing meetings when there are access issues.”

After Idaho EdNews raised the issue, SDE officials sent a news release including passwords necessary to connect to the meeting. They released that information at 10:46 a.m. Prior to issuing the news release, a SDE spokeswoman provided Idaho EdNews with a password at 10:19 a.m.

The meeting began at 10 a.m. The meeting was already in progress once the public could connect, so it was difficult to tell who was running the meeting, what the format was or who was speaking at a given time.

Committee members later did introduce themselves, although a handful did not respond when called on.

Committee members also stressed the differences between standards and curriculum.

Standards, they said, are what students should be able to know, understand and be able to do.

Curriculum, on the other hand, covers how the standards are taught and the resources and texts used to teach them.

The job of the committee is to rewrite the standards. Local districts and schools make curriculum decisions.

Because much of the meeting happened in secret Monday, it was not clear if any action was taken. The math standards committee is expected to meet again Aug. 3.

Monday’s meeting represented the first step in what is expected to be a time-consuming and intricate process. The committees are expected to produce draft standards in time for the October 2021 State Board of Education meeting.

The standards would then go to the Idaho Legislature during the 2022 session.

From Idaho Education News

From the Idaho Press

By BLAKE JONES

After learning that its previous order to move Ada County back to Stage 3 violated Idaho’s Open Meeting Law, Central District Health’s Board of Health held an emergency meeting Friday to fix the issue.

The board voided the previous order to close bars and limit gatherings to 50 people, which took effect Wednesday, and issued a new, identical one, which is effective immediately.

During the brief meeting Friday, attorney Michael Kane told the board the violation was caused by the lack of advanced notice for the board’s June 20 emergency meeting. Kane said because of the coronavirus’ accelerating spread in Ada County, health district staff recommended that the board act without 24 hours’ advanced notice to the public to avoid “further injury or damage.”

The Open Meeting Law, however, doesn’t require 24 hours’ advanced meeting notice for emergency meetings.

This issue, rather, was the board’s failure to alert the media ahead of Saturday’s meeting, according to Don Day, who runs the independent news site BoiseDev.com and has a content-share agreement with the Idaho Press. Day wrote in an article Friday that he raised the issue about the lack of notice with the health district.

“Idaho State Code requires that agencies notify the media of the emergency meeting,” Day’s article states. “Central District Health did not inform BoiseDev, even though we are on their media list.”

District staff looked into it and determined that “an inadvertent open meeting violation occurred,” Kane told the board Friday. The board, however, did not discuss BoiseDev or the lack of media notice specifically.

Kane did say the notice wasn’t posted online or at the office “due to employees working from home.”

Idaho’s Open Meeting Law requires government agencies, for regular meetings, to give five days’ notice and post an agenda at least 48 hours beforehand. Special meetings only requires 24 hours’ notice.

For emergency meetings, the law only requires that the agency maintains a list of journalists requesting notification of meetings and makes a “good faith effort” to provide advance notice to them.

The Open Meetings Law, found in Title 74, Chapter 2 of Idaho Code, defines an emergency as “a situation involving injury or damage to persons or property, or immediate financial loss, or the likelihood of such injury, damage or loss.”

Friday’s meeting was accessible to the public via online video conference and phone; a meeting notice and agenda were emailed to the media an hour before the meeting started, as well as posted to the district’s website.

REOPENING STAGES

Though Ada County is in Stage 3 per the health district order, the rest of the state remains in Stage 4 of the governor’s Idaho Rebounds reopening plan, which allows all businesses to be open, with guidelines on social distancing and other safety measures.

Central District Health oversees four counties: Ada, Blaine, Elmore and Valley.

After seeing a spike of COVID-19 cases in Ada County this month, the health district on Monday rolled the county back to Stage 3 of reopening, which forced bars to close and limited gatherings to 50 people.

Health district officials said the county’s numbers of infection were higher than they have been since late March and early April, and said the infection rate rivals that of Blaine County’s rate earlier in the pandemic — which at one point had one of the highest rates in the country, the Idaho Press reported earlier this week.

The week of June 7, Ada County saw 51 COVID-19 cases, according to Central District Health. Last week, Ada County logged 273 cases, and as of late afternoon Friday, 583 cases had been reported for the week in the county.

From the Idaho Press

By TOMMY SIMMONS and MARGARET CARMEL

When newly hired Boise Police Chief Ryan Lee appeared in a video press conference with Boise Mayor Lauren McLean on Wednesday, it marked the first time in the eight-month hiring process that members of the general public could ask him questions about how he views his job.

The mayor’s office announced June 1 it had hired Lee, the services branch chief of the Portland Police Bureau. The announcement followed just one other press release about the hiring process in April, in which McLean’s office declared the field of candidates had narrowed to two people.

Prior to that, an Idaho Press public records request in March revealed the city had four candidates in mind. That was the first time since former chief Bill Bones’ retirement in October that any news about the candidates had been released.

Boise’s approach to hiring a police chief isn’t unusual, but, across the country, some cities are more open than others when it comes to hiring leaders of police departments. Wednesday’s press conference marked the first time Lee answered questions from Boiseans who were not part of a city-selected panel. Other cities have had police chief candidates appear at public forums anyone can attend, to answer questions from city residents — something researchers consider to be a best practice.

That didn’t happen in Boise.

“Selection and vetting and analysis of who is the best person to lead this organization should be done in the most transparent of ways,” Rita J. Watkins, Ph.D., executive director of the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas, told the Idaho Press. “And so … having the opportunity (for residents) to at least share what they think they should have in a police chief is critical for the selection process.”

HISTORY

One of the things McLean pointed out during Wednesday’s video call was the fact that the search for a police chief began before her tenure, when Bones retired in October. That was during then-Mayor Dave Bieter’s leadership of the city. Just after Bones’ retirement, Assistant Police Chief Ron Winegar was appointed acting chief of the department, although former police chief Mike Masterson later took over that role. McLean again put Winegar in charge in April.

In January, almost three months after Bones’ retirement, the city still hadn’t said anything publicly about the search for a new chief. In a Jan. 10 email to Melanie Folwell — McLean’s then-spokeswoman — the Idaho Press listed nine questions it would have for potential candidates and the hiring committee. These included questions such as:

• Are candidates being considered specifically from cities similar to Boise in size/demographic?
• Is the selection committee considering candidates from (or who have worked in) cities that have experienced similar explosive growth to Boise?
• Right now, Boise has a young police department. Almost all of its command staff are new within the past year, or year-and-a-half. Is the committee considering an older candidate or a younger one?
• What would be the candidate’s approach to Boise’s camping ordinance (which prohibits sleeping on the street when there’s room in a shelter)? Would they want to change department policy in any way?
• Masterson had mentioned that in terms of the department mirroring the community’s demographics, women are underrepresented among officers. Would the candidate want to hire more women specifically?

McLean didn’t address those questions in a January interview with the Idaho Press. She declined to say how many applications the city had received for the position, citing it as a personnel matter.

“I’ll be looking for a chief that continues to build on our focus on community policing,” McLean said in January.

She added she would be looking for someone who could “grow and improve upon the record of the department.”

Four panels interviewed Lee — one made up of “professions,” two of community organization leaders, and a fourth of longtime Boise Police Department employees.

OTHER CITIES

Other cities across the country have varied in their police chief search strategies, with many others taking input from the public in community meetings throughout the process or allowing candidates to stand for questions from residents in town halls before the final decision is made.

Alice Fulk, the assistant police chief of the Little Rock Police Department and one of Boise’s four finalists for the police chief position, was also a finalist to lead her current department in the spring of 2019. As part of the process in Little Rock, she was one of four finalists who participated in a town hall where residents could ask questions.

Boise officials have frequently compared Idaho’s capital to Madison, Wisconsin, because of the relatively similar population size. Masterson, the former Boise police chief, first worked for the Madison Police Department. That city started a search for a new police chief in late 2019, just like Boise, and announced plans for a series of four listening sessions for the public to provide input during the process. They were canceled due to COVID-19, but residents could still send in comments to the city to share what they were looking for in a new chief.

Richmond, Virginia, which is nearly identical to Boise in population although the greater metro area is much larger, named a department veteran as the police chief in the summer of 2019 after the city held multiple community meetings to hear input. A survey was also collected. After the input was gathered, applications were accepted and finalists were interviewed and selected by the mayor and city council.

Watkins pointed out the hiring process is entirely within the city council’s control; the body can change the process if it becomes necessary.

“They possess that type of authority because they’ve been elected by the citizens to make the best decisions for their city,” Watkins said. “They should’ve run on that level of trust, they probably got elected on that level of trust. In addition to that though, city officials need to consider … what’s critically going on, and then establish new criteria in reference to that.”

A few years ago, Watkins said, she participated in a dissertation study. In that study, a top reason police chiefs lost their jobs was because they didn’t have a solid working relationship with the community their department policed, Watkins said. Lee said on Wednesday his first priority upon arriving in Boise will be to begin establishing that relationship with the community, as well as with his officers.

But Watkins pointed out community meetings can help a police chief begin to establish that relationship, and sometimes candidates appreciate the opportunity to have those conversations before they’re hired.

“They don’t want to be set up to fail,” Watkins said. “Oftentimes, they want to have the opportunity to talk to the community first because … sometimes they’re being asked to work in another state. They’re relocating not just themselves but sometimes it’s their families. They’re going to other places, so is it going to be a fit?”

During the press conference, McLean called Lee a “partnership-builder.” His philosophy on crowd management — which informed the tactics the Portland Police Bureau used during 2017 and 2018 clashes between antifa and far-right protesters — has drawn both praise and criticism, but one of its core tenets includes building a relationship with the leaders of various protesting groups. Boise has not seen the type of heated, sometimes violent protests Portland has, but during the press conference Lee said building relationships with the community would still be his first priority as police chief, although he also acknowledged concerns about the new coronavirus would make that harder.

Asked if he’d taken steps in Portland to make the police bureau more transparent, Lee cited the data the bureau makes public online.

“People can see how we’re spending overtime for officers,” Lee said. “They can see crime rates in the city. They can see response times. They can see use-of-force data. I believe that level of transparency in the information age is important for policing, because if we’re going to have meaningful conversations with the public about how they want to see policing occur in their city, they need to know the actual data information so we can sit down and have a conversation about how we can best … work toward a solution.”

McLean also referenced transparency in her closing remarks to those on the video call.

“As Chief Lee mentioned today, transparency, open data, community engagement, partnership with the media — all those things are really important to us … here at City Hall,” she said.

From the Idaho Press

by IDOG

After the Idaho Statesman threatened a lawsuit over a denied public records request for nursing home COVID-19 information, and the IDOG board sent a strongly worded letter to Gov. Brad Little, state Health & Welfare Director Dave Jeppesen, and the directors of all seven public health districts in the state about the importance of the releasing the information, the state has agreed to do so.

You can read the IDOG board’s letter here, and here is Director Jeppesen’s response:

“Betsy,

I very much appreciate the email and letter from the IDOG board. 

I wanted to let you know that this afternoon, DHW will issue a press release and publish long term care (LTC) summary statistics for Idaho.  In addition, we will publish a list of all long term care facilities that have had or currently have a COVID-19 outbreak (defined as at least one lab-confirmed or probable COVID-positive case associated with a facility) which will include number of total cases and number of total deaths by facility.  This information will be on the coronavirus.idaho.gov site under the LTC tab.  We plan to update this information weekly.

I believe that what we publish today will address the items and concerns raised in your letter, but I am happy to discuss additional questions or concerns that you or IDOG have after you see what we publish.

The department is committed to open and transparent government.  We also are committed to protecting individuals privacy.  Our challenge on this topic has been balancing those two items, particularly when it comes LTC facilities.  We have been working for some time to find a way to balance both.  We believe we have found a solution that does both, particularly given that (unfortunately) the number of case has increased. 

Thanks again for the letter on this important topic.  I always welcome any outreach, questions or correspondence from you or IDOG.

dave”

Dave Jeppesen
Director
Idaho Department of Health & Welfare
208-334-5500