Editorial from the Idaho Statesman

Idaho expects, and allows, its 105 citizen legislators to police themselves — to write and enforce their own ethical guidelines.

And that’s one reason why the rules are so weak. It is unrealistic to expect lawmakers to write rules without thinking about what helps or hurts them.

That’s why the Legislature has been slow to follow 47 other states that require lawmakers to disclose their finances. Some people in elected public service would rather keep their private information to themselves — and nobody is in any hurry to make them do otherwise.

That’s why, days after a Senate ethics committee publicly cleared New Plymouth GOP Sen. Monty Pearce of wrongdoing, Republicans passed a rule that will allow senators to review the actions of their colleagues, behind closed doors. Sure, it looks terrible, and compromises the integrity of the process. But when senators are writing the rules, it should come as no surprise that they’d write rules borne of personal convenience.

And that’s why legislators have, so far, been unwilling to close the “revolving door” that allows legislators to move straight into lobbying. As lawmakers repeatedly and reasonably say, no one runs for a $16,116-a-year legislative seat to get rich. Again, it shouldn’t be surprising that they have been reluctant to close the door on more lucrative work.

Which brings us to Boise Democratic Rep. Brian Cronin. A rising star in the state’s minority party and a 41-year-old father of two, Cronin is leaving the Legislature this year, due to financial concerns.

Cronin says he will not apply his four years of legislative experience into lobbying his former colleagues. Cronin’s new employer — Strategies 360, a Seattle-based communications firm — corroborates his account.

Of course, that decision is strictly between Cronin and Strategies 360. The state has no say in the matter, because it has no rules to prohibit Cronin from lobbying.

Legislative Democrats have tended to be the most vocal critics of the rules — and again, that’s no surprise. In a Republican state, Republicans get more opportunities to ride the “revolving door” to a future in lobbying.

But the revolving door is not discriminating: It allows a Republican, or a Democrat, to go from lawmaker to lobbyist in the time it takes to clean out one desk and move into another. The only thing preventing anyone from taking this step is a desire to do the right thing — or, perhaps, just a self-interested concern about appearances.

Appearances do matter. But are Idahoans fed up enough to take matters into their own hands?

They have before. The state only has a campaign contribution disclosure law because Idaho voters approved an initiative in 1974. As legislators dance around the edges of ethics reform, they gradually advance the argument for an ethics initiative.

“Our View” is the editorial position of the Idaho Statesman. It is an unsigned opinion expressing the consensus of the Statesman’s editorial board.

Editorial from the Idaho Statesman

From the Idaho Statesman

I thought something was up last month when retiring Rep. Wendy Jaquet, D-Ketchum, appeared to stray from her party’s position on imposing a one-year cooling-off period before lawmakers and other high officials become lobbyists.

“Let’s say we have a different governor. Where does that staff go? I mean, they need a job. They have families, too,” Jaquet said in reflecting on her 18 years of service, including 10 as minority leader.

I immediately thought of Rep. Brian Cronin, D-Boise, whose decision to leave the Legislature after just four years dimmed what many Democrats considered one of their brightest stars.

Cronin, father of 9-year-old twins, has spent the past decade running a marketing and communications firm. His associate left for another job last fall.

Though he has a master’s from Harvard, Cronin, 41, has made it no secret that supporting his family hasn’t been easy to balance with legislative duties. “I’ve talked candidly with Wendy about my struggles and difficulties with making a living in general for a couple of years now.”

So, when Cronin told me Tuesday that he was taking a job at Strategies 360, which opened a Boise office in 2010, I expected him to confirm a rumor he would become a lobbyist. After all, the two Democrats fired in February by the left-leaning Seattle-based firm were leading lobbyists for the oil and gas industry in the hot fight over regulation.

While just 14 of Idaho’s 376 registered lobbyists are former lawmakers, several are among the heaviest hitters, including Bill Roden, Skip Smyser and Jerry Deckard. Relatives of lawmakers abound, as do former high-level staffers. Connections and an understanding of the process can be “monetized.”

But Cronin said he won’t register as a lobbyist when he starts next week and doesn’t have plans to do so.

“I don’t want to say ‘never,’ but that’s not why they hired me,” Cronin said. “I’m attracted to them because they’re a strategic communications firm. They do marketing, they do branding, they do public relations, they do social media and social networking.”

Paul Queary, spokesman for 360, affirmed Cronin’s account, saying his skills “lend themselves to a different basket of clients.”

Anonymous comments on my Wednesday blog post and a Friday column on Cronin were skeptical. “So how does one go work for a lobbying firm and not register as a lobbyist?” asked one.

“What’s the difference between lobbying and ‘PR consulting’? Just the cost of the lunch tab?” wrote another.

Cronin acknowledged he’ll be doing policy work but said that doesn’t require him to lobby.

“You can be a PR consultant and not necessarily get into the definition of lobbying,” said Secretary of State Ben Ysursa, who enforces the law. “Sometimes it is a fine line. Our view as a disclosure office is: When in doubt, register and report. Nobody’s ever been fined or convicted for overreporting.”

In fact, no one’s ever been convicted under the law’s misdemeanor provision, which requires willful violation. Civil fines are small — Monsanto’s Trent Clark paid $100 this year for not registering on time — and typically come for filing late spending reports. Failing to register is rare, Ysursa said.

Ysursa is amused by the criticism of Cronin, saying, “The cart’s about five feet in front of the horse here, isn’t it? They’re anticipating he will lobby and won’t register. I don’t know how you anticipate a breach.”

Ysursa said he believes compliance is solid: “There’s a lot of self-policing. We’ll hear something from somebody else, obviously somebody who’s mad. I think there will be a lot of scrutiny of Mr. Cronin’s activities.”

Cronin plans to finish his term, which ends Dec. 1. After that, there is no legal bar to him lobbying. Democrats have called for personal financial disclosure without unilaterally revealing their income and assets.

But if Cronin hopes to preserve his prospects to return to the Legislature or seek higher office, he would be far better off not becoming a lobbyist.

Even 38 years after the disclosure law passed, the association of lobbyists calls itself “Idaho Legislative Advisors,” Ysursa noted.

“There’s still the old scarlet letter associated with the word ‘lobbyist,’ ” Ysursa said.

Dan Popkey: 377-6438

From the Idaho Statesman

From the Associated Press

Medical care is so poor at an Idaho state prison that it amounts to neglect and cruel and unusual punishment, according to a report that was unsealed Monday.

Correctional health care expert Dr. Marc Stern said there have been some improvements at the Idaho State Correctional Institution south of Boise. But terminal and long-term inmates sometimes went unfed, nursing mistakes or failure likely resulted in some deaths, and one inmate wasn’t told for seven months that he likely had cancer, he said.

The Idaho Department of Correction and the prison health care provider, Brentwood, Tenn.-based Corizon, said they’re disappointed and are preparing a response that will show the care delivered to inmates meets constitutional and health care standards.

Stern was appointed to study the care prison near Boise as part of a long-running lawsuit brought by inmates. A federal judge is expected to consider the report as he decides whether to allow the lawsuit to continue or bring it to a close.

Some of the medical problems described in the report are disturbing, including Stern’s findings that inmates who were terminal or required long-term care and who were unable to move on their own were sometimes left in soiled linens, given inadequate pain medication and went periods without food and water. Stern said those conditions were “inhumane.”

Emergency care was also found deficient in the report, with medical staffers routinely failing to bring parts of a basic resuscitation device — a ventilator mask for rescue breathing — to inmates experiencing medical emergencies. Prison guards reported to Stern that they sometimes had to call the health staffers multiple times to get them to respond to inmate emergencies, and sometimes the nurses only responded by phone, telling the guards to have the inmates request care the following day.

In another case described by Stern, a nurse who found an inmate unconscious and having serious breathing problems didn’t take any other vital signs and failed to give the man oxygen.

“Such evaluation was critically important at this point because it was highly likely the patient was not getting enough blood to his brain and required resuscitation,” Stern wrote.

Instead, he contends, the nurse moved the patient to the health unit and only assessed him a few minutes later, when he was having a heart attack. The patient died.

“It is impossible to know if immediate application of life saving measures in the living unit would have saved this patient,” Stern wrote. “However, failure to provide these measures greatly reduced any chance for survival.”

The report focuses only on the Idaho State Correctional Institution, though Corizon provides medical care for all inmates in Idaho’s state-run prisons.

Inmates at the Idaho State Correctional Institution, called ISCI, sued more than 30 years ago, alleging that they were subject to violence and rape by fellow inmates, denied adequate medical care, subjected to poor diets and forced to deal with extreme overcrowding.

Over the next three decades, they won several rulings designed to improve conditions at the prison, and the federal court continued to oversee operations to make sure that the state was complying with all of its orders.

But U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill is eager to end the court’s babysitting role, and the Idaho Department of Correction hopes the lawsuit will be closed for good. The inmates, however, said some of the rulings still aren’t being complied with — particularly the orders to improve access to medical and mental health care.

Complicating matters is that the prison has grown and changed over the years, and the state now says it’s difficult to apply the old rulings to the facility as it now stands.

Attorneys for the state argued against releasing the report, saying the public could confuse Stern’s findings with the court’s opinion. The state said the report should be sealed until both sides had responded to the findings in court.
Corizon is not named as a defendant in the case. But in a joint statement released moments after the report was unsealed Monday, officials from the company and the state acknowledged a few of the allegations in the report “may be well-founded but unfortunate anomalies” but most of them have been or are being addressed.

“We are particularly puzzled by the Special Master’s report because it contradicts a recent (June, 2010) accreditation study of the Idaho Department of Correction by the highly respected National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC). Their very thorough study found our care to exceed compliance with national healthcare guidelines,” the organizations said in the statement.

Officials with Corizon released a statement taking issue with Stern’s findings. The company said Stern inappropriately used legal language and made conclusions that were totally unsupported by the facts.

“The recent Special Master’s report regarding healthcare at the Idaho State Correctional Institution (ISCI) is an incomplete, misleading and erroneous representation of the current healthcare delivery system. The flawed report totally undermines the hard work and trust developed between the Idaho Department of Correction, Corizon and our inmate patients,” the company said.

Stern’s review process was biased, incomplete and based on anecdotes related to a few, isolated incidents, the company maintained.

Corizon said it’s so confident of the quality of care that it has contracted with an auditor to review Stern’s methodology and asked the National Commission on Correctional Health Care to return to Idaho and perform a “thorough review in compliance with the court’s instructions, at Corizon’s expense.”That audit will occur on April 2 and 3, the company said.

From the Associated Press

From Eye on Boise/The Spokesman-Review

“The sunshine of disclosure cleanses your interest,” Deputy Attorney General Brian Kane told the Senate Ethics Committee this morning, “because now it puts everyone on notice that you have competing interests within a piece of legislation, meaning you have interests as a private citizen, and you also have interests within the public trust. It lets everyone know, ‘This is where my legislator is coming from.’ And then they can make an appropriate decision as to whether the legislator has appropriately quantified and represented … that interest.”

The decision then “comes home to roost at the ballot box,” Kane said, when voters can decide, with all the information, whether they believe a legislator is appropriately representing them. You can read my full story here at spokesman.com on the Senate Ethics Committee convening for the first time in seven years.

From Eye on Boise/The Spokesman-Review

From the Associated Press

By REBECCA BOONE, Associated Press

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday set a deadline for unsealing an expert’s report on medical care for inmates at an Idaho correctional facility, saying opposing lawyers for the state and prisoners have one week to agree on a statement to accompany the findings.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill appointed the expert to create the report as part of his effort to bring a decades-old lawsuit between the state and inmates at the Idaho State Correctional Institution to a close. Correctional health care expert Dr. Marc Stern filed the report under seal last month.

Attorneys for the state argued that the report should remain sealed until both sides have a chance to contest it, because otherwise, they said, the public could wrongly assume Stern’s findings amounted to a court order.

But during a hearing Thursday, Winmill said the public’s right to know outweighed the state’s concern. He gave both sides one week to agree on wording for a stamp to put on each page of the report stating that it isn’t the court’s official ruling, and said after that, it would be unsealed.

Though still under seal, it’s clear the report isn’t flattering to the state. Deputy Idaho Attorney Generals Mark Kubinski and Colleen Zahn told the court that it contained inflammatory statements that if released, would be likely to cause an “unjustified public scandal.”

Zahn told Winmill that the state needed a chance to “provide information that shows the conclusions in that report are very inaccurate.”

But Jason Prince, an attorney with law firm Stoel Rives, which is representing the inmates, noted that Stern was ordered by the court to research and review the medical care at the prison and file his report under penalty of perjury. Just because the information Stern found might embarrass the state was no reason to seal it, Prince argued.

The lawsuit began in the early 1980s when so many inmates from the Idaho State Correctional Institution began filing lawsuits that the cases threatened to clog Idaho’s federal dockets. The judge presiding over the lawsuits at that time noted similarities between them and combined them all into one class-action lawsuit, which became known as the “Balla case” after lead plaintiff Walter Balla.

Several rulings against the state were handed down over the next three decades, with various federal judges ordering Idaho leaders to stop prison overcrowding, reduce violence, provide prisoners with warm clothes and improve access to medical and mental health care.

But the case kept bouncing back to the federal courts as inmates maintained problems at the prison continued. Most recently, the complaints have focused on medical and mental health care — a premise that seemed to be at least partly supported by the state’s own decision in recent years to fine its medical care provider more than $382,500 for failing to meet some health care requirements set by the state.

The state contends that the Idaho State Correctional Institution has changed dramatically in both its physical facilities and operations over the past several years and that rulings in the long-running lawsuit are increasingly difficult to apply to the prison as it stands today.

Idaho officials contend that if there are still problems at ISCI, the inmates should file new lawsuits that would accurately reflect the present circumstances.
Winmill appointed Stern last year to review health care at the prison so that he can review the findings in deciding whether to end the Balla case or continue court oversight.

From the Associated Press

From the Associated Press

By Rebecca Boone, Associated Press

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — State prison officials say a report on health care and other conditions at an Idaho prison is so inflammatory that it must remain sealed.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill appointed a correctional health care expert to see if Idaho is complying with a ruling in a long -running lawsuit brought by inmates at the Idaho State Correctional Institution.

Marc Stern’s report was filed under seal last month, and the judge ordered attorneys on both sides to review the document to see if any information should be redacted to protect health privacy concerns.

Though they agreed no such redactions were needed, the state says the report should be sealed anyway because the public could mistakenly believe it amounted to the opinion of the court, leading to an “unjustified public scandal.”

From the Associated Press

From the Associated Press

A group of severely disabled Idahoans is suing the state after the Idaho Department of Health & Welfare cut their Medicaid benefits by as much as 40 percent, then refused to tell them why, saying its formula for the benefits is a “trade secret,” and therefore exempt from release under the Idaho Public Records Law, the AP reports; the secrecy makes it nearly impossible for the patients to appeal the decisions. Click below for a full report from AP reporter Rebecca Boone.

Some Medicaid clients sue Idaho over budget cuts
By REBECCA BOONE, Associated Press

From the Idaho Press-Tribune

CANYON COUNTY – The Idaho Supreme Court, in a ruling filed Thursday, said financial documents related to John Bujak’s contract with the city of Nampa for prosecuting services were indeed public record.

Newly elected Nampa City Council member Bob Henry, who sued Bujak and Canyon County to see the records, said Thursday that the decision is a significant victory.

The high court, however, did not award Henry attorney fees.

The court ruled that Bujak’s financial documents relating to payments for services his office provided to the city of Nampa should have been available for public scrutiny, the county was not required “to obtain records that it had never prepared, owned, used or retained.”

Canyon County Prosecutor Bryan Taylor also called the decision a win for the county, but looks beyond what happened before he was appointed county prosecutor after Bujak resigned in September 2010.

“My task since taking office has been to move beyond these issues,” Taylor said. “I think we’ve done that, in a way which is aggressively transparent and above politics. One of my primary objectives since I have been appointed as the prosecutor is to make sure this sort of thing does not happen again.  Politics and law make uneasy bedfellows and that is a lesson my administration has taken to heart.”

Henry said the ruling also “vindicates the interests of the citizens of Canyon County” in four ways:

1. The prosecution services contract was a public contract and Bujak’s performance of the contract was the public’s business,

2. That payments from the city of Nampa to Bujak did not make the payments his personal money,

3. That records regarding public moneys cannot be shielded from public scrutiny just because the Canyon County commissioners agreed to have hundreds of thousands of dollars deposited into Mr. Bujak’s personal bank account

4. That the Canyon County commissioners always had the statutory power to demand an audit and the records from Mr. Bujak, but the commissioners simply decided not to use that power for the benefit of the public.

“As I stated previously, my goal in pursuing the appeal was to establish case law that help prevent future misuses of public funds,” Henry said.  “(The) opinion satisfies that goal.”

John Bujak criminal case update

Canyon County’s former prosecutor was arrested Dec. 13 on charges of embezzlement by and theft by deception charges. He is accused of taking $236,000 in money that should have gone to Canyon County.

The funds, according to an affidavit filed in 3rd District Court, came from a trust account Bujak used to deposit money from the city of Nampa for nonfelony prosecution services performed by the county.

Bujak said because the contract was private he owed the county nothing.

A preliminary hearing for Bujak’s case is set for 9 a.m., Jan. 25 before Magistrate Judge James Peart.

Bujak bonded out of jail but must wear an electronic GPS device and stay in the 3rd and 4th judicial districts. He also surrendered his passport.

From the Idaho Press-Tribune

From the Associated Press

A federal judge has refused to unseal a settlement agreement between an Idaho inmate and a private prison company involving allegations of rampant violence at a lockup near Boise known as “Gladiator School.”

The Associated Press had asked the court to unseal the settlement between Marlin Riggs and Corrections Corp. of America.

However, U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge said Wednesday the interests of Riggs and the company in keeping the settlement confidential outweighed the interest the public has in learning its terms.

The AP’s West regional editor, Traci Carl, said the news organization’s attorneys were reviewing the ruling and considering the legal options.

“The AP is disappointed with the ruling and believes the public has a right to know the terms of the settlement,” Carl said.

Neither Riggs’ attorney James Huegli nor CCA’s attorney Kirtlan Naylor immediately returned messages from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Riggs initially asked for $55 million in damages, saying the Idaho Correctional Center was nicknamed “Gladiator School” and that guards knew Riggs was about to be attacked but failed to protect him.

The AP contended the lawsuit raised profound and far-reaching issues of public interest. In his written ruling, Lodge acknowledged that the operation of a prison raises issues of public concern, but he said he feared releasing the document would place Riggs at risk for intimidation or assault in prison. He also said future litigants would be discouraged from participating in judicially supervised settlement conferences if they believed the outcome could be made public.

The judge also noted that a settlement agreement in a “companion lawsuit” between other inmates at the prison and CCA was released to the public. In that case, the inmates were alleging the same types of civil rights violations that Riggs claimed, but they didn’t ask the court for any monetary damages. Instead, the inmates wanted changes to the way the prison is run — and in the settlement agreement, CCA agreed to make those changes, though the company did not acknowledge any guilt or liability. Both CCA and the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, which was representing the inmates, agreed to make that settlement public.

“The present case now involves only a single prisoner seeking monetary damages for an assault,” Lodge wrote. “The public’s interest in knowing the precise terms of his agreement with CCA is outweighed by the parties’ interest in confidentiality as a means of minimizing the serious risks that the Court has found to exist.”

From the Associated Press