Craig, fires top 2007 Idaho stories
By JOHN MILLER
Associated Press
Monday, December 31, 2007 11:12 AM PST
BOISE — Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest in a gay sex sting isn’t just Idaho’s biggest story of 2007.
It’s likely the biggest Idaho political story of the last 100 years.
For months after his arrest in a Minneapolis airport bathroom became public Aug. 27 in the political newspaper Roll Call, Craig dominated headlines here and in all the world. The 27-year Republican lawmaker cried foul and said he was the victim of a police probe gone awry, then an error of judgment on his part for pleading guilty.
On Sept. 1, Craig said it was his ‘‘intent’’ to resign; he then reneged on the pledge, saying he could still serve effectively in the U.S. Senate until his term ends in January 2009 while he fights his conviction in court. In distant Germany, Der Spiegel, the news magazine, perked up its ears, headlining one article, ‘‘Larry Craig’s Lust Stall: Airport toilet becomes tourist attraction.’’ In the midst of it all, Craig was named to the ‘‘Idaho Hall of Fame.’’
‘‘It’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ — it just gets ‘curiouser and curiouser,’’’ said Jasper LiCalzi, a professor of political economy at the College of Idaho in Caldwell. It was the culmination of a long, hot summer in which temperatures hit their highest averages in the month of July, fanning wildfires that burned 3,100 square miles, an area a third bigger than the entire state of Delaware.
Residents of the town of Yellow Pine had to cancel their annual harmonica festival, which put some in such a feisty mood that they defied Gov. C.L. ‘‘Butch’’ Otter’s evacuation order in the face of the advancing flames. Nobody was injured. A single fire, the Murphy Complex on the Nevada border, burned 1,000 square miles by itself, torching grazing land and prime sage grouse habitat.
Between the Craig affair, wildfires and blazing heat, 2007 was scorched into the memories of Idaho residents from north to south.
Here are some of the other top 2007 stories for Idaho chosen by The Associated Press:
— Boise State Fiesta: For football fans, Boise State University’s 43-42 overtime win in the Jan. 1 Fiesta Bowl over the University of Oklahoma was filled with memorable moments. First, there was the ‘‘hook and ladder’’ touchdown in the final minute of regulation time, in which Drisan James turned a 15-yard pass into a 50-yard touchdown by lateralling a pass from quarterback Jared Zabransky to Jerard Rabb. Then, running back Ian Johnson turned a ‘‘Statue of Liberty’’ feint into the winning two-point conversion. Finally, Johnson proposed on national TV to cheerleader Chrissy Popadics.
— Hot wings, renovation: Gov. C.L. ‘‘Butch’’ Otter said during his 2006 campaign he was against two underground wings to expand the Idaho Capitol by 100,000 square feet. Even so, many in the Idaho Legislature didn’t think he’d do much about it. They found out otherwise Jan. 12, when Otter ordered work on the project stopped. For 14 days, the staredown brought lawmakers to a near standstill, before a compromise to scale the wings back to half their original size. Workers have dug two giant pits on the east and west ends of the building for the wings. The $120 million expansion and renovation of the 100-year-old Statehouse won’t be done until December 2009.
— Friendly fire: Controversy over a deadly 2003 mission in Iraq in which an Idaho National Guard A-10 tankbuster pilot mistakenly killed a British soldier on the ground erupted into an international incident in late January and early February. The case jumped back into the spotlight because of an ongoing British inquest into Lance Cpl. Matty Hull’s death. The pilots temporarily moved their families out of the region, to avoid some British reporters staking out homes of Guard members near Boise. Idaho military officials say the pilots are visited daily by the tragedy.
— Tragic violence: Idaho was hit by tragedy starting in late March, when David Robert Boss, a 21-year-old from Boise, was found dead early March 31 in his apartment near the University of Idaho in Moscow. Three days later, the body of Bradley Morse, a 25-year-old Boise State University student, was found in a Boise city park pond.
Police arrested John Joseph Delling, a former Boise resident and U of I student, after using cell phone and stolen-car records to link him to the crimes. Delling was later named a suspect in a March 20 shooting, in which a 23-year-old University of Arizona student from Boise was wounded. Delling later said he suffered from mental illness, claiming in an Internet posting that somebody ‘‘put a whole lot of the yellow spinning energy into my solar plexus and then I was sacrificed by possibly a vampire cult as the Sun King or something like that.’’
— Private Prison Blues: On March 4, an Idaho inmate in Texas took a razor blade and slashed his own throat. An investigation following Scot Noble Payne’s death concluded the privately run prison in Dickens County, Texas, where he was held was the worst facility Idaho officials had ever seen. Idaho’s prison director, Brent Reinke, conceded his agency had lost track of just how Idaho inmates were being treated. This is just the latest chapter in the state’s plight to accommodate its growing prison population, at a time when the 7,400 inmates have exceeded the system’s capacity. It kicked off a new debate: Should the Legislature allow private prison companies to build and run new prisons in Idaho, or should the state build those prisons itself? Either way, it will cost Idaho taxpayers millions.
— Water Woes: As nearly eight years of drought, a half-century of groundwater pumping and explosive population growth sap Idaho’s water resources, Gov. C.L. ‘‘Butch’’ Otter got in the game of resolving conflicts with a water summit in April. That kicked off a summer of legal wrangling when two trout farms sued farmers, dairymen and others who pump their water from the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer. Despite threats of shutdowns, the worst was averted by a plan to recharge the aquifer with a total of 64,500 acre-feet of water in late 2007. Otter got back into the action in October when he proposed spending more than half of a $15 million economic-relief fund on five water projects. Lawmakers balked, however, meaning water is destined to be an issue again in the 2008 Legislature.
— Shooting Spree: Late on May 20, Jason Hamilton began a shooting rampage in Moscow. He would fire nearly 300 shots, kill three people including his wife and wound three others. The rampage ended only when the 36-year-old janitor took his own life near the altar inside the university town’s First Presbyterian Church. Hamilton had been in and out of a mental health facility and had told health professionals he planned to kill others before killing himself.
— Job Losses: A year after Boise-based grocer Albertson’s Inc. sold to a Minnesota rival, Idaho’s corporate landscape shrank even further. Washington Group International, the engineering company incorporated in 1923 by Harry Morrison and Morris Knudsen, was taken over by San Francisco-based URS Corp. — but only after URS sweetened its cash-and-stock offer to $3.2 billion to quell a WGI shareholder revolt. Then, AMI Semiconductor Inc., an employer of 850 in Pocatello, agreed in December to be sold for $915 million to ON Semiconductor, a competitor based in Phoenix.
Amid these corporate departures, Micron Technology Inc., the state’s biggest private employer, posted three straight quarters of losses, including a $320 million deficit in fiscal year 2007. More than a tenth of its 10,000 work force near Boise was eliminated, as the maker of computer memory products tried to ease a profit-crushing supply glut by moving more of its production nearer customers in Asia.
— Duncan’s Plea: More than two years after he nearly wiped out the Groene family in a brutal May 2005 attack, convicted killer and sex offender Joseph Edward Duncan pleaded guilty in December to 10 federal charges, including that he kidnapped young Shasta and Dylan Groene, sexually abused them, and then shot Dylan to death in a remote Montana campsite. His plea means Shasta, now 11 years old, won’t have to testify at a federal trial. She also won’t testify at a hearing next April where a jury could decide to put Duncan to death.
Duncan has already pleaded guilty in state court to killing the children’s mother, Brenda Groene; her boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, and 13-year-old Slade Groene at the family home.
