Independent. Experienced. Integrity.
Priorities.
Planning with Purpose.
Valley County is one of the most remarkable places in Idaho, and like many Idaho communities, it is growing quickly. Every decision we make about land use is a decision about our water, our wildlife, our working lands, and our way of life. Growth isn't the problem. Growing without a plan is. Right now, too many land use decisions are made one parcel at a time. An application comes in, the county responds, and we move to the next one. Nobody's asking the bigger question: what does this decision, added to the last twenty, mean for our ground water? For big game winter range? For the ranch down the road that's trying to stay a ranch. By the time we notice the cumulative effect, the decisions have already been made. Resource-based planning flips that around. It means we start with the ground itself. Before we approve, deny, or condition a project, we should have real information in front of us about what is actually there. This isn't about adding red tape. It's about giving our Planning and Zoning commission, our staff, our commissioners, and the public the information they need to make good calls the first time. Good data protects property owners too. Clear standards, applied consistently, means applications know where they stand before they spend money, and current residents know what can--and cannot--be built next door. When standards are vague and can be inconsistently applied, it is the neighbors who absorb the consequences. Nobody voted for those costs. We just inherit them. The bottom line. We don't get a second Payette Lake, or a second Cascade Reservoir, or a second stretch of the North Fork. The water, the wildlife, and the open country that make Valley County the spectacular place it is are not renewable if we spend them. Planning with a purpose mean we make our choices deliberately and honestly--with the best information we have, in the open, and with our best future in mind.
Investing with Intent.
Valley County's budget is finite, and support from the state and federal government keeps shrinking. Yet, Valley County's obligations are growing. Roads, bridges, and culverts age. Public safety costs rise. That means we can't do everything. But it doesn't mean we get to stop being deliberate. It means the opposite. When there is less to spend, how we spend it matters more. Investing with intent means asking three questions before we commit a dollar. Who does it actually serve? What does it cost us later? What's the cost of not doing it? Running a county is not the same as running business. Business experience is a fine thing to have. I'd never argue otherwise. A commissioner should be able to read a balance sheet or negotiate a contract. But I want to be plain about an important difference. A business exists to spend money in order to make more money. That's not a criticism -- its a definition. A business invests capital, an the investment is judged by the monetary return. If a product line doesn't pay, you cut it. If a location isn't profitable, you close it. Everyone one of those things is the right decision, if you're running a business. Now, run a county that way. Maintaining and plowing the road up the canyon serving nine households will never pay for itself. The senior who needs a courthouse elevator, the family whose kid rids a school bus over a bridge the county is responsible for, the neighbor who calls 911 at two in the morning--none of that pencils out. There is no return on investment. There never will be. And the county must do it anyway. A business chooses its customers. A county doesn't choose its residents. That single difference changes everything about what a "good investment" means. So what does "intent" mean, if not return? It means we spend public money the way you'd spend money you were holding in trust for a neighbor--carefully, transparently, and with a clear account of what it bought. It means maintaining the infrastructure we have before we expand. It means budgeting in public, in plain language, so that residents should be able to see what we're spending, on what, and why. It means planning for cuts we can see coming. And it means measure what we said we'd deliver. I'll bring discipline to the county's budget. I'll ask hard questions about every dollar, and I'll expect a real answer.
Building Opportunity.
Valley County has an economy that a lot of places would envy. People come here from all over to ski, to fish, to float, to get married on the lake. That business is real, and I'm not interested in running it off. But we all know what it looks like from the inside. It looks like a restaurant that can't open five nights a week because it can't staff five nights a week. It looks like a teacher, a deputy, a nurse commuting an hour each way because there's nothing here they can afford. It looks like a neighborhood that's full in August and dark in November. It looks like a young person who grew up here, wants to stay here, and can't figure out how. Those aren't impressions. They're in the state's own numbers. Leisure and hospitality is the largest employer in Valley County — about 1,718 jobs, roughly a third of everything. It is also the lowest-paying sector we have, at an average wage of $33,695 against a countywide average of $52,349. And it's where the growth went: of all the jobs this county added between 2014 and 2024, more than four in ten came in that one low-wage sector. Meanwhile, of the people who work in Valley County, about 2,128 of them live somewhere else. That's roughly two out of every five jobs here, held by someone who drives in from Riggins, Council, or the Treasure Valley, and drives home again. And be careful with the number they'll show you Someone will tell you Valley County is doing fine, and they'll have a statistic to prove it: per capita personal income here was $71,881 in 2024, higher than Idaho's $62,323 and nearly level with the national figure. Look closer. Per capita personal income counts investment income, retirement income, and property income. It measures who owns in Valley County. It does not measure what work pays in Valley County — and the average wage here is $52,349, with a poverty rate of 11.7 percent. Both things are true at once. That's the whole problem in a sentence. What diversification actually means It doesn't mean chasing a factory. It doesn't mean handing public money to whoever promises jobs and a ribbon-cutting. We've all watched that movie. It means widening the base of what a person can do here for a living, and making sure the wages from it stay here. The county's job isn't to pick winners. It's to build the conditions. I've said elsewhere that I don't think a county should be run like a business. That applies here too. It is not my job to decide which company deserves your tax dollars. It is my job to make sure the things only a county can do get done — so that opportunity has somewhere to land. The bottom line I don't measure prosperity by how many people move here. I measure it by how many people can afford to stay. Growth will keep coming to Valley County. The question in front of us is whether it builds something for the people already here — or whether it just prices them out of the place they built. I'm running to make sure it's the first one.