Why people abhor government: Pocatello, Idaho. A case study.

All politics is local. My small town in the northern Rockies is a microcosm of the growing disillusionment with government at all levels.

I have lived in Pocatello, Idaho, longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life—well over three decades. I love Pocatello. But we have issues. Pocatello should be, based on location, quality of life, and physical beauty, the urban equivalent of a luxury SUV tooling down a superhighway towards a promising golden horizon. We are, instead, a Yugo with a slipping clutch and a transmission that, when engaged, only works in reverse.

Pocatello is the home of Idaho State University, where I was a faculty member for 24 years. I came to Pocatello to work at ISU. When I moved here in the early 90’s, ISU was ascending. At that time, Pocatello had three busy malls, a wonderful variety of local and national chain restaurants, nightlife, plenty of shopping, and a vibrant downtown. There were some quality of life issues associated with local industries, but those were in the process of being mitigated. The future looked bright.

With a growing regional university, several large private employers, and easy access to world-class trails, climbing, cycling, skiing, and just about any other activity I could think of, I was certain that Poky was destined to be the next “place to be” in the Intermountain West. But that never panned out. The signs and portents were everywhere for anyone with the time and insight to take notice. I should have seen it coming.

Pocatello is the unlikeliest college town imaginable. There is none of the funkiness and entrepreneurial spirit surrounding the ISU campus that is a ubiquitous feature of college towns elsewhere. Where the campus ends, neighborhoods immediately begin. Unless you are within half a block of ISU, you’d never know that a college campus was just down the street.

The worst leaders and administrators that bad dreams are capable of conjuring have been running ISU for almost the entirety of my time here. ISU, which is perennially situated near the bottom of nearly all good higher education rankings, has demonstrated again and again that no bar is too low. ISU is where dreams associated with the college experience go to die. It’s been in a doom spiral for decades, and it appears to me to be headed for community college status in the near future. A decline funded on the taxpayer dole.

While most of the other major employers here in Pocatello are good to the community, not all of them are. There are, on the up side, some businesses here that not only provide good jobs and services but also sponsor community events and give generous support to local charities and nonprofits. Others seem to pride themselves on being as difficult to exist with as possible. It’s a mixed bag.

School District 25, another taxpayer funded entity, occupies whatever level is below godawful. Every parent in the area should be screaming for more charter schools (many are). When your greatest claim to fame on the national stage is firing a lunch lady a few days before Christmas because she gave a free meal to a needy kid, you just kind of suck.

The reason that Pocatello, despite having many of the attributes needed to be an upscale little city, has failed to that which it aspires, is weak, incompetent, and utterly self-serving local leadership. From ISU to SD-25 to the city government, not-ready-for-prime-time players run the show around here. Whether you're a business owner or a student, investing in Pocatello means you won't have the luxury of going to bed each night feeling secure in the knowledge that the best and brightest are looking after your interests. That’s because the powers that be here in Pocatello are piss poor.

I will visit with you concerning bits of the rich history of incompetence and self-dealing in local politics, but I first want to touch upon the outrage du jour.

I understand how our local government works, from streets and roads to signage to building permits, because I served as Chair of the Pocatello Community Development Commission—essentially the planning and zoning board—for several years. I was appointed to the CDC by Mayor Peter Angstadt in the mid-1990s. Mayor Angstadt was an excellent public servant who understood the important role of city government in helping a healthy community thrive. After Mayor Angstadt, it’s been nearly all downhill.

Pocatello is located in a valley that runs roughly 5 miles south to north from the Portneuf Gap to the Snake River Plain and is split east and west by a large Union Pacific railroad facility. There are only three ways across the railroad yard in the valley. The Center Street underpass, one of them, is where the majority of traffic entering the downtown business district on the west side of the railroad yard from I-15 on the east uses.

This year, members of our congressional delegation helped Pocatello obtain the funds to perform long-overdue maintenance on the Center Street underpass—something that was in discussion when I was on the CDC decades ago. The underpass was closed during the spring, and the road surface was removed. This closure deprived downtown merchants of a traffic artery that is vital for commerce. This closure went into effect with short notice but also with the understanding that the project would provide minimal interruption, taking, at best, a few weeks, or, at worst, a couple of months, to complete.

That was several months ago. The Center Street underpass is currently closed with no work having been done in months. The reason for this is that the City of Pocatello did not have the authority to work on the underpass, which passes beneath the Union Pacific rail yards, without obtaining permits from the railroad, which they failed to do. When the Union Pacific Railroad showed up with what was, in essence, a cease-and-desist order, the city simply abandoned the project apparently until the conditions were right for the proper permits to fall out of the sky like manna from the heavens.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened around here—even recently. We currently have construction on a major intersection in the northern part of the city that’s been on hold for weeks because someone in the city apparently forgot to order traffic lights. We have a major land development on the north side of town that’s been beset with many irregularities. And downtown merchants have definitely seen this show before. About a decade ago, the city closed Main Street for sewer work. The work took months instead of weeks, and several long-term businesses had to close for good.

Right now, the traditional tourist traffic in downtown Pocatello has come to a screeching halt. Business owners tell me that they are down by as much as 70% from last summer. Several are weeks away from shutting their doors. As a musician who plays in downtown Pocatello, I can personally attest to the fact that venues that are normally vibrant and filled with customers are now nearly empty. It’s an untenable situation. I saw the first going out of business sale last week. There will be more.

None of this is due to an act of God or on account of unforeseen circumstances. This is entirely due to the rank incompetence and dereliction of duty among city officials. Why, you ask? Well, around here we have basically two classes of public officials, the ones who hail from the dominant social group in this area, who are incompetent, and the children of lesser gods who are, for the most part, equally incompetent. In terms of public service, you’ll be looking around for a while to find anyone outside of the business community who knows what the hell they are doing in Pocatello, ID no matter what social clique they are from.

One of the things that I find most appalling about the current unforced error is the attitude of city officials towards downtown merchants-which is that they should stop whining. There is no evident sympathy, nor any plan in place to make whole the downtown merchants that Pocatello city government has screwed.

Right now, the mayor of Pocatello, Brian Blad, should resign, along with the entire city council. Their last official act ought to be firing the city planners responsible for this debacle. It probably won’t change anything, since the next group is likely to be just as clueless as this one, but principle matters.

I’m not holding my breath. This is largely the same coterie of clueless not-ready-for-prime-time-players who, a few years ago lectured us about anti-Muslim bias when ISU recruited thousands of students from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait who subsequently wreaked havoc on rental property all over the city. This is the same cabal who have green lit a massive land development project on the city’s north side that is in some difficulty. The same fools who loaned out city equipment to surrounding towns when our own streets were in dire need of repair. The same group of idiots who thought that a Chinese solar panel manufacturing facility was going to be the answer to everyone’s economic dreams.

How do we get such leaders? Well, for one thing, just like in national politics, the benches are pretty thin. For another, there’s not a lot of real competition around here for leadership positions. There’s a dominant social caste here and if you are part of the club, everyone supports you whether you are an idiot or not. It’s part of a great empire of you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours worked out on Sundays. The rest of us gentiles and philistines might as well not exist. A great number of the downtown merchants, BTW, fit this description. If they weren’t, this mess would have been fixed a long time ago.

This, in a nutshell, is why people abhor government. We pay taxes for services that suck and to pay salaries to government officials who are often unresponsive to those they deem not worthy of attention. We happen to have a particular wrinkle on that around here, but the phenomenon is widespread, just for different reasons. If you want to understand why political figures like Donald Trump are so popular, just check out Mayor Brian Blad and the Pocatello city government. I’d rather support Nicky Taysom, a lady who shows up to city council meetings to protest various things. When she’s there, despite her issues, she’s the smartest person in the room.

Yo, city government. Think I’m wrong? Think I’m too hard on you? Think that you actually have everything running like a well-oiled machine?

Prove it.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.