BOISE, Idaho — Sometimes in the law, there can be inconsistency or maybe even a gap. Like the rest of the country, Idaho has a comprehensive set of laws that goes into deep detail, and sometimes, things slip through.
“It's unfair that the attorney general has the authority to investigate elected officials who are county elected but not city elected,” said Rep. Bruce Skaug of Nampa.
Rep. Skaug realized a gap in the law could create conflict-of-interest issues at the local level, so he drafted House Bill 390 which was first introduced on Jan. 12. The proposed bill would expand the power of the Attorney General to be able to investigate elected city officials.
“We get calls all the time about issues with city elected officials and other people. And we always have to explain we don't have the authority to do that,” said Idaho AG Raul Labrador.
Labrador explains that a few years ago, the legislature gave the AG power to look into illegal activity at the county level, but it didn’t extend to the city level. As it stands, County prosecutors investigate the city level. But, that can get tricky for practical reasons.
“These cases are hard. And when you're a local prosecutor, you don't always want to be investigating people that you work with. You don't want to investigate, you know, the city officials that maybe you're working with or the county officials that you're working with,” Labrador said.
Skaug is working closely with the AGs office on the idea, they see the same issues. Practical issues.
“That's uncomfortable to some, but for somebody to blow a whistle when there's something inappropriate, when they're working with that fellow all the time or woman who's a prosecutor, that they there's a tendency to not investigate,” Skaug said.
What do County prosecutors think? If passed, the law would assign their current jurisdiction to the AG.
KTVB reached out to some county prosecutors, including Grant Loebs, who is the Twin Falls Prosecutor and a board member of the Idaho Prosecuting Attorneys Association.
Loebs said on House Bill 390, he has no objection. Like Skaug and Labrador, he has a similar concern with the current law.
“Because of the inherent conflicts of interest that often arise when local prosecutors are asked to investigate and prosecute local officials whom they may know and work with. There is always the potential implication by one party or another that the local prosecutor is being to hard, or too soft, on an official they may know,” Loebs wrote in an email to KTVB.
There has been chatter about two lines in the legislation that would be crossed out in the Idaho Code, dealing with investigations into open meeting laws. Labrador explains that this is really a "clean-up" of code.
“When this law was initially drafted for county elected officials, it said that we would investigate civil and criminal activity, but there was an exception to not investigating open meeting law violations at the county level. Apparently, a couple of years ago, they withdrew the section that said that this was a civil investigation also and its only criminal investigation. So that language was just not necessary anymore because open meetings, law violations are civil. They're not criminal,” Labrador said.
The proposed law would also open the door for corrective action instead of jail and fines at the city level as it currently does with county elected officials.
“We have an investigation right now that on a county elected official where I think the conclusion is going to be that there shouldn't be any kind of prosecution, but there's going to be some training and some corrective actions. And I think that's really important because I think sometimes people make mistakes that are not criminal in nature, But if nobody's looking at them, then those things don't get corrected,” Labrador said.
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