House Committee Passes Bill to Give $250k to Utah Anti-Public Land Grifter Ken Ivory

UPDATE: The House floor passed HCR 38 at 10:00am March 17. It heads to Senate Committee now. Please use the form at the bottom of this link to send a note to your Senator asking to vote No.

We’ve seen some wild ideas sailing through the Idaho House of Representatives these past few weeks. Adding to the list of bad bills is Representative Judy Boyle’s (R-Midvale) HCR 38. This bill would give Utah’s Ken Ivory $250,000 - that’s Idaho taxpayer dollars - to continue his long career grifting taxpayers to fund his various anti-public land schemes, all of which have fizzled out.

This time around Ivory is peddling his software that appraises public land values as if they were developable private land. Idaho legislators could then use that value to demand money from the government or to forfeit the land. But there are some major flaws with this line of thinking.

The bill’s intent for counties to receive more PILT funding is worthwhile and the Federation has been working with our congressional delegates to explore strategies and funding mechanisms to get more, and reliable, PILT payments to Idaho counties. However, the mechanism in HCR 38 to advocate for PILT funding is flawed. The attempt to get more PILT funding by appraising all federal lands in Idaho will not achieve its desired outcome since the formula set by congress does not account for actual land appraisals.

To quote the Congressional Research Service 2017 report on PILT states:

No precise dollar figure can be given in advance for each year’s PILT authorized level. Five factors affect the calculation of a payment to a given county: (1) the number of acres eligible for PILT payments, (2) the county’s population, (3) payments in prior years from other specified federal land payment programs, (4) state laws directing payments to a particular government purpose, and (5) the Consumer Price Index as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This formula is also recognized in the Federal Lands Interim Committee report to the 63rd Idaho Legislature in 2015. Nowhere in Congressional or in the Idaho legislature’s own research is it stated that PILT funding is based on land appraisals. So, this tech that HCR 38 is trying to fund is not at all applicable to how PILT is calculated, and therefore, will not help with PILT funding. A quarter million dollars is a hefty price tag for a bill that cannot fundamentally accomplish what it is sets out to accomplish.

Contrary to statements in the bill, the federal PILT program was never intended to match the revenue counties could hypothetically receive if public lands were taxable. In fact, nowhere in the federal laws cited in the bill can the term “tax equivalency” be found. Instead, the function of PILT, as stated by the National Association of Counties as of 2019, “helps to defray the costs incurred by counties for services provided to federal employees and their families, the public, and to the users of federal public lands.”

It should be noted that a similar bill in Wyoming to allocate hundreds of thousands of dollars to this exact same effort was just killed on these premises just mentioned. But we have some other vital questions no one on the committee was interested in asking:

Will the state accept competitive bids to ensure wise stewardship of fiscal resources? No. It will not go through the traditional government bidding. Ken Ivory gets what he wants.

Does this resource already exist in Idaho? Yes. The Idaho Association of Counties completed a policy brief in 2018 after a resolution to require the federal government to increase PILT. What they found was, “Statewide, a withdraw from the PILT program in favor of taxes would decrease the county revenue by an estimated $5.5 million”, and, “the current estimates likely overvalue the federal land in terms of taxing, and thus overstating the potential tax revenue counties could levy. In other words, if a more conservative estimate were used, even more revenue could be lost if taxes replaced PILT.”

Does the Federalism Committee have the authority to spend this money? No. It is the Joint Financial Appropriations Committee that sets the state budget. As stated earlier, the Federalism Committee was tied to a fiscal note of $50-$60,000. Now they’re on the hook to spend another $250,000 on top of that, and that’s just for the pilot

Where is the money coming from? No one knows. It came out of thin air.