Molly Messick was StateImpact Idaho's broadcast reporter until May 2013. Prior to joining StateImpact and Boise State Public Radio, she was a reporter and host for Wyoming Public Radio. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
To bring one of their herds in for the winter, the Isaak family lured in the cows and calves with hay, then gathered them together in a makeshift corral.
Across the U.S., the price of good quality cropland is soaring, and it’s not just farmers who are driving demand. In an unsteady economy, investors are looking to farm ground as a safe haven. Prices have been highest in the Midwest Corn Belt. Here in Idaho, demand is centered in the Snake River Plain, where farmland has reportedly sold for as much as $10,000 an acre. That’s more than double average values just a few years ago.
Idaho saw a more than 40 percent drop in foreclosure filings from October to November, according to numbers from RealtyTrac, released today. The report shows that one in every 770 housing units in Idaho had a foreclosure filing last month, compared to one in every 432 in October.
Idaho’s 40 percent drop in foreclosure activity is much greater than the national drop of 3 percent. The state’s foreclosure rate has fallen to 16th in the nation. In August, Idaho ranked fifth.
Mike Turner, president of Boise-based Front Street Brokers, believes there’s a clear reason Idaho’s foreclosure rate has dropped. “In Idaho, the foreclosure process is much faster and more streamlined than it is in some other states,” he said. “We’ve had our low point, I think. It was so bad here that most people threw the towel in already.”
According to a Brookings Institution report released today, the housing market began to improve across the West in the third quarter, when home prices showed improvement for the first time since the start of the recession. Still, the report says, prices in Boise remained more than 17 percent below last year’s level.
Medicaid service providers and advocates for people who receive Medicaid voice many concerns about the nearly $35 million cut in state spending approved by the Idaho Legislature early this year. Underlying their anxiety about provider layoffs and service reductions for adult Medicaid recipients is the fact that all of the changes approved in the last legislative session went into state statute. For Katherine Hansen, Executive Director of Community Partnerships of Idaho, that’s a problem. “All of those changes went into law, so now you have to go into law to get those things changed,” she said. “And yet those were things that were proposed as short-term, temporary things to help save.”
Legislators knew, in the 2010 session, they were looking at a Medicaid funding problem. Enrollment was rising, and the federal contribution to Idaho’s program, which temporarily increased thanks to federal stimulus dollars, was scheduled to go back down. So they started the hard work of figuring out how to cut spending. Continue Reading →
To understand the challenges Idaho’s Medicaid program has faced in recent years, it’s important to understand the numbers. As we noted in earlier reporting, Medicaid enrollment has grown by more than 20 percent since 2008.
Source: Idaho Department of Health and Welfare
The result is greater spending. As the graph below illustrates, state Medicaid expenditures peaked in the 2011 fiscal year, which ended in June. That peak came just after the state saw Medicaid enrollment increase by more than 9 percent from 2009 to 2010. It was the largest increase the program had seen in eight years. Continue Reading →
It’s relatively simple to describe the Medicaid cut approved by the Idaho Legislature early this year. State leaders made about $35 million in targeted cuts. That meant fewer federal matching dollars, and a total funding loss of nearly $100 million to the state’s Medicaid program. The economic and personal reverberations are more difficult to tally, but they include job loss and a change in quality of life for some of Idaho’s most vulnerable residents.
Bruce Vladeck, who directed the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs for four years in the 1990s, summed up the Medicaid program this way. “Medicaid isn’t rocket science,” he said. “It’s harder and more expensive.” Years later, a poster echoing those words hangs in Idaho Medicaid Administrator Paul Leary’s office.
It’s true that in the world of social programs, Medicaid is one of the hardest to understand. It’s something of a catch-all program for low-income people, covering broad and divergent needs. Included are healthy children and adults with eligible dependent children, people with disabilities or special health needs, and the elderly. Eligibility, which is income-based, varies according to the category of qualification for the program.
Meridian-based Scentsy has landed a spot on Forbes Magazine’s list of America’s Most Promising Companies. The only other Idaho company to join the no-flame scented candle maker on this year’s list is Idaho Falls-based Deer Valley Trucking, which transports water and oil on North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation.
Scentsy stands out on the Forbes ranking for having the greatest revenue — $381.8 million in the most recent fiscal year. Like Tupperware, Scentsy relies on a direct-sales distribution model. Founded in 2004, the company boasts more than 140,000 home-based independent sales consultants worldwide. In September, Inc.com counted Scentsy among the fastest growing U.S. companies.
Kelly Barker, a single mother from Meridian, has been out of work since April.
Name: Kelly Barker
Age: 46
Unemployed since: April 2011
“Every day that I get in my car to go volunteer, I pray and cross my fingers that it starts, because I don’t have anything to fall back on.”
The Idaho Department of Labor estimates nearly 70,000 people in the state don’t have jobs. That doesn’t include thousands more who are underemployed or have stopped looking for work. This is the latest story in our “Jobless in Idaho” series, that follows several Idahoans in their search for work.
Kelly Barker remembers pleading for her first job. She was twelve years old, and she wanted to buy a Pentax camera. “It was very expensive, and I remember begging for that job at a Tastee-Freez,” she said. “Finally, when the owner got tired of me begging every day, he gave me the job. I’ve worked ever since.”
Nathan Bussey lost his job with Hewlett-Packard three years ago.
Name: Nathan Bussey
Age: 33
Unemployed since: 2008
“I had only been engaged with my wife for about a month when I found out I was getting laid off.”
The Idaho Department of Labor estimates nearly 70,000 people in the state don’t have jobs. That doesn’t include thousands more who are underemployed or have stopped looking for work. This is the latest story in our “Jobless in Idaho” series, following several Idahoans in their search for work.
Nathan Bussey began working for Hewlett-Packard before he’d even graduated from college. He was still a student at Boise State University when he started out in the tech support call center in 1999. By 2005, he’d landed a job as a technical consultant, working on printer installations for Fortune 100 companies all over the country. Then, in 2008, he got bad news. He, like many others on his team, was being laid off.
Fairfield's downtown farmer's market is organized by a couple who say they needed a new source of income after one of them lost a job.
StateImpact’srecent story about Fairfield, in Camas County, described the about-face the town has suffered due to the recession. What it didn’t talk about is the town’s water system. In short, it’s not great. Right now, a water pressure problem allows bacteria to build up, clogging meters, pipes and distribution lines. That can have some unhappy consequences, according to Carleen Herring, vice president of Region IV Development Association.
“They get these little globs of a biofilm, which, for lack of a better phrase, is slime,” she said. “So if you open your faucet in the dark of night to get yourself a glass of water, you’d better let it run for a few minutes or you’re going to have a glass full of ooze.” Continue Reading →
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