Little a good fit for Shoshone County?

KELLOGG — Last week, Idaho lieutenant governor and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brad Little stopped in Kellogg as part of a GOP bus tour through North Idaho.

Little had time for a brief interview with the News-Press on Friday and was able to answer some questions that could provide insight into the political veteran’s hopes, particularly for the northern part of the state.

Little, 64, has been involved in Idaho state politics since 2001, when he was appointed by former Gov. Dirk Kempthorne to fill a vacancy in the Idaho Senate in May of that year.

He was subsequently re-elected to that spot four times.

In May, Little pulled in an astounding 72,518 votes in the GOP primary, good for more than 37 percent of the Republican votes and just shy of 28 percent of the total votes for the entire state.

In the interview, Little expressed that he has a deep appreciation for North Idaho, as he attended the University of Idaho in Moscow and has familial ties to the Genesee area.

“I’ve spent a lot of time up here on just family issues,” Little said. “I’ve had statewide leadership roles up here in business and education, as well as agriculture. I’ve spent a lot of time working with the Silver Valley in business and philanthropy, so I am not a stranger to this area.”

Little’s work in his family’s ranching business catapulted him into a career in the agricultural industry, which allowed him to interact and build relationships with the heads of the Silver Valley’s mining and timber industries.

With the race seemingly tightening up according to pollsters, both candidates have had to reach into their political bags to sway voters from across the aisle, and Little is standing on the principles that have kept him in office for the last two decades.

“I urge folks to take a look at my record,” Little said. “You can ask any of the Democrats who represented this area and they’ll tell you how well I got along with them and how well I treated them and that I valued their opinions. But, no matter whether you’re Democrat or Republican, if you’re elected from an area, then you are their representative. That’s very important to remember, especially if you’re elected governor.”

With that in mind, Little has striven to make himself as available as possible to anyone with any concerns and respectfully tries to help them as best he can.

Little has taken notice of one of Shoshone County’s most polarizing situations, the ongoing strike at the Lucky Friday Mine between the United Steelworkers Union and Hecla Mining Corporation, and he is saddened that the state he hopes to represent is losing hardworking tradesmen.

“The strike makes me sad in a lot of ways,” he said. “It makes me sad, mainly, for the families that are struggling. It makes me sad that these highly skilled workers are leaving the state and finding work somewhere else. We have such a skills problem here in Idaho and I hate the thought of losing these highly skilled miners as they find work outside the state. These folks were one of the highest paid in the state of Idaho, I keep thinking either the market will go up or one side will be willing to sit down. I don’t think it’s fair for the governor to weigh in other than to urge the parties involved to get together and resolve it. Because for the good of the state, it needs to be resolved. We have this incredible investment that Hecla has made in that mine and that needs to be back online. Those families also deserve to have some assurity.”

If he is voted in, one of the main issues Little plans to focus on is education. Idaho has consistently ranked low in this category on a comparative national scale.

“I think we need to keep the trajectory that we’ve got now, where we have this consensus between parents, educators, school trustees, the Legislator and the business community on continuing to aid the career ladder to compensate our professionals in the classroom,” he said.

His plan to do this is at the conclusion of the current education plan next year, he wants to build a new five-year education plan that will give teachers the tools to teach in each specific school district.

“What works in Kellogg will darn sure be different than what works in St. Maries, or Dietrich, or Rexburg.”

In the classroom, Little wants to place an emphasis on students reaching reading proficiency by the end of the third grade.

Little believes this can be done by using the framework of Idaho’s current Core standards — a program he says is much different than the federal Common Core standards.

“They (Idaho Core standards) aren’t Common Core,” he said. “They are the handy work of parents and teachers in Idaho.”

“Nothing’s perfect and we need to continue to make it better, but they are widely acclaimed amongst our educators and they’re not a federal curriculum,” he added.

One of Idaho’s fiercest battlegrounds has been concerning the legalization of marijuana.

In a interview with the SNP earlier this year, Little voiced his thoughts and concerns on the subject.

Idaho has held out on passing any sort of legislation that would decriminalize the use or possession of the substance, despite it being surrounded by states that have in one way or another.

Little stated that he is against recreational use, but is open to the idea of medicinal marijuana and CBD oil — so long as it is controlled properly.

Referring to a group of epileptic children he visited the previous week in Caldwell, he said, “this CBD oil is making a big difference in their life and we’ve got that product that’s about ready to be available for them and we should be all-in to make sure that it’s quality controlled and it does what it’s doing, but it’s not a back door for recreational marijuana.”

Citing safety concerns such as police not being able to test drivers for marijuana use, Little said that the decision to make the substance completely legal would not go over well.

“Law enforcement, pardons and parole, corrections — every one of them is really reluctant to say this is a good idea.”

Little has plans to be in the region as often as he can, including continuing the much-heralded Capital for the Day, which Pinehurst hosted in 2016, but he wants to be able to come into the more remote areas and spend quality time with the people he hopes to represent.

“It’s important to spend quality time,” Little said. “Usually on these ‘fly-through’ trips you get to talk to the mayor and the county commissioners, but with the Capital for the Day you bring members of the cabinet that are germaned in the issues that are going on. And then you let your citizens come and ask their questions. That’s really important to me.”

Little’s passion though, is one that could directly affect Shoshone County.

“Coming from rural Idaho, one of the things I am most passionate about is preserving rural Idaho,” Little said. “As mines, mills, and farms get more efficient and basically displace people, we have an obligation in rural Idaho to add value to what those people do and to diversify those economies. For those families to stay where they are, they need to have other job opportunities, whether it’s expansion of tourism, manufacturing, and if you diversify the economy and the price of gold, silver or timber goes down, you have something there to hold the economy up.”

Brad Little is running against Democratic candidate Paulette Jordan.