Taxes, wages issues in District 1

In a rematch of a close and heated race two years ago, an oceanographer is challenging a one-term state representative from Priest Lake for his District 1A House seat, which represents Boundary and Bonner counties.

And like last time, the two opponents look to be some of the highest-spending candidates in the state.

Democrat Steve Elgar, of Sandpoint, has raised nearly $50,000, and Republican Rep. Eric Anderson has brought in more than $36,000, according to campaign expenditure reports. The majority of Elgar’s donations are from individuals, something he said is a good representation of how he runs his campaign.

Elgar says he has knocked on more than 7,500 doors in the months he’s been campaigning. It’s those people he speaks with who give him insight into what needs to be done and what’s been ignored for too long, he said.

His major issues are quality health care for all Idahoans and increasing the minimum wage, which is currently $5.15 an hour.

“I’ve knocked on 7,500 doors, and only two people have said they don’t want the minimum wage raised,” Elgar said.

Anderson doesn’t support raising the minimum wage and said he wishes more people understood all the facts and arguments surrounding the issue.

“Even if you raised it a dollar, our starting wages are above that,” Anderson said.

Anderson said the minimum wage issue deserves to be debated, but that when all the facts about wages in the state are presented, it’s clear that increasing it would reduce the number of jobs.

He used one of his daughter’s jobs as an example. She works at Pizza Hut for $3.15 an hour but brings home about $12 to $15 more an hour in tips. An average of nine young people work at the restaurant at a time. Raise their minimum wage and some of them would be out of a job, he said.

The best way to encourage a livable wage – not a higher minimum wage – in the state is to support business and encourage a vibrant economy, Anderson said.

“Minimum wage is an introductory level wage that, even if it were applied, it’s only introductory,” Anderson said. “If I felt in my (district) that people were only being paid that I would feel much differently.”

Anderson names property tax relief, access to public lands and fighting methamphetamine as some of the biggest issues he would like to address if re-elected.

He’d also like to continue work on the Eurasian milfoil problem that plagues many of North Idaho’s lakes. Anderson is credited with securing $4 million from the legislative budget-writing committee to combat the pernicious weed but said it was the relationships he formed with other lawmakers that helped assure the funding.

“If you don’t have alliances and you don’t work with people, you can’t get anything through,” Anderson said.

Along with increasing the minimum wage, Elgar cites health care and increasing education funding as other big issues that need to be addressed.

He sits on the Bonners Partner in Care Clinic Board of Directors and said he’s been working with community members to find a way to make health care affordable. Too many people in North Idaho are without health care because their employers simply can’t afford to provide it, Elgar said.

Affordable health insurance doesn’t have to include triple bypass surgery coverage or procedures like that, he said.

“You take those things off the table, and what you have left is what 80 percent of us need and it’s at about 20 percent the cost,” Elgar said.

The key is bringing businesses, insurance companies and health care providers into the discussion before decisions are made and plans are proposed, he said, which the task force he serves on is doing.

“Most employers would love to provide health care for their employees,” Elgar said. “But they can’t afford $500 to $600 a month premiums.”

Anderson said the recent ban on snowmobiling imposed by the U.S Forest Service on 300,000 national forest acres near Priest Lake will have detrimental effects on the area’s economy.

He wants to work with state lawmakers and the federal government on figuring out a way to protect the caribou that the ban is intended to protect, while still allowing winter tourism in the area to flourish. The area had been hurt by environmental regulations on timber and forestry and told that tourism could be their savior, Anderson said.

“People banked on that,” Anderson said. “Suddenly the threat is that that will all be taken away. To me, that’s unconscionable.”

The election is Nov. 7.