A bill that would require 10 additional Idaho cities to elect city council members by district is advancing to the floor of the Idaho House of Representatives for a vote.
If passed into law, House Bill 720 requires all Idaho cities with populations of at least 25,000 to divide themselves into districts and elect city council members from those districts. Idaho law already requires cities with at least 100,000 residents to elect city council members by district.
The 10 cities that would be affected by the law change include Caldwell, Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Coeur d’Alene, Twin Falls, Post Falls, Rexburg, Lewiston, Eagle, Kuna and Moscow, said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Joe Alfieri, R-Coeur d’Alene.
As the Idaho law is currently written, local officials in these cities are allowed to create city council districts if they wish. Passing the new bill would require them to make the change.
In addition to specifically requiring cities with a population of more than 25,000 residents to elect city council members by district, the bill allows cities with a population of less than 25,000 residents to have the option to elect city council members by district.
One of the results of passing the bill is that voters in the 10 cities required to create city council districts would no longer be able to vote in all city council races like they can now. Instead, voters would only be able to vote for city council members running in their district.
Alfieri said the bill is necessary to ensure representation is as local as possible at the city council level. Alfieri also said the bill would prevent all city council members from living in the same neighborhood or part of town.
“If you’ve got a problem you want to talk to the city about, (and) your council members are at-large, you don’t know who to talk to. You don’t actually have local representation,” Alfieri said during a public hearing on the bill Thursday at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise.
“So the intent here is to provide for that local representation by dividing the city properly into districts, as we do with all other things as is done across the country,” Alfieri said.
Some legislators, groups express concern over city council districts bill
The Association of Idaho Cities opposed the bill.
Jonathan Wheatley, the association’s deputy director, said lowering the population threshold to 25,000 people could make it extremely difficult to recruit candidates to run for office because each district could have a population of less than 5,000 people if there are six districts.
Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen, R-Idaho Falls, worried that it would be especially difficult to implement the bill in Rexburg – one of the 10 cities affected by the bill – because Rexburg’s population is so heavily dominated by Brigham Young University-Idaho students. Mickelsen worried passing the bill could make it hard not to have an entire district made up of just student housing.
Rep. Erin Bingham, R-Idaho Falls, also worried that passing the bill could create a huge expense for cities to have to go through the process of creating fair districts and boundaries based on U.S. Census Bureau data. For context, it takes the state months and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to go through the redistricting process every decade, which would be a similar process.
Following a short public hearing Thursday, the House State Affairs Committee voted unanimously to send House Bill 720 to the floor of the House with a recommendation to pass the bill.
If the Idaho House votes to pass the bill, it would be sent to the Idaho Senate, where the process would start over with a new public hearing in a committee.
In 2020 the Idaho Legislature passed House Bill 413, which required cities with more than 100,000 residents to divide into districts for city council elections. Initially, Boise was the first Idaho city with a population large enough to require districting.
However, the populations of Meridian and Nampa exceeded 100,000 for the first time in the 2020 census, and those cities also had to divide into city council districts, the Idaho Capital Sun previously reported.
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