Choose to listen first

The big dustup here in Dalton Gardens has me thinking about my father.

Dad grew up in Kellogg. He was a city councilman during many of his Bunker Hill years and, after he retired, he was elected to the Shoshone County Commission.

Although dad never finished the eighth grade, he was easily the smartest man I’ve ever known — able to work math problems in his head that many Bunker Hill engineers could not solve on slide rules.

After he died in 1986, I received several letters from Shoshone County residents who had known him personally or professionally. They remembered a quiet man with exceptional listening and analytical skills — traits we rarely see in elected officials today.

Save for all important school bond elections, we never talked politics at home. My English teacher mother was a staunch Republican who was very dedicated to her students. Dad was a more independent thinker who didn’t care much about your politics as long as you shared some common ground.

He was a hometown boy to the depths of his soul, so apart from our family of three nothing mattered more to him than the prosperity and future well-being of Kellogg and Shoshone County.

One of his old councilman friends wrote me after dad died to say that dad was always the last person to speak at meetings. “Finally,” he wrote, “One of us would say, Darrell, what do you think we should do?”

Dad's answers were always framed as possible solutions and they invariably summarized the important points that everyone had raised during meetings.

“We’d all look at one another and one of us would say, ‘Why the hell didn’t we think of that three hours ago’?”

My father never using the word “I” in a sentence. It was always “we” or “us.” He thus never took credit for anything he did as a county commissioner, including persuading his friend, Idaho U.S. Sen., Frank Church, to stick enough money in the Forest Service’s annual appropriation to fund replacing all the aging wooden bridges on the North Fork road with new concrete spans.

There aren’t many elected officials in Idaho today who possess my father’s quiet leadership skills or his depth of caring for the people he served. Brad Little comes to mind — and no doubt there are others — but I don’t know them.

Dad would have been horrified by the staff resignations that have occurred here in Dalton Gardens this month. I am too and so is my wife, Julia. Our disgust isn’t personal. We don’t personally know our four City Council members. Nor do we know our mayor, but we care deeply about our community’s reputation and its very public fall from grace.

Julia is the social media maven in our house. I have a Facebook account through our forestry nonprofit, but she has a personal account that she uses to visit with our family, friends and neighbors.

After the Coeur d’Alene Press broke the story about the possibility that Dalton Gardens would cease to exist, Julia used Facebook to invite concerned citizens to gather at our house Sunday, May 24, to talk about what’s happening. On 12-hour notice about 30 people streamed into our family room. Save for our friends across Woodland Avenue, I didn’t know any of them.

In hopes of honoring my father’s legacy, I chose to listen and, when asked what I thought, I said, “I’m just an innocent bystander.” My reply got a lot of laughs, but none of us who form this community is an innocent bystander. We have a big problem and it needs to get fixed as quickly as possible.

Dad would want to know more before offering possible solutions. Me too.

How on earth did it come to this in a town so small? I will hazard a guess that most Dalton Gardens residents assumed we had capable leadership. We don’t. Rather, we form a microcosm of the turmoil that infects every community and every level of government in our country today. We are in the grip of elected officials whose agendas are deeply personal and have nothing to do with governing for the good of the whole.

Julia and I were among the 300-400 people who attended last Monday’s City Council meeting. I sat outside under the picnic pavilion in a downpour and feasted on two great hamburgers cooked by a young man who turned out to be the son of our city engineer. I don’t know him either, but his son, who is a student at the University of Idaho, gives me hope for our shared future.

Julia spoke at the meeting and was later interviewed by The Press and KREM TV. She’s not one to mince her words, but she was polite and direct. Trust me when I tell you no one ever has to wonder what she thinks. She is a social boat rocker from way back and, like my father, an exceptional analyst.

She shared a few of the Facebook comments she received following the long and tumultuous meeting. Some were supportive of her belief that something has gone terribly wrong in Dalton’s leadership. Others were angry, including a woman who demanded to know who had paid her to say what she’d said!

Yes, something here has gone terribly wrong.

Political messes like the one we face generally get worked out at the ballot box, so I suspect we may be electing some new City Council members this fall. We who call Dalton Gardens home — regardless of our political affiliations — must do everything we possibly can to restore our community’s good name.

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Jim Petersen writes from Dalton Gardens. He is the founder and president of the nonprofit Evergreen Foundation and the author of six books, most recently, “First, Put Out the Fire!”