Editorial: Cost of bad leadership piling up at NIC

Let’s ignore the vitriol for a moment and look at some clean, hard numbers to answer these questions:

Is fiscal responsibility still a major plank in the local Republican Party platform?

How closely do voting members of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee scrutinize candidates’ understanding of and commitment to fiscal responsibility when rating and vetting them, particularly those running in nonpartisan races whose responsibilities start with overseeing taxing entity budgets?

At what point would the KCRCC abandon — or even counsel — the elected officials it had ardently supported in light of blatant evidence that they were guilty of gross fiscal irresponsibility?

When it comes to the board majority of North Idaho College trustees, the answers to all three questions are painfully obvious. Given time, it’s likely that a similarly sorry statistical story will be told by the board majority of the Community Library Network, confirming a pattern rather than a single ugly outlier or two.

In case you missed it, Tuesday’s top article in The Press laid bare the trail of horrible financial decisions made by NIC trustees Todd Banducci, Greg McKenzie and Mike Waggoner. In little more than a year, these decisions — primarily, contracting two college presidents simultaneously while enriching two local attorneys with strong political ties but virtually no experience in the realm of higher education, all while paying outside lawyers to fight unwinnable cases.

Since December 2022, McKenzie, Banducci and Waggoner have been responsible for NIC paying more than a half million dollars to lawyers and law firms. The $511,404 doesn’t even include a quarter-million-dollar payout to wrongly fired President Rick MacLennan, or insurance costs that have skyrocketed because of mounting legal threats due to the board majority's reckless "leadership." 

The $511,404 is the bottom line — again, in one year — of money paid directly to local attorneys Art Macomber and D. Colton Boyles, as well as outside attorneys representing the college in court cases that qualified trustees would have averted in the first place.

Tens of thousands of additional dollars have been burned in the same ideological bonfire because of additional costs incurred through Banducci, Waggoner and McKenzie’s failed leadership. The college must foot the bill for ongoing travel costs and expenses brought on by the need for accreditors to impartially assess what’s gone wrong and explain clearly what trustees must do to preserve accreditation — which means to preserve the college itself.

Since KCRCC-backed trustees took over in 2020, much of the public focus has correctly been placed on the horrific impact of their decisions on students, staff and faculty. Because public education has been unapologetically centered in the crosshairs of KCRCC and its manipulators, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, it is not surprising that their soldiers would fire at the very targets they were elected to defend.

What is surprising is the capricious and irresponsible manner in which the NIC board majority has consistently misspent vast sums of the public’s money; money that could instead have boosted the college, which directly strengthens the community at large.

Fiscally responsible? Read the article and decide for yourself: https://shorturl.at/ackp1