Scott Herndon for Idaho, Sagle, ID (2026)

09/05/2026

Your November property tax bill is coming. Coeur d'Alene just voted to make theirs bigger, and every Idaho city and county can do the exact same thing to yours.

Every year, Idaho law lets a city raise the property taxes it collects by up to 3%. Coeur d'Alene just decided to take the full 3% this year.

But they also did something most people have never heard of. They reached into a pot of "foregone" taxes.

Here is what "foregone" means. In past years, when the city chose not to raise your taxes the full 3%, it did not just let that money go. It saved the right to collect it later. Year after year, that saved-up taxing power piled up. The city's own finance director explained it plainly at the meeting:

"In prior years when the city did not take that 3% allowable increase, it was preserved as foregone taxing authority. At this point, the city's foregone balance is just under $6.5 million."

Important: this is not money sitting in a bank. It is saved-up permission to raise your taxes. The city gave itself the right to take that $6.5 million from taxpayers whenever it chooses. And on September 1st, the council voted to start using it. This year alone they took about $923,000 of it, on top of the automatic 3%. Together that raised the city's property taxes about 6% in a single year.

Here is the part that got me. The city is not short on money. It is sitting on a healthy savings account, about 25% of its budget. Even one council member was not sold, saying it was hard to say yes when they had not made "a strong argument for that full amount of foregone." But the majority voted to take it anyway. Only one member voted no.

For a typical Coeur d'Alene homeowner, the city's share of the property tax bill is already around $1,185 a year. And that is before the county, the schools, and every other district add their property taxes to your bill.

None of this broke the law. That is exactly the problem. Idaho law lets a city take the full 3% every year, save up the years it doesn't, and cash it in whenever it wants. And it is not just cities. Your county can do the very same thing, and so can your other taxing districts. When even that is not enough, they raise fees, on water, on permits, on services, because fees skip the limits property taxes have. It is a shell game, and you pay every version of it.

This is why I do not think capping the property tax is enough. A cap just slows the taking. As long as the tax exists, government will find a legal way to grow it. The only way to truly protect your home is to end the property tax and replace it with the growth Idaho's economy already produces every year. No new tax. No hidden pot. No shell game.

You already bought your home. You should not have to keep paying the government every year just to keep it.

Most of us can't sit through a three-hour city budget meeting on a Monday night. I can, and I do. Follow along, and I will keep bringing you what is really happening with your money.

09/04/2026

I filled up in Sagle this week. Travel America Conoco: regular unleaded $4.89, premium $5.35, and diesel number 2 at $6.19 a gallon.

I pay with a Conoco card, so I pulled my own receipts at that same pump. Last September regular was $3.12. By February it had actually drifted down to $2.82. Then it took off. This week, $4.89. The whole jump, up 73 percent, hit in the last six months.

And out here, driving is not a choice. We live rural. There is no bus, no train, no walking to work. Town is dozens of miles away. Most of us put 40, 60, 80 miles on a vehicle every single day just living our lives, getting to the job, hauling kids to school and practice, running to the feed store, making the drive to the doctor. When the price at the pump nearly doubles, we cannot just drive less. We drive what we have to drive. So, it comes straight out of everything else.

Now look past the sign for a second and think about the kitchen table.

When gas climbs two dollars a gallon, something else in the budget has to give. Maybe it is eating out that stops. Maybe it is the kids' activities that get trimmed. Maybe it is the trip to see family that does not happen this year. Maybe it is just the quiet stress of checking the account every week and wondering how long you can hold the line. A mom doing math in her head at the pump. A retiree on a fixed income choosing between a full tank and something else on the list. A guy putting $185 of diesel in his truck before he has earned a dime that day.

Here is what gets me. When your family's costs go up, you tighten your belt. You cut something. You make it work. Government almost never does. Prices go up on everybody, and instead of finding savings, government keeps spending more and reaching deeper into your pocket to pay for it. City, county, state, all of it. More budget, more programs, more taxes and fees, year after year, good times and bad.

That is backwards. When money is tight for families, it ought to be tight for government too. The answer to a squeeze on working people is not one more dollar out of their pockets. It is government finally learning to live within its means, spend less, and give people their money back.

That is why I fight to control spending and cut the tax burden wherever I can. Eliminating the property tax is my plan and I will keep driving it, because it is the tax that can take a paid-off home. But it is bigger than any one tax. Every level of government should have to justify every dollar it takes from you, especially now, when you are the one going without so their budget balances.

So, I want to hear from you. Are you feeling this? What has it changed in your house? What did you used to do that you have cut back on just to keep up? Tell me in the comments. I read them, and the people in charge should have to read them too.

You work too hard to be the only one who has to cut back.

09/03/2026

You don't actually own your home. As long as the property tax exists, you're renting it from the government, and the rent comes due every year whether the mortgage is paid off or not.

Miss enough of it and they take the home you already bought and paid for. Eliminate the property tax, and for the first time in America, you would truly own your property.

That's the whole fight. When you send me back to the Senate, I'll lead it.

09/02/2026

An Idaho sheriff just used government license plate cameras to run his own wife's vehicle more than 700 times in about two months.

It was not a detective chasing a criminal. It was the man in charge, querying a private citizen's plate over and over, and it only came to light because one of his own deputies noticed and flagged it.

Now here is the part that should worry all of us. When the Attorney General looked into it, the office said it could not even prove a crime. Idaho already has a law that says this data cannot be used for personal reasons. The sheriff did this 700 times, and the law still had no teeth and no mechanism to stop him.

This is not about one company or one brand. It is about government building a record of where you drive, and far too little standing between that power and its abuse.

That is why I will carry a strong bill to end warrantless government surveillance and the tracking of innocent Idahoans, with real penalties and real audits behind it. If the government wants to know where you drive, let it get a warrant. That is what the Constitution is for.

When you send me back to the Senate, I will keep fighting to keep Idaho free.

09/01/2026

There is a lot in Proposition 1 that alarms people. Abortion late in pregnancy. No requirement that a doctor be involved. No duty to care for a child who survives. Abortions on minors. All of that is real, and all of it matters.

But it is not the worst thing about Prop 1.

The worst thing is that Prop 1 would tear down the pro-life protections Idaho already has. Idaho today is an oasis. We are surrounded by states that treat the child in the womb as nothing, and we do not. Idaho law recognizes what is true. The smallest and most defenseless human beings among us have inherent value, and they deserve the protection of the law.

I want to tell you why I believe that. It did not come from a book.

In 2012 I served as a chaplain at the Bonner County Jail. That December, a man named Jeremy Swanson killed his pregnant wife at their home in Priest River. Idaho charged him with the death of both his wife and their unborn daughter, because under Idaho law the killing of a child in the womb is a homicide. He is serving two life sentences, one for each of them.

I was called to the jail the night he was arrested. He was in a holding cell, in a suicide-watch smock, and I went in to sit with him. Just the two of us, in a concrete room. I have never forgotten the weight of it. A woman was gone. So was her daughter, who never got the chance to be born.

Here is what I have never been able to unsee. Idaho law was right to count that little girl as a life. She was a life. When a criminal takes her, we call it what it is. Prop 1 would say that the same child, the same life, can be ended and it counts as nothing at all. Idaho cannot hold both of those ideas at once. One of them is a lie.

Notice something. When a man murders a pregnant woman and her unborn child, Idaho charges him with two deaths, and almost no one objects. Not even people who support Prop 1. We all feel it. A second life was taken. But move that same child, the same pregnancy, into an abortion, and we are told there was no life there at all. The only thing that changed is who ended it. The child did not change. To that child, and to me, and to a lot of people, the law should not change either. A life is a life, no matter whose hand is involved.

Some people say a man has no business voting on this. I have heard it. I do not have a uterus and I am not a doctor. But that is not how representative government works, and it never has been. Legislators vote on war without having gone to war. On medicine without being physicians. On prisons and schools we do not sit in. We are elected to write laws that are equal and just for every person in Idaho, born and unborn, and to answer to the constitutions we swear to uphold. That is the job. I have tried to do it honestly.

When you send me back to the Senate, I will keep standing for the oldest and simplest idea in a just society. The weak are not disposable. The child in the womb is one of us.

Vote no on Prop 1.

08/30/2026

I want to end Idaho's property tax. A voter outside my district just sent me the toughest questions about how. Not cheers, not insults. Real questions, and on a couple of them she was right, and I told her so.

She said I could share them if I answered honestly, because she is probably not the only one wondering. So here they are, her questions and my straight answers, concessions and all.

**"Idaho is currently paying 13% of property tax bills. Isn't the 13% the state pays now just leftover surplus?"**

No, it is better than that. Two new laws, one in 2023 and one in 2024, set aside a steady stream of money the state already collects and use it to pay off part of your property tax bill for you. Think of it as the state chipping in on the bill. And it renews automatically every year, without the legislature having to vote on it again. It does not depend on having a big surplus in any one year, which is why it has held and grown for three years straight.

**"How do you ever get to 100 percent property tax elimination? Is a state $500 million surplus even enough?"**

No single surplus gets you there. The full property tax in Idaho is about $2.5 billion a year. We have already knocked out about $328 million of it, the 13 percent. The remaining $2.2 billion comes off gradually, over about a decade. Here is how. Every year Idaho's economy grows and the state takes in more money. As long as the state keeps its own spending from rising as fast, the leftover goes toward paying off property tax, a little more each year. It happens in stages, not all at once.

**"Cities are already lean. How does 'tighten our belt' not mean cutting services?"**

The belt-tightening happens at the state level, not at your city or county. The state keeps its own spending growing slower than the money it takes in, and uses the difference to pay off property taxes. Your city and county keep their full budgets. Nothing in my plan requires them to cut a single service.

**"Idaho's surplus swings a lot, $50 million some years, $500 million others. Property tax is steady. Isn't it a problem to pay for a steady thing with money that jumps around?"**

You are right, and that is exactly why the plan does not run on the surplus at all. The surplus is just the money left over at the end of a good year, and yes, it comes and goes. The plan runs on two steady things instead. First, a fixed share of the money the state already takes in every year, set aside by law for this one purpose, not leftover scraps. Second, plain spending discipline, meaning the state keeps its own spending growing slower than the money it takes in and puts the difference toward paying down your property tax.

So in a lean year the payoff just slows down. It never reverses. Once the state has paid off a piece of your property tax, that piece does not come back. And we know this works, because Idaho already did it once. In 2006 the state moved school funding off the property tax. Two years later the 2008 crash hit, one of the worst budget years in memory, and that change held. It never snapped back onto homeowners.

**"In our county's tax lien sale, almost no one actually loses their home. Isn't the 'losing your home' talk overblown?"**

Outright tax foreclosure of a lived-in home is rare, and I will say that plainly. Most people with a mortgage have the tax folded into their monthly house payment, so the bank quietly pays it for them. The sharpest edge is not usually the courthouse steps. It is the retiree who finally paid her home off, so now the bill comes straight to her with no bank paying it for her, and she watches it climb every year for reasons she never chose, until staying becomes unaffordable and she sells. That is a quieter loss than a foreclosure, but it is real, and she is who I am fighting for.

**"Why not just give relief to seniors who own outright? Though even they use the services, so shouldn't they pay their share?"**

Idaho already does that. There is a program aimed at low-income seniors, but it reaches only a few thousand people while everyone else stays on a tax that keeps growing. But look closely at the fairness point, because it actually cuts against the property tax. This tax is not tied to the services you use. It is tied to your home's value. A retiree with no kids in school, who rarely calls the fire department, can pay far more than a young family that uses more, simply because her house went up in value. "Pay for what you use" is one of the best arguments against the property tax, because it is the tax least connected to what you actually use.

**"Isn't property tax just like HOA dues or a contractor's lien? You pay for services, and if you don't, they can take your house. How is that different?"**

An HOA or a contractor can take your home, true. But the HOA is voluntary. You chose to buy into that community. The contractor is a one-time, agreed deal. You hire him for a roof, you pay, and you own that roof free and clear forever. Property tax is none of those things. It is not voluntary, every property is taxed. It is not a one-time debt, it renews every single year with no end. And it is not priced to what you agreed to or what you used, it is priced to your home's value, which you do not control. Here is the difference that matters: with the contractor, you can finish paying and truly own your home. With the property tax, you never can. It renews forever. That is exactly what people mean when they say you never really own your home, you rent it from the government.

I would rather fund the roads and the fire department in a way that lets you actually own your home someday than keep the one tax that guarantees you never will.

Thank you to the voter who asked. You made me think, and you were right that a lot of people are wondering the same things.

So let me turn it over to you. What is your hardest question about ending the property tax? Ask it below, or send it to my inbox, and I will answer it, the same way I did here.

08/29/2026

Here is the "magic line" at Music at McEuen.

On one side of a flimsy orange fence, you are a law-abiding Idahoan exercising a right the Constitution protects. Step three feet across the fence, and suddenly the same person, on the same public ground, is banned from carrying. Your rights, according to a strip of plastic mesh.

And remember, the sign said, "No Weapons Allowed," but nobody stopped me and nobody checked my bags. So, all that line really does is announce to anyone with bad intent that here is a place where the law-abiding have been disarmed for them. That is not security. It is an advertisement.

A snow fence and a sign cannot turn a free, public event on ground you paid for into a gun-free zone. And they should not, because the sign has it exactly backwards. An armed, law-abiding public is a safer public. The criminal is the one who is afraid he does not know who around him is carrying. Disarm the honest people and you have not made anyone safer. You have simply promised the one person willing to do harm that he will have the only gun in the park.

Idaho is a carry state. That is a strength, not a problem to be fenced off. We do not give up that right the moment we step onto taxpayer-funded ground that is open to the public. That is exactly where it should be strongest, because it is your ground.

I ran the 2024 law protecting your right to carry on public property. An amendment weakened it with a vague "restricted access" exception, and I am running a bill to strike that loophole. Send me back to the Senate and we will protect the right to carry, on the public square most of all.

08/28/2026

Meet Marla. Her family has owned this ground for 116 years. Nothing has changed on it since the 1950s. And the government can still take it.

Here is how. Every year, the state sends you a bill for what you already own. Miss that bill, and under Idaho Code you have three years. After that, the county takes the deed to your home and auctions it off. It does not matter that it is paid for. It does not matter that it has been in one family for over a century.

That is not ownership. That is rent, and the landlord is the government.

This is exactly why I want to end Idaho's property tax. No family should lose land they have held for 116 years over a bill for property they already own.

One more thing tonight. This page just passed 10,000 followers. Thank you. Every one of you who shares these posts is how this message reaches the people who need to hear it. You did that. Send me back to the Idaho Senate and we will finish the job and work to end the tax that lets the government take your home.

08/27/2026

Tonight I walked into a "gun-free zone" in Coeur d'Alene, and nobody checked a thing.

It was Music at McEuen, a free concert in a public park, advertised as open to everyone. No ticket. No admission. Just an orange snow fence, a "No Weapons" sign, and not one person screening anyone who walked in. I walked right past all of it with a camera, and so could anyone else.

And that should make every Idahoan angry. This is public ground. You paid for that park. Yet someone decided they could hang a sign and strip you of a right the Idaho Constitution guarantees, on land you own, at a free event they invited the whole public to attend.

Here is the problem. A sign is not security. It stops exactly zero dangerous people, because a criminal simply ignores it. The only people a gun-free zone like this actually disarms are the law-abiding citizens who obey the sign. On public ground, that does not make anyone safer. It just leaves good people defenseless.

In 2024 I wrote the law that protected your right to carry on public property, after the City of Sandpoint tried to strip it. But an amendment slipped a loophole into that law, an undefined "restricted access" exception, and that loophole is exactly what is being abused here. A plastic fence and a "No Weapons" sign are being treated as "restricted access" to turn a free public concert into a gun-free zone.

No one should be able to pretend your rights vanish behind an orange fence. So, I am running a bill to close the loophole. Strike the "restricted access" exception and end this charade for good.

Your right to defend yourself does not end because someone put up a snow fence on ground you paid for. It is time for a law that actually respects your right to carry on public property in Idaho. Watch the video, and you will see exactly what I mean.

08/26/2026

If you own property in Boundary County and use water from a well, spring, stream, or pond, you have probably just received an official notice from the Idaho Department of Water Resources, or you will soon. About 5,500 of them went in the mail on August 14. Here is what it is, and please do not panic, because this is good news, not bad.

First, what it is not. The state is not stealing your water. It is not putting meters on your well. It is not taking away a use you already have. I wrote a long explainer on all of this back in 2021 when the process reached Bonner County, and everything in it still holds. IDWR is an ally to landowners in this, not an adversary.

What is actually happening is called a water rights adjudication. It is a one-time court process that creates a complete, official inventory of every water right in the Kootenai River Basin, which is Basin 98. The court confirms who has the right to use water, how much, and the priority date of each right. Think of it as preemptive dispute resolution. Filing locks in your place in line, first in time is first in right, so if a neighbor's use ever threatens yours down the road, you have a decreed right and IDWR on your side instead of a lawyer and a court bill. I have filed two of my own water rights this way on my land, and IDWR walked me through both.

Basin 98 is the last basin in Idaho to go through this. When Boundary County is finished, Idaho will be the only western state to have fully adjudicated every water right within its borders. That is a real accomplishment, and Boundary County gets to complete it.

Here is what to do if you use water on your property:

File a Notice of Claim by June 4, 2027. Most people who divert and use water need to file. Small domestic and stockwater uses, generally under 13,000 gallons a day and a half acre of irrigation or less, may be deferred, but IDWR recommends filing them now anyway. Failing to file a required claim can lead the court to determine the right no longer exists, so do not skip it.

Gather your information first: the legal description of your property, Township, Range, Section and quarter-quarters, or your county parcel number, any existing IDWR water right number, and the source, quantity, priority date, and purpose of your use. A subdivision lot and block number alone is not enough.

Get help, it is free. IDWR is holding local workshops September 22 through 24 at the Valley Event Center on the Boundary County Fairgrounds in Bonners Ferry, with staff on hand from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. to help you file. You can also call the Adjudication Hotline at 1-800-451-4129 or the Northern Regional Office at (208) 762-2800, and file online at idwr.idaho.gov under the Kootenai River Basin Adjudication section.

You are generally NOT affected if your land is undeveloped and has never used water, or if you only receive water through a city, irrigation district, or water utility that will file its own claim.

Water is a shared resource in Idaho, and our right to use it goes back to statehood in 1890. This process protects the uses we already depend on. If you have questions about how it affects your property, reach out. Helping Boundary County families get this right is exactly the kind of thing I am here for.

Scott Herndon for Idaho

09/05/2026

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