Guest Columnist Martin Hackworth: Pocatello’s Culture Problem

There has been a video circulating recently on local social media, promoted by city council members Dakota Bates and Ann Swanson and made by Councilman Bates, concerning an alleged culture problem in Pocatello. I agree that Pocatello has a culture problem. It’s just not what Dakota and Ann claim it to be.

I happen to like Dakota Bates and Ann Swanson. If I lived within city limits, I’d have supported them in the last election along with Greg Cates for mayor. I don’t generally consider party affiliation particularly relevant in local politics. I’m for the people I think can best do the job. Sometimes these people are quite different from each other.

It takes a village, or so I’ve heard.

Councilman Bates’ jeremiad about local negativity, which he claims is our most pressing issue, isn’t even original. The people who I think are the culture problem in Pocatello—the established gentry and sunshine-and-rainbows crowd—have a rich history of blaming negativity for their failures to deliver much in the way of good news.

Between these two groups are a great number of the most unselfconscious, unrealistic, clueless, inept, and delusional civic leaders that bad dreams are capable of conjuring.

Councilman Bates actually invokes “woe is us” regarding the burden of being an elected leader in such a sea of negativity in his video. That’s not going to fly. No one bends anyone’s arm up behind their back to run for local public office—you run as a volunteer. Being an elected civic leader requires listening to all constituents, not just the smiley ones. He should come to grips with that (I think that he will).

Promoting Pocatello should be one of the easiest gigs on the planet. Pocatello, based on location, quality of life, and physical beauty, should be the equivalent of a luxury SUV. We are, instead, a rusty subcompact with a slipping clutch and a transmission that, when engaged, only works in reverse. We are shedding jobs and our tax base at an alarming rate due to a lack of a coherent vision about what constitutes a rational future and competent leadership—not criticism on social media.

The doom spiral in Pocatello isn’t caused by negativity. No business has ever passed over Pocatello because of comments on Facebook. They pass on Pocatello because of what they find when they get here—the not-ready-for-prime-time players running the show. The track record is painfully obvious.

It’s not critics on social media who promised the moon over Northgate, Hoku, and ISU’s “Gallium Valley of Pocatello” and then failed to deliver. It’s not critics who stood by silently while a series of incompetent administrations drove the area’s largest employer, Idaho State University, off a cliff. Negative comments on social media are not responsible for the now years-long Center Street Underpass debacle, currently exacerbated by the ill-timed West Benton Street bridge replacement project.

Social media posts didn’t land Pocatello in national headlines for firing a lunch lady days before Christmas for giving a free lunch to a needy kid or for inviting thousands of ill-qualified students from the Middle East to wreak havoc and then deem anyone who objected a racist. Facebook posts did not cause Main Street in the very heart of downtown to close for three months one summer, nor did they lead to vital road maintenance equipment being quietly loaned to another city.

Not a single person living in the large homeless encampment on our city’s north side this past winter came here because of critics of the local gentry or sunshine and rainbows crowd on Facebook. They might have used social media to figure out how to run electricity to their small, unzoned city encampment, complete with holiday lights. But that’s about it.

And social media posts did not kill Victor Perez in his front yard, nor did they bungle the city’s response to the subsequent international outrage and concern.

Incompetent and self-dealing local leadership, not bad luck or negativity, has caused Pocatello to fail in achieving its aspirations, despite having many of the attributes needed for success. The good news is that changing people is easier than changing attitudes. One generally precedes the other anyway.

And that needs to happen here. In Pocatello, we have traditionally had two classes of equally low-octane public officials: those chosen by the dominant local clique and the sunshine-and-rainbows crowd, who use every trick in the book to ignore the elephant in the room posed by the dominant local clique.

The only thing that seems to unite these two disparate groups is the belief that accepting nonsense with a smile is a necessary step in the alchemy required to transform prospects that repeatedly sink like a lead balloon on Jupiter into future gold.

This is why people don’t much care for our local government and aren’t bashful about saying so. Locals pay taxes for lackluster services and for government officials’ salaries, who deride critics as “negative” and who imagine that the necessary step on the road to prosperity is to require that we all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”

Think I’m wrong? Think I’m too negative? Think that passing an ordinance mandating smiles will remedy everything that’s wrong here and lead to growth and prosperity more effectively than better leaders?

Prove it.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.