Sometimes, having the least amount of experience for a job is more than enough — or at least that's the message that the North Idaho College Board of Trustees sent last week when they voted 3-2 to hire North Idaho-based attorney Colton Boyles as the college's general counsel.
Boyles has no previous experience representing a higher education institution and has ties to Idaho's far-right extremists, including Ammon Bundy.
Boyles was up against Spokane-based law firm Stevens Clay, which has more than 30 years of experience in educational law. Stevens Clay has represented clients like the Community Colleges of Spokane, Big Bend Community College and more than 100 other educational institutions in the Inland Northwest — now excluding NIC.
Prior to a June NIC board meeting, four legal counsel candidates were evaluated on five criteria including experience, timeliness, cost and proximity to NIC. Overall, Stevens Clay scored a 97 percent, and Boyles Law earned the lowest score, a whopping 60 percent. (Boyles Law did score higher than Stevens Clay in a single category: proximity to NIC.)
As the college clings to its accreditation from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, one wrong move could impact the future of the college — and its 6,300 students.
"We are one bad board meeting away from losing accreditation," Trustee Tarie Zimmerman said at last week's meeting.
In June, the trustees were unable to hire Stevens Clay after a failed motion was made by board member Brad Corkill. Mike Waggoner, who is also on the board, said the evaluation wasn't enough and requested further information from both Stevens Clay and Boyles Law.
Stevens Clay responded less than a week later. Boyles Law did not respond to questions and instead accused the "group of administrators" that evaluated the firms as being biased.
NIC President Nick Swayne told the board that this unresponsiveness would usually disqualify a candidate from the job.
And outgoing NIC legal counsel Art Macomber said that part of Boyles Law's agreement regarding conflicts of interest was illegal. Zimmerman encouraged Macomber to review the entire agreement because she noticed many other areas of suspicion.
In May, Macomber said he was resigning as the college's attorney because he said "laws are being broken or are in imminent peril of being broken by college personnel," but he didn't detail these accusations, according to the Coeur d'Alene Press. But during a private executive session last week, the board extended his contract to focus on college policies, Swayne's summer 2023 evaluation and an investigation into the personnel matter he tried to quit over.
Board members Waggoner, Todd Banducci and Greg McKenzie voted in unison to hire Boyles.
Last year, Bundy's campaign for governor paid Boyles $5,000 for legal advice. Bundy is an anti-government activist who led the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Last month, Bundy, his gubernatorial campaign and other defendants were ordered by a jury to pay $52 million in damages after a southern Idaho hospital won a defamation lawsuit against them.
And, according to the Coeur d'Alene Press, Boyles was hired by another 2022 gubernatorial candidate — the Trump-aligned Janice McGeachin — during her effort to withhold information about her education task force. Idaho District Judge Steven Hippler ruled against McGeachin and Boyle in their losing case against the Idaho Press Club, which cost taxpayers almost $29,000 in legal fees.
But at the NIC board meeting, Boyles supporters suggested that if he wasn't up to the task, they'd deal with it. Moments before the legal counsel vote, Corkill asked if Boyles had any experience with Title IX. No one had an answer, but McKenzie had a quip.
"Well, if after you meet him and you're dissatisfied in a few months we can easily fire him," McKenzie replied. ♦
