Payette Lake cabin owners crowded into a packed hearing in Boise last week and pleaded with state officials to lower the skyrocketing rents for the state owned land under their cabins.
The leaseholders urged the state to come up with a plan for more reasonable rents when the leases expire in 2010.
"How much blood can you squeeze from something before it dies?" asked long-time cabin owner James Hancock of Boise, who built his own cabin many years ago and saw his son married there.
Cabin owners told of annual lease payments soaring in the past seven years, with some jumping to as high as $60,000 for 2008.
At the same time, cabins on state-owned endowment lands on the lake have stopped selling, due to the uncertainty over the leases. There are now nearly two dozen on the market, and none have sold this year.
"It's unfair to set a rate that's above what longtime lessees can pay when we have no escape," Hancock told a subcommittee of the state land board. "We're mad as a bunch of hornets."
"We kind of expected the crowd, but not this large," Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa told the crowd as the meeting opened with people standing in the doorways, sitting on floors and tables and every seat taken.
The cabin sites in question are state-owned land that is rented to people who build and maintain cabins on them, on both Payette Lake and Priest Lake in northern Idaho.
The leaseholders, some of whom have had their family cabins for generations, pay the state rental fees based on a percentage of the market value of the lot each year. The money - about $4 million last year - goes mainly to fund schools, along with universities and some other state institutions.
All the leases come up for renewal in 2010, and Ysursa and state Superintendent of Schools Tom Luna have been charged with recommending new lease terms to the full land board.
"We pledge to communicate," Ysursa said at the close of the nearly five-hour hearing.
Comments from the hearing will be transcribed in full for consideration as the state looks at future rents and lease terms, and Ysursa said there could be more meetings. He said both the short-term complaints about next year's lease rates at Payette Lake, and long-term questions about how to structure new leases in 2010 must be addressed.
"We were here to listen-we did a lot of that," Ysursa said.
"It was sincere and honest, and as elected officials, we're obligated to respond," Luna said.
Jim Young, president of the Payette Lake Cabin Owners Association, told the crowd, "I think we all know why we're here," as he displayed a graph of lease rates for cabin sites from 2000 to 2008.
The line rose sharply up, like one side of a volcanic cone. Young presented research showing that state-owned cabin sites in western Montana and Wyoming rent for much less - with prime cottage sites on Montana's Flathead Lake renting for a high of $9,468 a year. "Payette Lake has the highest gross rent of any like-kind lease, compared to anywhere in the United States of America," he said.
The Idaho Constitution requires state endowment lands to be managed for "maximum long-term financial return." State law says when it comes to cottage sites, those returns "are best obtained through stable leases at market rent."
But Young said Idaho has erred by tying its cabin-site rents to skyrocketing county assessments for the land, rather than to what comparable rents are in the market.
He noted that Idaho's state grazing leases are not based on land value, and in fact charge just a fraction of land value, because they're based instead on grazing forage.
"My point here is that market rent is not necessarily related to the fair market value of land," he said.
Mike Fery, who has a cabin at Pilgrim Cove, urged the state to sell the cabin sites to the cabin owners who have built and maintained their cabins on them for years. But Ysursa noted that if the state sells state-owned land, it must put it up for public auction.
"Cottage site leases are only worth what they sell for on the open market," said Loren Macev whose annual cabin-site rent jumped from $11,000 in 2005 to a proposed $33,000 in 2008.
"My lease payment's going to be $61,000 - it's just ridiculous," Allen Dyckman told the hearing. "It's way above market. If I could sell, I'd leave all the memories, I'd be out of there in a heartbeat."
David Leroy of Boise and attorney for the cabin owners association, said the cabin owners want more reasonable rents, leases extended for terms much longer than the current 10 years, more flexibility to rent out their cabins as vacation rentals.
In a letter signed by dozens of Valley County Realtors and business owners, Mountain Central Board of Realtors President Ray Moore warned that the area's economy will suffer serious harm if high lease fees push out all but "the super wealthy from out of state."
McCall could become like Sun Valley, Moore said, with "ghost houses" that are rarely occupied, rather than cabins filled with part-time residents who boost the local economy.
