A friend recently told me the county building fees had been raised. I didn't see how this could be right because the state law authorizing the collection of building fees requires that an increase of over 5 percent requires a public hearing. I remember testifying at the last building fee hearing back in 2006, so I decided to examine my friend's claim.

When I looked on the county website at their fee resolution schedule, passed by the commissioners in 2006, I noticed that part of the document looked different from the rest of it, and one of the pages had a note on it that said "revised 4-8-10." I obtained an original copy from the commissioner's office, and sure enough, the original did not match the one at the planning department.

I asked who had changed the pages and increased the fees, and one of the "community development" employees admitted that he and a former employee had re-typed the "specific fees" table, making people pay more for their permits.

He claimed they were allowed to alter the exhibits and fee schedules because the average construction cost data that the fees had been based on in 2006 had changed, so the building and planning department had taken it on themselves to alter the resolution and raise the fees. When I asked why they had stopped changing the sheets in 2010, he said that the fees were "getting too high" so they had decided to stop raising them.

Idaho law states that "Any public officer, law enforcement officer, or subordinate thereof, who wilfully destroys, alters, falsifies or commits the theft of the whole or any part of any police report or any record kept as part of the official governmental records of the state or any county or municipality in the state, shall be guilty of a felony..."

I should also point out that the state law authorizing the fees and requiring the hearings for fee increases provides that fees that were raised without the hearing "shall have the validity of all or a portion of the fee increase that it collects be voidable."

Does everybody out there think "Kookey County" Community Development should get a pass on this? Perhaps they should be made to write "I will stop modifying official documents" on the blackboard a few hundred times? I am sure that as I write this the county is busy recalculating the fees that were overcharged and sending them back with a note of apology. And now I will remove my tongue from my cheek, because I know as well as the rest of you that this is just the way things work here. The rest of the state doesn't call this town "Corrupt d'Alene" without reason.

Larry Spencer is a Kootenai County resident.