Get Risch quick, 'less awfuller,' Sand Creek Byway tour

There is still room on the buses Saturday for the first-ever public tour of the Sand Creek Byway project.

The cost is $5 for adults, $3 for children 7-17 and free for those 6 and under.

The tour will take an hour. The first tour will begin at 9 a.m. and the second will start an hour later. The tours will begin at the corner of  Fifth and Pine at Panhandle State Bank’s auxiliary parking lot.

Important note: You must contact the chamber at 263-0887 by Friday afternoon to reserve space. Reservations may also be made online at sandpointchamber.com. The chamber folks think the buses will fill up, so they probably won’t let you just jump on the bus Saturday.

When you finish the tour, the farmers market will be going strong.

Why would anyone want to tour the byway? I was lucky enough to hitch a ride with Sen. Jim Risch Monday afternoon and allow me give you a few reasons.

• It is the biggest highway project in Idaho history. The price could top nearly $100 million by the time it is done in just more than three years from now.

• Anyone with an engineer brain will appreciate the many challenges with water, “goose poop,” clay and other impediments Parsons Construction crews have solved and continue to solve.

• You will get to see the innerworkings of this project and be able to ask Idaho Transportation Engineer Ken Sorensen any question you can think of about the project. In fact, if you are on the 9 a.m. bus with me and you stump Ken, I’ll give you a free, autographed history book to the first stumper.

Here are a couple of things I learned on my tour.

• There are 150 people working on the project right now. A vast majority of them are local.

• There are 450 miles of wick drains on the project. What’s a wick drain? Ask Ken.

• There have been 65,000 truck trips so far. Only one accident in one year because Parsons is famous for safe worksites.

• BNSF constructed a railroad bridge in 1975 that would go over the top of the future byway and even turned the piers the right direction so the byway (which many people said would never be built) would be perfectly aligned. Someone at BNSF had a crystal ball.

It is interesting to see the bridge that was built over the nothing that will now be Highway 95.

The last reason that I am loading up the family Saturday is for them to see what has been done so far and how much it will have changed on the next tour in the future.

Speaking of Sen. James Risch, I had the pleasure of emceeing the community meeting Monday with him which was sponsored by the North Idaho Chamber and area chambers.

A couple of things struck me as he answered questions ranging from health care to illegal immigration and international threats.

This guy gets it.

It would be easy to be a Risch fan when you compare him to Larry Craig, Steve Symms and Bill Sali. Idaho hasn’t done itself any favors in the Washington, D.C., public arena with some of these characters.

On the other hand, Mike Crapo and Walt Minnick have done a commendable job representing Idaho.

Full disclosure: I endorsed Risch (and Crapo and Minnick for that matter) in the last election and he put me on the Idaho Lottery Commission when he was governor a few years ago, so any comments I make about him should be couched in the fact that he actually trusted me to help oversee Idaho’s multimillion dollar lottery.

I had a few quick minutes with Sen. Risch prior to the byway tour and asked him a few questions. It was my first attempt at a “Get Risch Quick” interview.

He told me health care is THE issue with Idahoans. Three months ago, the focus was on the economy but 85 percent of the calls he receives are from constituents looking for answers.

“People are afraid of what they don’t know,” he said. Risch predicts something will get done with health care but he doesn’t have any clear idea what, nor does he believe anyone else in Washington, D.C., does either.

As far as the economy, the news is getting “less awfuller,” he said. The joblessness numbers are reducing and he watches those numbers more than the Dow Jones as an indicator.

The leap from Idaho politics to Washington, DC., has left him in the minority party for the first time in a long time. In Idaho, Risch said, caucusing was key. In the Senate, the leaders are more independent and some of his best friends have a “D” as their party affiliation.

He is worried that this country’s involvement with Afghanistan will become more front and center as more US troops are involved in the war there.

He hopes the administration soon has an “articulated goal” for political and military objectives.

Risch is settling in to life in DC, even though he flies back to Idaho every weekend. His wife, Vicki, is starting to spend more time in DC.

“They are a very tight family and even though it is expensive to fly home every weekend, he does so because of an obligation to family first,” a friend of Risch’s told me.

It is impossible to read every bill and Risch relies on  a great staff to keep him informed. Every day is a new adventure he told me. He is also very anxious to get back to work.

“This is the best job in the world,” he said.

David Keyes is publisher of the Daily Bee.