Ralph McAdams Interview

NARRATOR: RALPH MCADAMS INTERVIEWER: BRANDI BURNS DATE: SEPTEMBER 22, 2009 LOCATION: PROJECT: Boise City Mayor and Council Oral History Project BB: This Brandi Burns on Tuesday September 22, 2009 speaking with Ralph McAdams about his experiences on the Boise City Council. Thank you for letting me have this opportunity to speak with you. I thought we would get started by talking about what you did before you were on the city council so where did you spend most of your time growing up in Idaho and just tell me a little bit about – RM: I’m a native son. I’ve always lived in Boise. I was born in 1929 and became employed by Mountain States Telephone in 1950 and previous to that I had worked for the US Forest Service a lot but that put me on the road. We operated in that company, Idaho south of the Salmon River and every little spot had our dial tone and the reason it had dial tone is I hooked it up so it would buzz. I did cable splicing work and ended up in a long career with them finally finishing up as a lobbyist and there wasn’t anything in the business I hadn’t done and enjoyed every minute of it. It was good hard work and a good company. Good people. BB: Could you tell me more about your experiences on the Forest Service? RM: Well, I – when I was a very early teenager – World War II was at its height and even those days in the summer time southern Idaho caught on fire just like it does now but during World War II there wasn’t anybody around to fight the fire except kids like me – but I was a big kid. I was the size when I was about twelve or thirteen years old I reached the size I am now so I could pass as somebody quite a bit older. And then there were a few Hispanic people – Mexicans that had come up but not many and all of us that were here, all seven of us or whatever it was, were fighting the fires so we’d spend the whole summer out here on the Mountain Home desert with a truck and a road grader and a few sorry people putting the fires out. And that got me started in that and I had a wonderful time, made a lot of money and changed the direction of my life. I found out I could boss people around. (laughs) It was a great life. The district guy for the BLM was a childhood buddy of my dad’s so the first job I had was he hired me when I was actually about thirteen to drive him because he worked day and night – there just weren’t enough people here to do anything and he needed somebody to drive him and he knew that I had learned how to drive probably when I was about eight years old (laughs) so he and I would load into the government’s 1938 Ford and away we’d go. BB: (Laughing) RM: It was a good life. BB: Did you work for the Forest Service during the summers and then go to school again in the fall? RM: Yes, yes. I worked on the Boise National Forest. I was the – well, the formal name was Fire Guard. The real name was Smoke Chaser. Places like Idaho City, Beaver Creek, Lowman, Grandjean, all through that country. There wasn’t a fire that I didn’t get on and finally I got to where – they were beginning to use smoke jumpers and trying to get over a fire with an aircraft with a Ford Tri-motor as early as possible so they could see what resources they needed and I’d get in there with a radio on my back and I’d get there about the same time they did and tell them what it was really like. I did that for three or four years and could have made a lifetime career of it but it was hard work and I stumbled into something else and didn’t do it. BB: What did you stumble into? RM: Mountain Bell. Mountain States Telephone. I grew up in the family service station and we serviced all their trucks and so forth so I knew everybody that worked there and I was raised by a family that said the impossible – we can do the impossible and have it ready by eight o’clock the next morning, you know. And I was used to doing that and I kind of snowed these people how great I was so they came and said Ralph, we want you to come to work for us. I said I didn’t ask for a job. But the way it turned out I went to work for them and spent thirty- five years with them. BB: Could you tell me a little bit about what you did for Mountain Bell? RM: Well, I was a lineman, a cable splicer, a line assigner, a service consultant, a major account manager and Idaho district marketing manager. When we reorganized the Bell system I was still there and to stay at district level on that marketing job I had to move to Denver and I said forget it. It’s too close to me being able to bail out of here so they needed an employee benefits administrator in Idaho and that’s what I was. I did that until I retired. And I retired early. BB: Why did you retire early? RM: I didn’t want to move to Denver BB: (Laughs) RM: I wanted to have a fairly good paying job. I’ve always been able to run through money pretty rapidly and I really didn’t want to move to Denver. Don’t get me wrong. I knew – I was personal friends with our Mountain States Telephone’s General Sales Manager and so forth. I could have had a very good job there but it was too late in my career. I’d gone through a rocky divorce and didn’t want to go off and leave my kids and a whole lot of things like that. On balance I did the right thing and then later in my life ran onto Susan Stacy, married her and I’ve been happy as a bird dog ever since. BB: (Laughs) Could you tell me what year it was you retired? RM: Not right off hand. I’d have to go look something up. BB: That’s okay. RM: I can’t. BB: Could you tell me I guess a little bit about Boise while you were growing up here? RM: Sure. Boise from the time I was born Boise didn’t even have Capitol Boulevard when I was born and it was a tight little town that was a charter city so it could not annex. The only way it could gain in size was if the people around it petitioned to be annexed – and nobody’s going to do that – so it hadn’t grown. It was the capitol city and it was an interesting beautiful place with a lovely river running through it, beautiful parks. The two really beautiful parks were there as much for any other reason that the land was given to the city by the people that had an orchard there or whatever. And then after World War II, commerce began to change and some of the regulations were changed and so forth and the city started to grow. And you know, you see it today and of course I was for many years a city councilman trying to facilitate that growth and manage it. Growth to be valuable to people and to a locality has to have some management. There’s just no getting around that. Much as we all resist being managed you’ve got to make good business decisions and good people decisions or you end up with a mess. BB: Well, Thank you. I guess that starts to lead us into these other questions about your city council years. Did your job prepare you for the council? RM: Well, I suspect that being familiar with trying to manage things as I was and had for many years and employing other people’s money and so forth to do all that prepared me. Plus I had lots of self-confidence. I knew what I thought I knew I knew and was willing to move on that, you know? If you’re going to be a manager for a company or a manager for a public entity like a city there are times when it’s up to you. You’ve got to fish or cut bait and get on with it and I was ready to do that – or I thought I was. You know, we all think we’re more than we are most likely but it was a great life. I’m a native son and I’ve always held this area in very high esteem and still do and did then and tried to do my very best or influence others, you know. Serving on the city council is not a one horse deal. Everybody has to learn to pull together and I was fortunate in that I served with an outstanding mayor. Richard Earrdley was just outstanding I thought – and a number of very good council people and staff people. The city had some really top world-class staff people. Probably still does. BB: Perfect. I think we’re definitely going to talk about you know, how it was on the council. Did you serve any other public office before you served on the city council? RM: Nope. Oh well, you know we all – I had kids in school, I was the PTA president and things like that. Lots of stuff like that. I sang in a mixed chorus for many years that had an absolutely outstanding director and we booked ourselves into conventions and all kinds of stuff. We travelled all over the west and made good music and didn’t go broke. BB: Could you tell me more about those other things that you did like PTA president and the music? RM Well, you say you make a claim that you’re going to be able to do thus and such and you just do it. What it amounts to, it’s kind of like a kid in high school. You do your homework, you’ve got to figure out okay, I said I was going to do this now let’s take a look at this and figure out what it means to do it. I learned when I was in my late teens with the Forest Service, I learned how important it was to be a good fire fighter and to be a good fire boss and that lesson then carried me into Mountain Bell where I aspired to be a district manager and pursuing that aspiration I found out how hard you’ve got to work and how much you have to know and how you have to apply yourself to make the right decisions and then carry them out and I brought all that – probably baggage – along with me and tried to use it on the other and it worked. I don’t have to look in the rear view mirror too often - not that I haven’t made a lot of mistakes. Until I married Susan I had trouble staying married to one woman and that’s a struggle and expensive and so forth. You learn by doing things and hopefully you learn it intensely enough that you then know what worked and was right and you repeat that kind of action on and on if applicable. BB: Thank you. Taking that into consideration, what led you to become interested in city government? RM Well to start out with for many years my office was in the same block as Boise City Hall. They were on the corner of sixth and Bannock and we were on seventh. I was always on speaking terms with the mayor and we did a lot of business together, you know. These were people that I knew, sometimes I grew up with them, whatever and I developed opinions about – Boise was going through a tremendous spurt of growth. In my opinion there were some developers that were making it – try to skip into some places where they didn’t have anybody regulating how the growth was accomplished and I began to take personal positions on why I thought that was wrong and how serious I thought it was and how it would burden us unnecessarily with taxes that we shouldn’t have to - pay extra because it was growth that wasn’t connected. Anyway, it was a long complicated thing and somehow or other I got kind of wrapped up in it and it swept me along. BB: Do you remember if there was a moment that made you decide to run for city council or did it just kind of happen? RM It wasn’t a single-issue kind of thing. It was kind of an accumulation of concern seeing that it was hard to get good candidates who had a grasp on what the issues were and then I had several people I knew and respected offer to help me campaign and so forth and I was swept along. Most people who run for a local office like that don’t really have a grasp on how hard it is going to be to get that and how once you stick your toe in the water – unless you’re going to totally embarrass yourself and everybody around you – you’ve got to go give it hell. And I did and I was and so forth. I served on the city council without regret. I enjoyed it. It was hard work and sometimes very frustrating and seemed sometimes endless but I’m proud of the work that I did and I suppose go back twenty-five, thirty years I’d do it again. BB: Could you tell me more? RM Well, the thing that most people overlook and don’t know until they get into it it’s very hard work. You put in hours and hours. You give up all your weekends. In the years that I served on Friday at about five o’clock every week you got the so-called packet. Well, what it was, was the next Monday’s agenda and all of the supporting documents and if you take it the way I did, I was trained in the old Bell system if you’re going to do something be prepared when you do it. Don’t just wing it. Well, if you’re a city councilman and you get the packet at a quarter to five, you spend the whole weekend out driving around and/or reviewing the supporting documents, etcetera, etcetera or getting people on the telephone. You work all weekend – weekend after weekend after weekend. There is no end to it. And then on Monday in the pre-council meeting or in the council meeting on Monday evening you don’t make a damn fool out of yourself. You do what probably in your frame of mind is the best thing to do.It’s like being in finals week while you’re trying to get yourself educated every week. You’ve got to do that every weekend. You give up your weekend. It is hard to have a regular life. My hat is off to the people who are doing that because I know what they are sacrificing – and you do make some sacrifices to do it. BB: Quick question – as a city council member do you keep your regular job and then work in addition to the council or is it just council work all week long? RM Well, in my case I kept my regular job. I went – part of the time I was on the council – well, most of the time I was on the council I was still with Mountain Bell, what is now Quest and I had a series of jobs at Mountain Bell - including I was District Marketing Manager and I became I.O. Employee Benefits Administrator and god, that’s a detailed, talk to people millions of times kind of work. Hands on, you’ve got to be right on top of it all the time or you screw it up. You just lead two lives. BB Okay. RM You don’t go on many fishing trips and things like that. You just don’t have time for that kind of stuff. BB Is it difficult to try and balance your regular life I guess you could call it compared to your city council duties? RM Well, the challenge for anybody that’s in that kind of position is that events tend to set the timing. You can’t set the timing. You can try to and some people do. I served with people on the city council that weren’t engaged. They were nice people and they were smart and sometimes they voted right but it wasn’t because they were deeply engaged. And I already had a lifetime of education and work experience that you had to be engaged. I was used to – I was a district manager with the old Bell system, when somebody asked me something it was because they wanted a smart answer not just a word and to give a smart answer you’ve got to be informed. It sucks a lot out of you – but if you’ve got it there why, so what? I served with some people who weren’t engaged and I served with some that were more engaged than I was. Just kind of like fighting fire. If you don’t knock the fire down it will burn you up (laughs). BB (laughing) Did you want to tell me about the dynamics of the city council that you served on? RM Well, it changed. It was just a group of people and a mayor and so forth. Mostly I served when Richard Eardley was mayor. He and I tended to think somewhat alike so there wasn’t a conflict between us. We didn’t always agree on issues but – and there were others that I particularly respected – Marjorie Ewing was a council person. She was just outstanding. She was a bit impulsive sometimes but her work was good, she did her homework and she made good decisions. There were others that I could say the same for. Some of them had some other agenda and I did my best to thwart them (laughing) if I didn’t think it was in the public interest. A lot of us served in good spirit, weren’t mean to each other. There were a few, but it’s kind of an all-consuming job. You really have to apply yourself. You’ve got to – as my mother used to say – you’ve got to think around corners – and you’ve got to husband your strength and your concentration so that you don’t wear yourself out and then just not do the job. Campaigning, you are out there making commitments to the public and the public have every right to expect to collect on those commitments and if you’ve got any self-pride, why you’re going to do the best you can. You’re not going to be right all the time. You will disappoint yourself from time to time because in spite of your best efforts you screwed it up but that doesn’t happen a lot. BB What years did you serve on the city council? RM Oh, my god you’d have to ask – my memory – BB I think I found it was 1974 to 1985? RM Yeah. BB And you served I believe it was the same time for the whole time Richard Eardley served as well. RM I did. We walked in together and walked out together. BB Was there any reason that you didn’t run for another term I guess is what it would be called? RM Oh, I had served long enough. You know, I needed to do something else with my life. It’s a grind. It costs you money to do it. If you were working that hard on anything else you’d be rich. And there’s always – bless their hearts – one or two people that you are serving with that because of the differences in your opinion and your make up and so forth you get really tired of them and they get tired of you of course and you need to at some point move on with your life. It takes a toll on your health too. I was headed for heart problems and didn’t really know it but found out soon afterwards that I needed a zipper here and some work done. (laughs) BB So was it a pretty stressful job? RM I had other stressful jobs in my life, physically and emotionally and mentally stressful and it is comparable. It isn’t more stressful but your pride in yourself and your ability to handle something is put on the line frequently and that is stressful. None of us can do everything but at one time or another a city councilman has to be able to do everything (laughing). You know what I’m trying to say is you’re going to come face to face with important challenges that you’re not prepared to handle so you’ve got to get – you’ve got to jam it down two gears and rev it up tight and do it. BB Let’s talk about some of those issues that came up while you were on city council where you really had to just do it. RM A lot of the things that were at issue while I was serving had to do with land use, contiguous development, developing rules and regulations that protected the public interest and getting them passed and then getting them implemented. Managing an employee body, having the resources available, making sure that they are properly utilized, that what you thought was right is really right. It’s a management challenge all the time and you can’t just kind of drift along and chat with people. You’ve got to be willing and able and ready to chat with people because they want to talk to you. But you also have a responsibility that you need to be conscious of and you need to be on top of all the time. You can’t just let anything drift – in my opinion. That’s the kind of manager I was and I think the public deserves the best you can give them and that you damn well better give it to them. It is very important that where the kind of government that we have – particularly at the local level – to get a fair shake out of the people that you elect to office. Just because their personality or whatever it is makes them want to run, that is not enough. If they run and get elected then they need to be able to do the job and they need to do it in a very heads-up way without a lot of Mickey Mouse stuff going on. None of that is negotiable with me. (laughing) BB (laughing). So, I was talking with Richard Eardley earlier last week RM Bless his heart. BB And he said that not a lot of people knew this but when he took office the city was almost bankrupt. Could you tell me about that? RM Well, that’s it. You have to – the mayor and council can run a city right into the ground, overnight, and not break any laws doing it. It’s stupidity. That’s right. And he prided himself on a whole lot of management things that he may or may not have been the absolute best, but he gave it his best and he did a lot of improvement. The thing that Dick did that was so important was he got a good financial director in Floyd Ayers that knew and understood what he was doing and Dick gave him the authority – or used his authority – to get it done. Muy Pronto. Yeah, the city was in hell of a shape in many ways and Richard and Floyd Ayers did a real tune-up job on it – and with the full knowledge of the council. And not everybody ever caught on to what the hell was going on. That’s life. Not everybody ever has to – even has to catch on. You do the best you can. Yeah, they were a shipwreck. (laughing) BB (laughing) RM You know, that is so typical. Businesses are that way, you know?. BB Do you remember anything that you guys did to help the city get back on track? RM It was a whole lot of incremental things that we did on a weekly basis and no, I can’t tell you click, click, click. It was an attitude and an effort to – we hired better people than they had had – not that the people that the people that were there previously were devious bad people. It takes kind of a combination of things. Boise has been in the last thirty years or so has been fortunate to have some really outstanding managing people and then bent hell to it. Yeah, that is one of the weaknesses in our great Democracy – is we tend to elect charming people and then we don’t know much about what they are supposed to do and they don’t either and it doesn’t get done right. (laughing) BB (laughing). You were saying earlier that one of the things that you worked a lot on was facilitating and managing Boise’s growth. Could you just kind of explain to me what was going on? RM The tendency here in the west is to kind of leapfrog everything. You know, a guy buys an eighty acres out in the boondocks someplace and he wants to make a million bucks on it but he’s got to have city services. Well, he somehow or other cons the city into spending the money to connect him to the sewer instead of him connecting himself to the sewer. You know, there were a whole lot of things that happened that were inappropriate and the bunch of us that were trying to fix that, fixed it. If you want to put a subdivision at Bogus Basin you build a sewer to it and then we’ll take a look at it (laughing). Oh, gosh I guess I won’t do that then. I thought you’d build a sewer to it. That’s an extreme example but that’s the sort of thing that you’ve got to have a grip on all the time because they didn’t always have a grip on it. They don’t – that sort of thing happens from time to time. God knows where it’s happening today, but it is somewhere. BB What were some of the specific things that were going on in Boise at the time like was it a subdivision at Bogus Basin trying to come in? RM Oh, I don’t remember. No. No, there wasn’t anything glaring but there were things. I couldn’t tell you any of them now. I don’t remember – well Dewey Bills had a tendency to buy farms. DeWayne Bills – don’t use his name – and subdivide them. Well, they wouldn’t be contiguous to anything. They’d be half-way between Boise and Meridian and okay, if you want to do that you do it but do it in the county and don’t expect us to provide sewer to it unless you want to build it, etcetera, etcetera. You have an opportunity to screw that up every day of your life when you’re in a city because – you know, in a growing economy where people are moving in and so forth there is demand for developed property and houses and so forth and it costs a lot of money – more money to build them contiguous to the city than it does to leapfrog. Well we had leapfrog every way When you flew over Ada County it would scare you to death. That interestingly enough – again, I shouldn’t talk about Dewey Bills but he had his own airplane and he would fly around and see a piece of ground that was neglected or something well, then he’d check it out and buy it and develop it, subdivide it in the county but it was urban development happening in the county and it ultimately needed urban facilities. Well, that’s a long ways out there to put urban facilities, sewers – sewer and water and things like that. I used to fly in and out of here all the time in my regular work with Mountain Bell and I’d see all that stuff and it would scare you to death. BB Did the city annex this leapfrog development? RM You can’t – it’s got to be contiguous. You have to work your way out to it. Sure, but it can only done according to law. You can’t annex something that is two miles south of Kuna, even if you’re in Kuna. There’s got to be a connection, a logical physical connection. That’s an oversimplification of what it has to be but you don’t expect the people that are already in the city to pay for a leapfrog development at all. They can’t afford it. Nobody can afford it. But the developer that does that – and I shouldn’t be picking on developers because they’re no more venal than anybody else – but there was a lot of that going on when I – that was one of the things that prompted me to run some – I don’t even remember specifically some subdivision really burned me up and I was interested in resisting that sort of thing. BB Go ahead. Did I interrupt you? RM No. BB How did they…did Boise do, I mean - Did Boise annex or have people asked to be annexed in that contiguous way during your time on city council? RM Oh, all the time. Sure. Yeah and if they are contiguous why you are likely to do it. Yeah, I grew up here in this valley. I lived – when I was a kid you could stand in the street in front of our house which was the town end of Boise Avenue and there weren’t so many trees, you could see the Capitol Dome but we were not in the city. We were in the county. The city’s boundary was the sidewalk on Capitol Boulevard. And in fact we couldn’t even get in the city because there was a piece of ground between us and the city that belonged to somebody else that didn’t want to be in the city. I knew that. And we had sewer problems. We wanted to be on the city sewer when I was a little kid. We couldn’t do it. My dad slowly bought up the land around but he never could get the key piece and it belonged to an advertizing sign company. They didn’t care what happened there except their signs. They cared about that. Yeah, that was the lesson I had growing up – what’s wrong with the system, now we’ve got to fix it. BB Your time on city council was there a particular event that really stood out for you? RM There probably was. Been a while since I was there. Well, yes. The thing I was also – we were involved in was the downtown redevelopment and several of the things that happened there where we got something moving and I can’t recall the details now but I remember we travelled to god, to Chicago and we travelled all over the country on that to get things moving. That was always very difficult because there were various factions all trying – everybody but myself was trying to make money off of it and I was just trying to get it done. (laughs). BB I definitely want to talk about the downtown development and urban renewal issue but unless there’s something that you particularly want to talk about I might save that until further on. RM No, go ahead. BB One particular question that I was interested in is in 1978 the council created the Boise City Arts Commission which is basically what led to the Department of Arts and History where I’m from now. What made the council want to make that ordinance? RM As we understood it, not particularly in that case, but most of those kinds of things need what the city can give to them without much of a commitment. I mean it’s a legal and so forth kind of commitment but it isn’t an expensive commitment at the time. And we were interested in sharing whatever appropriate horsepower the city could with things like that – sooner than later. It was kind of a frame of mind of the council. That it should have been part of the city and the city wanted to be part of it. BB Do you remember much about the need for the Boise City Arts Commission? RM No I don’t. I remember there was – there were several things that needed to be done but I don’t remember the details at all any more. There was something specific but I can’t bring it back. But we were always looking for opportunities to help community improvement things and didn’t shy away from that at all. I can’t remember. There was some kind of issue at the time too but I can’t remember what it might have been now. BB Do you remember the other things that had that need in the community? RM Well, of course that’s how Boise city got involved in trying to help redevelop the commercial center of the community. It wasn’t because we wanted to be big time developers. It was they needed help and the resources, the appropriate resources that were available from the city might make a difference and the interest and so forth. One of the things that the councils that I served on and successive and previous councils always worked to get a decent set of parks for the city and it involved often working with developers and so forth as they brought subdivisions on line. We’d try to have a neighborhood park or whatever but nobody does those things voluntarily. You’ve got to go after it. There were lots of things like that. You could look around and name them all the time trying to provide a real urban atmosphere for the people that live here. BB Could you name a few for me if you remember them? RM Not right off hand. No. Sucked my brain dry [laughs] BB When you remember them just go ahead and interrupt with them at any time. RM Yea. BB My other question – was there something that you wanted to accomplish as a member of the city council? We talked a little bit about the – RM Oh, at the time I’m sure there was. I don’t remember now. One of the things that I wanted to see us – the old Boise was a pretty nice town and I wanted the new growth, new subdivisions, contiguous subdivisions and so forth to be at least of that quality. You know, there were some pretty junky things out in the county that were an embarrassment to everybody and I wanted to see us do better than that and knew we could. I wanted to be sure that we provided – continued to provide good law enforcement, good sewer system, not pollute the river. We’re guilty of all those things. Trying to keep the river clean is a real challenge – and the parks. END OF TRACK 1