Why Idaho's Endowment Trust is in the Self Storage Business

"BOISE — An Idaho-managed endowment trust is unfairly taking on the private sector and undermining tax revenue for local governments by buying a storage facility to bolster revenue for the state’s public schools, a national self-storage lobbying group said Wednesday.

But Laurie Boeckel, a board member of Idaho’s Children’s Land Alliance Supporting Schools, a group focused on making sure endowment lands are managed properly, contends the state doesn’t own the business — its endowment trust does.

Endowment trust lands are tracts granted to states when they achieved statehood, and endowment trusts like Idaho’s have bought and sold holdings such as the storage business over the years.

According to the Idaho Constitution, the five members of the Idaho Land Board who oversee the trust — Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter, Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, Controller Donna Jones, Secretary of State Ben Ysursa and public schools chief Tom Luna — must deliver the maximum benefit to beneficiaries, including public schools.

All five voted in August to buy the storage facility.

Scanlon “obviously has an interest for his group, but that is not what the obligation or fiduciary duty is of those managing the trust,” Boeckel told the AP. “If we continue to let special interest groups pressure the managers into not adhering to their fiduciary duties, the ones that lose will be Idaho’s children.”

Affordable Self-Storage in Boise’s suburbs is more than 80 percent occupied. Its projected annual earnings of nearly $230,000 will be shared by schools statewide. About $20,000 will go to Boise schools, double what they’d been getting from property taxes generated by the facility when it was still in private hands, state officials have said."

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