Bill Analyses and Ratings

Bill Summary

House Bill 926 amends Idaho Code Section 50-3101 to expand the geographic reach of community infrastructure districts (CIDs), which are special financing mechanisms that allow new development to fund regional public infrastructure through advance payment of impact fees. Under existing law, counties could form CIDs only in areas covered by a city’s comprehensive plan and only with that city’s consent. This bill adds a third pathway: counties may now form CIDs in areas that fall entirely outside any city’s comprehensive plan, without requiring city involvement or approval, effectively allowing CIDs to be created virtually anywhere in the state.

Community infrastructure districts are quasi-governmental taxing and spending bodies with significant statutory powers, including the authority to impose special assessments on real property, issue special assessment bonds, and spend funds on a broad range of infrastructure including roads, parking facilities, trails, and public safety facilities. There is no statutory cap on special assessment amounts, and assessments can increase up to 2% per year to a maximum of 10%. District formation requires a petition signed by no fewer than two-thirds of landowners — not eligible voters — and once formed, districts can levy assessments and issue bonds without voter approval.

The bill also makes two technical corrections: it repositions the word ‘only’ in subsection (3) for grammatical clarity without changing its legal effect, and it inserts ‘may be’ before ‘cited’ in subsection (5) to conform to standard statutory citation language. An emergency clause sets the effective date as July 1, 2026.

Overall Assessment

Although House Bill 926 makes a narrow jurisdictional change — allowing counties to form CIDs outside city comprehensive plan boundaries — its downstream consequences are substantive and far-reaching. By expanding where these districts can be created, the bill effectively enables the formation of quasi-governmental taxing and spending bodies across the entire state, including in rural and unincorporated areas previously beyond their reach. This represents a meaningful expansion of government size, scope, and taxing capacity, warranting negative scores on the metrics most directly implicated by these changes.

The bill’s most significant concerns center on accountability and fiscal impact. CIDs are formed through a petition process involving only landowners — not all eligible voters — with no required public notice period or time limit for signature gathering. Once formed, these districts can impose special assessments and issue bonds without voter approval, bypassing the transparency safeguards of a standard election. By expanding the territory where this process applies, the bill extends these accountability deficits statewide, resulting in more government spending, more debt capacity, and more property owners subject to assessments imposed without their direct vote. The bill receives a total score of -2, reflecting negative ratings on government responsibility and economic impact, while most other metrics are unaffected by this narrow but consequential jurisdictional expansion.