State Preemption Through the Lens of Idaho Local Officials

Abstract

In this field note, we partnered with the Association of Idaho Cities (AIC) to conduct an original survey of 119 mayors and city councilors across the State to assess their perceptions of – and experiences with – state preemption. We find that local officials across Idaho, Democrat and Republican alike, are strongly opposed to preemption and overwhelmingly believe that it negatively affects local affairs. We also find that, despite their limited autonomy, local officials express a desire to resist state preemption through various mechanisms, ranging from advocacy efforts and local ordinances to legal action and defiance. Our qualitative data corroborates our quantitative data, illustrating local officials’ negative sentiments about state preemption.

Introduction

On April 3, 2025, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed House Bill 96 into law, prohibiting cities from displaying unauthorized flags, especially those promoting political causes, on government property. Boise Mayor Lauren McLean vowed to keep the city’s LGBT Pride flag flying, stating, “We will continue flying it because we are a safe and welcoming city that values all comers.” Conservative activists were seen covering the Pride flag and adding a flag linked to right-wing movements, prompting Mayor McLean to drive to Boise City Hall on a Sunday morning to reinstate the Pride flag herself. Soon after, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador responded to Mayor McLean with a letter, warning her to comply with the new law or lose state funding, adding that some had called for her arrest (Komatsoulis 2025a).

Swindell et al. (2018) outline methods that cities can leverage to oppose and resist state preemption, including advocating for more autonomy, initiating local legislation, finding workarounds, taking legal action, and refusing to comply. Interestingly, throughout the month-long battle with the State over hanging the LGBT Pride flag, the City of Boise leveraged all five of these actions. In an April 24 letter to Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, Mayor McClean urged the State to allow the city to maintain its autonomy over its flags. At the same time, Mayor McLean warned that Boise would not take down the flag, stating that the city “isn’t acting out of defiance – we’re acting out of duty” (Rodriguez 2025a). As the dispute escalated, on May 6, the Boise City Council passed a resolution to designate the Pride flag as an official city flag to circumvent the new state law. The city also accepted an offer of pro bono legal services from a local law firm, Holland and Hart (Rodriguez 2025b). Notably, Boise was not the only city to oppose and resist House Bill 96. The deep-red border town of Bonners Ferry followed Boise’s example, passing a resolution to continue flying the Canadian flag in their city (McEvoy 2025). The cities of Kuna and Nampa, also right-leaning, have chosen to continue flying their “Thin Blue Line” flags to honor their police forces. Zulema Montenegro, assistant to the Mayor of Kuna, stated, “No displays at Kuna City Hall have been or will be removed at this time” (Komatsoulis 2025b).

While a newsworthy example of state preemption – situations in which state laws take precedence over local laws – this is one of many recent incidents of state preemption in Idaho. The Association of Idaho Cities (AIC) tracked fourteen preemption bills passed by the Idaho State Legislature during the 2025 session alone, and these bills were often blanket preemptions that applied statewide. One notable example is House Bill 243, which loosened the minimum staff-to-child ratios in daycare settings. The legislation preempts local governments from enacting stricter daycare regulations than those established by the State. Ultimately, the bill shifts Idaho’s ranking on child-to-staff ratios from the forty-first loosest to the forty-fifth loosest in the country. House Bill 68 preempts cities from requiring electric vehicle charging stations, while House Bill 32 bans local governments from implementing mask mandates. Senate Bills 1140 and 1144 preempt cities from prioritizing pedestrian infrastructure on new highway projects, and Senate Bill 1141 compels cities to ban public camping or sleeping among the unhoused (Pfannenstiel 2025). The 2025 legislative session continued previous patterns of preemption in Idaho. Namely, a 2018 report published by the National League of Cities and a 2020 report published by the Economic Policy Institute highlight Idaho as a top preemptor of local action (Blair et al. 2020; DePuis et al. 2018).

Case Study: House Bill 287

In 2023, HB 287 prohibited local governments from adopting any energy code that was different from or stricter than the requirements set by the 2018 Idaho Energy Conservation Code.

While the bill was being considered, the Blaine County Commission unsuccessfully advocated for more autonomy from the state by drafting a letter of opposition that was ultimately ignored.

However, the cities of Hailey and Ketchum have successfully incorporated “workarounds” to this preemption by adopting voluntary, market-based participation in energy efficiency standards through education and training programs (Blaine County 2025).

There are reasons to believe that local officials, both in general and in Idaho, will oppose and resist state preemption for several reasons, ranging from the inability to satisfy constituent needs (Riverstone-Newell 2017), stifled local innovation (Rutkow et al. 2019), and partisan or ideological disagreements with the state (Artiles 2025; Barber and Dynes 2021; Einstein and Glick 2017). For example, Barber and Dynes (2021) conducted a novel survey of over 2,000 municipal officials about whether they had experienced state preemption. They found that officials in municipalities that were more ideologically distant from their state were more likely to report being preempted. Artiles (2025) presented over 1,000 local officials with hypothetical scenarios of state preemption over environmental and traffic regulations. She found that local officials facing preemption from an out-party state government were significantly more opposed to preemption, and were more willing to take legal action, refuse to comply, initiate a resolution, and advocate for more autonomy in response to preemption.

To that end, in this field note, we partnered with the Association of Idaho Cities (AIC) to conduct an original survey of 119 mayors and city councilors across the State of Idaho. Our survey explores local officials’ views about and experiences with state preemption. Beyond our focus on Idaho, we replicate and extend upon Barber and Dynes (2021) and Artiles (2025) in several ways. Namely, we utilize Barber and Dynes’ (2021) question about local officials’ experiences with state preemption and build upon this question by providing respondents with two opportunities to elaborate on their experiences in an open-ended manner. We leverage Artiles’ (2025) question about local officials’ opposition to state preemption and extend her question about local officials’ resistance to preemption. Idaho is not a Home Rule state, resulting in little recourse for local officials to combat preemption. Therefore, we break Artiles’ (2025) resistance question into two: one asking what actions they have taken to resist preemption and one asking what actions they wish to take to resist preemption. This approach allows us to compare local officials’ current and desired levels of local autonomy. Finally, we incorporate an original question that gauges whether respondents believe that preemption positively or negatively impacts local affairs.

Our quantitative and qualitative data reveal novel and valuable information about the preemption conflicts between state and local governments in Idaho. Overall, we find that both Democrat and Republican local officials across Idaho are strongly opposed to preemption and agree that it has a negative impact on local affairs. We also demonstrate that local officials desire significantly more autonomy than they are granted and would utilize more pushback mechanisms against state preemption if given the opportunity. Our open-ended data also proved compelling. In these responses, local officials report experiences with preemption across several substantive policy areas and describe these experiences as largely negative, overreaching, and inequitable.

Why Idaho?

Idaho is a particularly useful case study for preemption for several reasons. First, state preemption is often told as a story about conservative state governments targeting liberal cities (Einstein and Glick 2017; Fowler and Witt 2019; Goodman and Hatch 2024; Riverstone-Newell 2017; Swanson and Barrilleaux 2020). Yet in Idaho, the vast majority of elected officials at both the state and local levels are Republican, resulting in a unique presence of intra-party preemption. In fact, in our own survey sample, 70 percent of local officials identify as Republican, with 15 percent identifying as Democrat and 15 percent identifying as neither.

Relatedly, state preemption often disproportionately targets larger cities, which tend to have higher capacities and resources to experiment with their own policies (Fetcher 2025). Yet Idaho is a heavily rural state. With a total population of just over two million, only three cities have populations over 100,000, and eight have populations over 50,000. More than half of all Idaho cities have fewer than 1,000 residents (Carney 2024). With this in mind, it is worthwhile to explore whether state preemption is perceived negatively in a context characterized by many small city officials.

Finally, Idaho is one of the few states that does not provide Home Rule – a legal framework that allows cities to challenge state preemption – via its constitution or statute (Moore 2020). This deviation from the norm is important because local autonomy is a powerful predictor of state preemption activity. Fowler and Witt (2019) find that Home Rule status increased the likelihood of legislative preemption across seventeen policy areas. Weissert et al. (2021) find that higher local autonomy is associated with increased gubernatorial preemption over public health policies. Artiles (2024) corroborates this finding: governors in states with higher local autonomy were more likely to issue ceiling and floor preemptions, which prohibit local governments from issuing stricter or laxer regulations than the state, respectively. In their study of judicial preemption, Swanson and Barrilleaux (2020) find that state courts were more likely to preempt high-autonomy local governments. Together, this literature suggests that states feel the need to curtail high-autonomy local governments through preemption. Given the low local autonomy in Idaho, this context is particularly interesting for exploring local officials’ perceptions of preemption, including its frequency.

Data and Methods

We field an original survey through the Association of Idaho Cities (AIC) of mayors and city councilors across the State of Idaho. ¹ Established in 1947, the AIC is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that serves 191 out of 197 incorporated cities in Idaho (97% coverage). ² The AIC advocates on behalf of cities by providing education, training, and assistance to strengthen the capacity of cities to serve their constituents. Our survey was fielded from April 7 to June 10, 2025. The AIC recruited 170 mayors and 704 city councilors to complete our survey through one direct email invitation and three advertisements in its weekly newsletter. In total, we received 119 responses from forty mayors (23.5% response rate) and seventy-nine city councilors (11.2% response rate).

Our response rate from mayors exceeds the 15% average for surveys on American political elites, while our response rate from city councilors falls short of this expectation (Kertzer and Renshon 2022). This trend is intuitive for several reasons. First, the vast majority of Idaho cities operate under a strong mayor system, in which the mayor serves as the chief executive of the city and presides over city council meetings. Therefore, mayors in Idaho are more likely to feel responsible for responding on behalf of the city than councilors. Second, the AIC strives not to inundate its members with direct emails; instead, it uses its weekly newsletters as its primary channel of communication. This method of communication reduces respondent frustration at the expense of the higher response rates that direct emails typically yield (Kertzer and Renshon 2022).

Results

General Attitudes About Preemption

We first asked local officials about the extent of their opposition to state preemption: “The term ‘preemption’ refers to situations in which a law passed by a higher authority takes precedence over a law passed by a lower one. In general, do you support or oppose state preemption over local government?” Answer choices were presented on a five-point scale and ranged from “Strongly support” to “Strongly oppose.” Answers were subsequently recoded on a 0–1 scale for ease of interpretation.

Figure 1 illustrates respondents’ opposition to state preemption, with the dotted line representing the average opposition of 0.69 out of 1. Broken down, 66 percent of local officials either somewhat (35%) or strongly (31%) oppose preemption, while only 21 percent either somewhat (19%) or strongly (2%) support preemption. About 12 percent of respondents reported neutral attitudes toward preemption. This opposition brought Democrat and Republican local officials together: 75 percent of Democrat local officials and 64 percent of Republican officials opposed preemption. No Democrat or Republican respondents reported strongly supporting preemption. ³ Overall, local officials across Idaho, regardless of partisanship, are overwhelmingly opposed to preemption.

Figure 1.

Opposition to preemption.

We then asked respondents, “In general, how do you think state preemption has impacted your local government?” Answer choices ranged from “Very positively” to “Very negatively” on a five-point scale but were again recoded on a 0–1 scale for simplification. Figure 2 shows the distribution of local officials’ views on the impact of state preemption. The average perceived impact – again displayed on the dotted line – is 0.71 out of 1, or quite negative. Most respondents (68%) believe that preemption has a negative impact on their local government, with 45% reporting somewhat negative effects and 23% reporting very negative effects. Very few local officials believe that preemption has a very positive (2%) or somewhat positive (4%) impact on their local government. Finally, 27% report neutral feelings about the effects of preemption. The perceived impact of preemption was also shared by local officials from both parties, with 69 percent of Democrat officials and 70 percent of Republican officials reporting that preemption negatively impacts local affairs. No Democrat respondents, and only 5 percent of Republican respondents, reported a positive impact. Overall, there is a bipartisan consensus that preemption negatively impacts local affairs.

Figure 2.

Perceived impact of preemption.

Experiences with Preemption

To capture direct experiences with preemption, respondents were asked, “In your time as a local official, has the state ever tried to enact legislation that would preempt a law passed by your local government?” Here, the answer choices included “No, they have not tried,” “Yes, they have tried but were not successful,” and “Yes, they have tried and were successful” (Barber and Dynes 2021). Overall, 53 percent of respondents report having been preempted by the State of Idaho, while 47 percent of respondents claim that they had not been. As shown in Figure 3, among respondents who experienced attempted preemption, the vast majority (84%) reported that the State of Idaho was successful in its attempts.

Figure 3.

Experiences with preemption.

These results resemble those of Barber and Dynes (2021), who found that 60 percent of local officials had reported preemption attempts, while 38 percent did not. Also similar to Barber and Dynes (2021), officials in larger cities reported preemption attempts more frequently. In our own sample, 92 percent of officials representing cities of 50,000 or more reported preemption attempts, compared to 41 percent of officials representing cities of 500 or less. These distinct experiences are intuitive, given that larger cities tend to innovate more frequently across various policies (Fetcher 2025). For example, House Bill 68, which preempted local governments from requiring electric vehicle charging stations, would only affect larger cities that had implemented such stations in the first place.

Regarding partisanship, 75 percent of the Democrats in our sample reported experiencing preemption, compared to 53 percent of Republicans in our sample. Of course, it is not necessarily the case that Democrat local officials faced preemption more than Republican local officials, particularly since most preemptions apply statewide. Instead, Democrat officials likely perceive the State’s actions as more preemptive due to their ideological incongruence with the State. On the other hand, since Republican officials tend to substantively agree with the policy actions of the State, they are less inclined to view them as preemptive.

Respondents who reported preemption attempts were brought to a text box that read: “Please briefly describe the experience(s).” When asked to elaborate on their experiences, respondents noted several distinct substantive policy areas they had faced preemption over. Figure 4 presents a word cloud with the most frequently used words in respondents’ open-ended answers. These included daycare licensing, urban renewal, single-use plastic bags, taxes, water, tourism, short-term rentals, highway funding, building code requirements, and libraries. The open-ended examples provided by respondents mirror many preemption attempts in Idaho’s recent legislative sessions. For example, tax policy – the most frequently used word – has been a decades-long point of contention between the State of Idaho and its local governments. Despite advocacy efforts by the AIC, Idaho has retained strict control over city taxing authorities, with no success at expanding it beyond a handful of resort towns.

Case Study: Idaho Statues, Title 50, Chapter 10

For decades, local officials across Idaho cities, including Boise, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho Falls, and Meridian, have unsuccessfully lobbied the State Legislature for the power to enact local sales taxes.

Today, the State of Idaho only allows resort cities with less than 10,000 residents, such as Bonners Ferry and Stanley, to impose a local option sales tax.

As a result, most Idaho cities do not have diversified revenue streams for local services such as public safety and transit. Instead, these cities rely heavily on property taxes (Berg 2018).

Figure 4.

Word cloud, experiences with preemption.

All respondents were given a final opportunity to express their views on preemption in a text box that read: “Please share any additional thoughts you have about state preemption.” Here, local officials offered a variety of information. Respondents’ additional thoughts fell into three themes, the first being a consensus that local governments are the closest to the people and, therefore, offer the best representation of their constituents. One official noted, “Local control reflects the desires of the local population.” Another concurred, “Local government best understands local needs.” One added, “IMO [in my opinion] preemption takes away the notion that government works best at the local level.”

A second theme highlighted that Idaho legislators, albeit opposed to federal preemption, do not apply this same philosophy to state preemption: “The State reps certainly know, and don’t like when the Feds do this to them, but don’t seem to have the ability to know when they are doing the same thing to us.” One official stated, “The hypocrisy is astounding! They bitch and moan about the Federal Government messing with Idaho and then turn right around and do it to cities.” Some responses to this effect noted the unique role of intra-party preemption. For example, one official stated, “The irony of a ‘party of freedom’ being in control of our legislature is not lost on some local officials.”

A final theme recognizes that although preemption sometimes targets larger cities, smaller cities are too affected by preemption. For instance, “What works or is impactful in a big city like Twin Falls, Boise or Nampa does not work in a small rural city of less than 1,000 people. You cannot paint every city with the same brush.” Another official stated, “Mostly it seems to be ‘Boise bills’. The state legislature is more conservative than Boise and sometimes wants to reign them in. The effect on smaller more conservative cities in the State is basically collateral damage.” These testimonies reflect the reality that, under Idaho law, all cities are considered equal, regardless of size. Another respondent notes the uniquely rural composition of Idaho, stating, “Idaho communities range from very small to somewhat large. We are all different. Some are very rural, such as our community. Some are more metropolitan. We should be allowed to have ordinances that protect our citizens. The State does not know each individual case, and has no right to impose a one-fits-all narrative.”

Combatting Preemption

Perhaps the most insightful finding of this survey is the comparison between what local officials have done to combat preemption and what they wish they could do to combat preemption. Respondents were first asked, “Which of the following actions, if any, has your local government taken in response to state preemption?” The five actions presented to respondents included passing a local ordinance, advocacy efforts, finding a workaround, legal action, and defiance (Swindell et al. 2018). For each action, respondents answered on a 1–3 scale, where a 1 represents “We have not done this,” and a 3 represents “We have done this.” A 2 represents “We have considered this.”

Then, respondents were asked, “Which of the following actions, if any, would you support your local government taking in response to preemption?” Here, answers were placed on a 1–5 scale, ranging from “Strongly oppose” taking action to “Strongly support” taking action. The answers for each of these questions were recoded on a 0–1 scale to compare them on equal footing.

Figure 5 presents a series of difference-in-means tests, calculating the difference between what local officials have done to combat preemption and what local officials wish they could do to combat preemption. ⁴ Turning first to the square point estimates in the first two rows, local officials report having found alternative means to achieve local goals at an average of 0.46 out of 1. When asked what they wished their local government would do, local officials’ support for finding a workaround increased to 0.87 out of 1. This represents a forty-one-point increase, significant at the p < .001 level. Looking at the circular point estimates in rows 3 and 4, local officials reported passing local ordinances in response to preemption at an average of 0.06 out of 1. However, support for issuing ordinances in response to preemption was 0.57 out of 1. This represents a fifty-one-point increase, also significant at the p < .001 level.

Figure 5.

T-tests, action taken versus action desired against preemption.

The diamond point estimates in rows 5 and 6 reveal that legal action was pursued in response to preemption at an average of 0.14 out of 1. Support for taking legal action in the future, though, was moderately desired (0.55 out of 1). This equates to a forty-one-point increase in support for legal action, significant at the p < .001 level. Defiance in response to preemption remained relatively unpopular, although local officials expressed a desire to defy the State (0.24 out of 1) far more than they have acted on it (0.06 out of 1). The cross point estimates in rows 7 and 8 indicate that local officials are four times more likely to support defiance, which is significant at the p < .001 level. Finally, looking at the triangular point estimates in rows 9 and 10, local officials reported advocating for more autonomy at an average of 0.40 out of 1, making it the second most common response to preemption. Still, support for advocacy efforts more than doubled to 0.81, significant at the p < .001 level.

Responses to our second open-ended question, which asks local officials to share any additional thoughts about preemption, note that pushing back against preemption can be risky. One official reported, “I honestly haven’t ever considered defying the State or passing ordinances in defiance. Our city isn’t wealthy and the legal risk and costs thereof just aren’t worth it.” Other respondents concurred that resources to push back against preemption are scarce in most Idaho cities: “We have to maintain a report [sic] with legislators. We wouldn’t have the funds to take legal action against the State. We are forced to take what we are given when it comes to legislative rule.” Another added, “Our city would not consider defiance as a productive or fruitful policy path. That is a pretty expensive and high-stakes way to govern. Few of us have the resources to fritter away local tax dollars on political or symbolic action. And this is particularly so when other means of expression are free – op-eds, letters to legislators, speeches given back home, etc.” Despite these noted risks, local officials continue to express a desire for more autonomy over their affairs, with one respondent adding, “It is very difficult in the State of Idaho which is not a home rule state and that is very frustrating. I would advocate for that.” Another stated, “It’s better for the state to have more say in their state than the federal government, likewise, the local municipality should have more say than the state.”

Conclusion

The contribution of this field note is twofold. First, we provide a first look at preemption conflicts between state and local officials in Idaho. Idaho offered an excellent opportunity for a case study given its unique political and institutional characteristics, including being overwhelmingly conservative, disproportionately rural, and lacking meaningful local autonomy. Especially useful about our case study is that we received responses from 119 local officials, including mayors and city councilors, coming from vastly different city sizes across the State of Idaho.

Second, our survey presents a wide array of novel quantitative data on local officials’ views about preemption. Namely, we have quantified local officials’ opposition to preemption, the perceived impact of preemption, the actions they have taken to combat preemption, and, perhaps most importantly, what actions they wish they could take to combat preemption. Moreover, we offer unique qualitative data about local officials’ experiences with preemption, prompting them to provide specific policy examples and to offer any additional thoughts about preemption.

Our results speak to the extant literature on state preemption in several ways. First, our work complements existing findings that ideological incongruence or partisan mismatch increases local officials’ perceptions of preemption conflicts. Officials in larger cities also tend to report more experiences with preemption (Barber and Dynes 2021). Adding to existing literature, we demonstrate that state preemption over local governments is not only a story about conservative states targeting liberal, large cities (Einstein and Glick 2017; Fowler and Witt 2019; Goodman and Hatch 2024; Riverstone-Newell 2017; Swanson and Barrilleaux 2020). Instead, skepticism about preemption is also prevalent within conservative, small cities in conservative states.

Our study also speaks to the literature on the influence of local autonomy on preemption, which shows that high-autonomy local governments often face higher preemption activity (Artiles 2024; Fowler and Witt 2019; Weissert et al. 2021). Despite their low levels of autonomy, local officials in Idaho frequently face preemption. Relatedly, we document the stark differences between the actions local officials have taken – and would like to take – in response to preemption (Artiles 2025; Swindell et al. 2018).

Future studies should replicate this survey across different states. Collaborating with other local organizations, scholars can determine whether Idaho local officials’ views on – and experiences with – preemption hold true in other contexts. For example, does local officials’ opposition to and perceptions of preemption differ in more heterogeneous political contexts? It is likely that ideological incongruence might exacerbate preemption conflicts between state and local governments. Local officials in states with more urbanicity – or in states that grant more local autonomy – might also offer different experiences, given the increased capacity and resources available to cities in these contexts.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-slg-10.1177_0160323X251415202 – Supplemental material for State Preemption Through the Lens of Idaho Local Officials

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-slg-10.1177_0160323X251415202 for State Preemption Through the Lens of Idaho Local Officials by Alexandra Artiles, Stephanie L. Witt and Lance Sayers in State and Local Government Review