In 1982, Power County and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints disagreed over whether a church-owned farm in Arbon Valley should pay property taxes. On December 31, 1982, the Salt Lake Tribune printed an Associated Press report from American Falls, the county seat, under the headline "LDS to Pay Taxes on Farm." The church had agreed to pay taxes on its 6,742-acre farm, more than ten square miles of valley land, and the agreement ended a dispute that, the report said, had put the Arbon elementary school in danger of closing.
That report is the only account of the dispute found so far. In the archive's machine-read text, its columns are jumbled together with the television listings and other stories on the same page, so what follows is a paraphrase of what can be pieced back together. Where the report is silent, the post says so.
A welfare farm or an investment
The earliest step the report dates came in February 1982, when the church applied to the county for a tax exemption on the Arbon farm. The report does not print the county's ruling, but by December the church had an appeal before the state Board of Tax Appeals, so the county had probably refused the exemption.
Ben Cavaness, the county's deputy prosecuting attorney, said the county objected to the way the Arbon farm was run: the church had hired the farm's former owner to run it, and not all of the farm's proceeds went to welfare purposes, that is, to the church's program for people in need. The report added that, traditionally, the members of a local ward (a Latter-day Saint congregation) owned and worked their welfare farms at their own expense.
The quarrel reached a second farm. The church also had a welfare farm at Michaud Flats, near the Pocatello airport, which, the report said, had been granted a tax exemption for two years. When the church sought the Arbon exemption that February, the commissioners changed the Michaud Flats farm's tax-free status.
The compromise
By late December the two sides had a settlement, as Cavaness described it. The church had mailed a check for $4,292, half of the tax owed on the Arbon property. It agreed not to seek an exemption for that land and to withdraw its appeal, and the farm would be shifted to the church's taxable investment properties. In return, the county would restore the exemption on the Michaud Flats welfare farm.
The commissioners still had to give the compromise final approval, probably at their next meeting. One of them, Louise Bauer, said that week that she did not agree with it. She was "not in favor of it," though she expected it to go through and to end the controversy for the time being. She hoped the church would move the farm into its income-producing property and would not seek an exemption again. Cavaness said the agreement had, in effect, put to rest the worry that the Arbon school would close.
What the report leaves out
The dispatch does not explain how the tax dispute could have closed the school, or what share of the district's money the farm's taxes represented. It does not say when or how the church acquired the land, who the former owner was, or whether the commissioners approved the compromise at their next meeting. Valley families may remember more, and the local newspapers of 1982 and 1983 may hold the rest of the story.
The Arbon school was open a generation later. In 2016, KPVI News 6 reported that Arbon Elementary's 16 students had saved for nearly three years to replace a badly cracked blacktop with a $12,000 concrete playground, much of the money coming from the Idaho Lottery's Scratch for Schools program and the rest from other fundraisers. This site keeps a reprint of that story.
On this site: the history of the Arbon area, the valley's first school and other firsts, School memories with a photograph of the Arbon school from about 1980, and the school district's notices, such as the 2014 supplemental levy election.