The Idaho Statesman from Boise, Idaho • 20

4 Local Sunday, November 6, 2005 The Idaho Statesman IdahoStatesman.com SINUSITIS, COLD? Now in Because the symptoms of sinusitis MERIDIAN sometimes mimic those of colds, you may not realize that you need to see a Sinus Specialist. If you suspect that you have sinusitis, review these signs and Sinus If symptoms. suffer from three you Center or more symptoms, Idaho Sinus Center-Idaho can help! Idaho's first sinus care clinic SYMPTOM SINUSITIS COLD MERIDIAN Facial Yes Sometimes 3090 Gentry Way Duration of Illness 401-0231 Over 10-14 days Under 10 days Nasal Discharge Thick, yellow green Thick, whitish or thin Fever Sometimes Sometimes BOISE Headache Sometimes Sometimes 727 E. RiverPark Ln. 433-9300 Pain in upper teeth Sometimes No Bad Breath Sometimes No NAMPA Coughing Sometimes Yes 1001 Caldwell Blvd.

Nasal Congestion Yes Yes 318-0146 Sneezing No Yes Idaho: Aerial Tapestry The IdahoPTV flying camera travels the length of the Snake River, soars over Idaho's major lakes and mountain ranges, glides along rivers and through canyons on a panoramic tour of the Gem State. Sunday Nov. 6 at 7:00 p.m.) This Idaho Public Television production is available for purchase on VHS or DVD. For your copy of this video, please call 1-877-224-7200. In the Treasure Valley, call 373-7220.

Operators will take your call during and after the program. IDAHO PUBLIC TELEVISION idahoptv.org IDAHO: AN AERIAL TAPESTRY is underwritten by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation. 77756 mba.georgefox.edu Ethical Leadership with a Commitment to Service GEORGE Fox MBA Weeknight professional track in Boise Monthly weekend executive track in Portland More than 500 MBA graduates 0068-SLE-807 Information meetings Nov. 10 and Feb. 9 6 p.m.

George Fox University Boise Center GEORGE Fox SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT 72517 1810 S. Eagle Road Meridian, ID 83642 college degree DE Bachelor's degrees for working adults 16-month degree-completion programs Multiple bachelor's degree options Class one night a week Credit for life experience Information meetings Nov. 8 and Dec. 13 6 p.m. George Fox University Boise Center 1810 S.

Eagle Road Meridian, ID 83642 GEORGE FOX UNIVERSITY boise.georgefox.edu 208-375-3900 George Fox University is ranked by U.S. News World Report as a top-tier regional university and as one of the magazine's "Great Schools at Great Prices." 72252 State editor Jennifer Swindell Phone: 377-6417 IDAHO E-mail: Gay marriage ban on agenda Some Republicans mull Constitutional amendment The Associated Press BURLEY- Idaho Republicans are discussing whether to try for a third time in as many years to add a ban on gay marriage to the state's constitution. Last year, the state Senate failed to muster the necessary two-thirds majority needed to put the issue up for a public vote, which is required to change the Idaho Con- Murray Dalgleish, superintendent of district used a $386,000 grant from Nevada, North Dakota and Utah, and system, although University of Idaho stitution. woman, but socially con- ho tell me this is what they want." A moderate Republican, servative legislators in an If it comes up, such legislation former state Sen. Sheila election year could try to use would begin in the House, and Sorensen of Boise, who's the debate over inserting it Newcomb said he'd want to adnow running for U.S.

Con- into the constitution as a way dress it as the first issue to make used her position as of raising their profiles. sure there aren't any "emotional gress, chairwoman of the Senate Eleven states passed bal- issues hanging around." State Affairs Committee to lot measures for constitu- Newcomb wouldn't carry such deny the issue a hearing af- Bruce tional gay marriage bans in a bill but he has been plotting Bruce ter it House. The platform marriage, lieve reform, sue of Idaho marriage had passed the state Newcomb 2004. And Friday, a judge upheld Oregon's voter-apIdaho Republican Party's proved ban on gay marriage, which includes a ban on gay could give Idaho proponents new and some legislators be- momentum. this, along with property tax "This isn't just a conservative could be the dominant is- issue," said Speaker of the House the 2006 Legislative session.

Newcomb, R-Burley. "I can already has a law defining tell you everywhere I go and whenas between a man and a ever I give a talk, the people of Ida- strategy with the Senate Pro Tem Bob Geddes, R-Soda Springs, and other southern Idaho and the Boise-area Republicans who are interested in the subject. Some senators who voted against the measure in 2005 pledged to renew their opposition in January, when the 2006 session starts. Anne Wallace Allen Associated Press the Council School District, stands with a pile of biomass chips used to fuel school furnaces in Council. The Fuel for Schools, a U.S.

Forest Service program that promotes the use of biomass at schools in Idaho, Montana, a $1.2 million bond issue to fund the project. Council is the only public; school in Idaho to have a biomass heating in Moscow has had a large biomass heating system for 20 years, and Kellogg residents recently approved one. Idaho school keeps students warm by burning biomass Program takes advantage of 'waste' supplies from surrounding forest By Anne Wallace Allen The Associated Press The tiny Council School District used to pour thousands of dollars into outmoded oil and electric heaters. Nearby, the Forest Service burned brush piles on the mountainsides to keep the brush from fueling forest fires in dry summers. Looking for some savings, Council Superintendent Murray Dalgleish developed Idaho's first public school biomass heating system a project that's expected to save Council $1 million on fuel over the next 15 years.

"We're surrounded by the Payette National Forest," said Dalgleish. "We're the Saudi Arabia of wood." Biomass plant or animal waste that can be burned as fuel. Modern biomass furnaces burn such matter wood, manure or crop waste, for example at very high temperatures, reducing pollution to levels acceptable under federal air quality standards. "We're at a fraction of what our oil boiler used to stink up the air with," Dalgleish said. In some other heavily forested states such as 3 Vermont, which heats many public buildings with wood biomass has long been used for fuel.

But it hasn't taken off until recently in the West, where power has been relatively cheap. "It wasn't part of the culture out here," said David Naccarato of Siemens Building Technologies, which installed the Council boiler. "People burned wood in their stoves, but they did not tend on an institutional level to look at wood as a fuel." Dalgleish started looking for oil alternatives in 2002. The high school, built in 1965, used costly radiant electric heat; the boiler at the elementary school next door was 50 years old and headed for extinction. Some months it cost Council $10,000 about a third of its buildings and maintenance budget to provide heat for its 300 students and their teachers.

So he turned to Fuel for Schools, a U.S. Forest Service program that promotes the use of biomass at schools in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Utah. The program gave Council a $386,000 grant toward a new $2.8 million heating system. The rest of the money came from a $1.2 million bond issue approved by the taxpayers, and from projected savings on fuel. For now, switching to biomass is only feasible if the school is replacing an aging heating system anyway, as Council was.

"Probably 75 percent of the people up here in the mountains here heat their houses with wood," said Dalgleish, whose own home has a wood stove. "And why? Because it's a lot cheaper than heating with electricity or natural gas or oil." Council is the first Idaho public school to use biomass for heating, though the University of Idaho in Moscow has had a large biomass heating system for 20 years. Kellogg residents voted Tuesday to approve an $8.6 million levy to pay for a school district biomass heating system. Fuels for Schools was started in Darby, by a group looking for ways to use the slash, or extra brush and limbs, piled up every year by the U.S. Forest Service.

The Forest Service thins the forest to prevent wildfires and burns the brush on the mountainsides, casting a pall of smoke. That's the wood now being used in Council. The highway department put the extra wood through a chipper and dumped it in Council's new storage shed and in a field behind for free, leaving a mountain of fuel that Dalgleish expects to last for two or three winters. With help from the Biomass Energy Resource Center, or BERC, in Montpelier, the Darby group identified several schools in Montana that would save money by converting to biomass. Now Montana has five biomass-heated schools, said Dave Atkins in Missoula, who coordinates the U.S.

Forest Service's biomass program for the region. A school in Ely, is also heated with biomass through the program. Another six Fuels for Schools projects are under way in Montana, and there are other biomass heating systems in neighboring states. Biomass supplies about 9 percent of all industrial energy consumed in Oregon, according to that state's Department of Energy. About 30 public schools in Vermont are heated by biomass, said Tim Maker, executive director of BERC with two or three schools being added each year.

Vermont is the leader, but "it's slowly permeating out from Vermont," said Maker, noting that Maine has one school biomass system and New Hampshire has two. His group is now working in New Mexico and South Dakota to help install biomass school systems there. With biomass, "we can switch our rural communities off fossil 1 fuels and onto local resources," Maker said. "That's money that could be kept in the local regional economy instead of shipping it to energy companies in other parts of the country, or suppliers in other countries." Biomass makes sense when the system is close to a source of wood. There's no size limit for the systems.

All of downtown St. Paul, is heated and cooled with a 25- megawatt heat and power wood boiler, said Maker. About 500,000 square feet of office space in Montpelier is heated by a central steam plant that gets half its heat from a wood boiler. Wood at $35 per ton delivered becomes economically favorable when conventional fuel prices top $1.50 per gallon for oil, $1.05 per galIon for propane, and $11.50 per million BTU for natural gas, Maker said. "We are way above these levels right now for oil and propane; the economics of wood system installation is very favorable," he said.

And there's plenty of biomass, said Mike Tennery, the Fuels for Schools coordinator for Idaho. Slash is burned as waste around much of the country. "All you have to do is drive around north Idaho this time of year and you see the slash piles being burned," Tennery said. "Those slash piles could be to an excellent economic use, and in an environmentally responsible way." Atkins said thinning a forest of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir generates about 10 tons of waste per acre every 20 to 30 years meaning a school the size of Darby's, which burns 770 tons of biomass a year, would need about 2,000 acres of forest to support it. Businessman faces abuse suit from daughters The Associated Press COEUR D'ALENE The director of a northern Idaho business development group is the target of a lawsuit filed by his adopted daughters, who claim he sexually molested them as children and teenagers in California and Idaho.

According to documents filed in 1st District Court, Veronica Nikki Glaze, 41, of Alaska, and Viola Ralston, 40, of Arizona, allege that James Deffenbaugh committed fraud by concealing the abuse from family members. Deffenbaugh is director of the Kootenai County's Panhandle Area Council, an economic development agency for northern Idaho. He also sits on the Idaho Transportation Department's public transportation advisory counsel. Glaze and Ralston are asking for more than $10,000 each for emotional suffering, as well as punitive damages of more than $500,000. The two women, whom Deffen- baugh and his late wife adopted in the early 1970s, said he would fondle them, perform oral sex on them and force them to perform oral sex on him.

Glaze also told the Coeur d'Alene Press her father had sexual intercourse with her. The alleged abuse occurred several times a week, according to court documents. Attempts to reach Deffenbaugh were not successful Saturday, and his lawyer, Mark Harris, did not immediately return a message left at his office. The girls were adopted while Deffenbaugh and his wife, Sharon, who died in 1996 in a car accident, lived in California, they said. They'd spent a year in foster care, and Ralston says life at the Deffenbaugh home began happily.

"Then it all became confused," she said. Both women said they have recorded conversations with Deffenbaugh in which he has acknowledged the alleged abuse..