Idaho meth home law has mixed success

TWIN FALLS, Idaho — A 2005 Idaho law meant to alert renters to homes where meth has been manufactured and encourage owners to clean them up has met with, at best, mixed results.

Renters sometimes are told only after they sign a lease that their new home or apartment was once used as a site to cook the illegal stimulant, The Twin Falls Times-News reported. Chemicals associated with making methamphetamine are hazardous and can make such a property dangerous to inhabit.

Homes must stay on the list until cleared by a certified industrial hygienist. Dozens of residences have been on the list for years.

Until they're removed, homes on the list are supposed to remain vacant. However, it's up to the properties' owners — not police or health officials — to ensure that happens.

Monica Shaff of Twin Falls says she and her now ex-husband didn't know until after they signed a lease that the property they moved into in 2009 previously held a meth lab.

She says that after the paperwork was finished, her landlord told her to keep the kids away from a shed where the drug was manufactured.

"He also told us it had been cleaned properly," Shaff said after learning the two-story home is still on the list. "I'm floored right now."

Shaff and her family have since moved out.

The 2005 Legislature passed a series of measures aimed at combatting what at the time was a scourge, in particular in rural communities.

Though law enforcement agencies say much of Idaho's meth now comes from Mexican super laboratories — seizures of Idaho meth labs plummeted from as many as 169 in 1999 to fewer than a dozen in recent years — the drug's legacy can live on in the form of an unsafe property where it was made.

As of Monday, more than 40 homes were on Idaho's meth-lab property list, with three dating to 2006; eight each from 2007 and 2008; nine from 2009; six from 2010; and 10 from 2011, including a home in rural Bonner County near Priest River listed just last month.

In Shaff's case, authorities say her former landlord, Mitch Campbell, was the victim of drug-making tenants who were busted in 2008.

He carted off the contents of the shed where the tenants cooked the highly addictive brew, then thought it would be safe to rent to a new tenant.