Bonneville County gets High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area designation, what does that mean for local law enforcement?
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IDAHO FALLS — The White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy designated Bonneville County a High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area on Friday, according to a news release.
Bonneville is now Idaho’s fifth county with this designation. Two other counties, one in Texas and one in Arizona, also received the designation.
Chris Gibson, executive director of the Oregon-Idaho High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, says the program is a federal counter-drug grant program with $4.3 million available. The program now includes 17 counties nationwide.
The HIDTA program expanded into Idaho and joined Oregon in 2015 — two decades after the Office of National Drug Control Policy came into existence.
Gibson says each designated area will submit proposals to the executive board about its strategy to target and disrupt or dismantle drug operations in its area. Federal funds are provided with the designation to help create task forces composed of federal, state, local and tribal agencies.
Funding can be used for staffing, training, or, in some instances, to buy narcotics in undercover operations, but not to replace current funding for existing operations.
Another benefit of the new designation is the collaboration among the different HIDTAs.
“This is a networked program where we expect all of our initiatives to work together on a more regional basis than just a local basis,” Gibson said. “The idea is that they’re going to look deeper into the case instead of just what they’re seeing right now, and use intel to connect cases to other parts of the country.”
Bonneville County Sheriff Sam Hulse told EastIdahoNews.com that locally, Bonneville County has attempted to get this designation twice previously.
“It’s a long time coming,” Hulse said.
Hulse said that the local community has seen an increase in drug/narcotic arrests of 34% between 2025 and 2026. But it is still not as high as in previous years in the county, with 207 arrests in 2021.
One reason for the increase is that staffing for the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office patrol team is now nearing full, which means more personnel on the streets to intervene in drug operations.
Hulse said the new designation will improve collaboration with other law enforcement agencies.
District 6 Idaho State Police Captain Chris Weadick said that with ISP’s new office, there is dedicated office space to house county, state and federal resources to create that new task force for the HIDTA designation.
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Weadick said the designation will merge resources to target drug trafficking and make agencies more effective through collaboration with other HIDTAs.
Overall, Gibson said that while this new designation may sound worrying to community members, it is a compliment to the existing interdiction programs of each agency in Bonneville County.
He said that their efforts to tackle drug trafficking with the budgets of their own agencies and being aggressive in curbing the flow of drugs are worthy of praise.
“They’ve recognized the problem, and they have done a lot of work to address that problem all along,” Gibson said. “It’s a compliment to the (Bonneville County) Sheriff’s Office, the Idaho Falls Police Department, the state police, and all the other partners that are there.”