Last summer, Gov. Butch Otter sat in his Ford Expedition in traffic on Boise's busy State Street. He wondered aloud to a reporter who was riding shotgun how much gas - and taxpayer money - could be saved if a good percentage of the 19,000 state of Idaho employees worked from home.

It's still a good question.

The governor's suggestion was met with horror by some agency administrators. There would be no way to transfer secure information to and from an employee sitting at his or her kitchen table, they objected. The lack of an integrated state e-mail system might make such a system impracticable, and besides, who would police the goldbricking?

There are obviously some state workers who couldn't telecommute, but many - perhaps most - could work from home a couple of days a week, saving taxpayers a fortune and conserving an ocean of gasoline.

Skeptics need only look at high-tech companies and even virtual charter schools, which successfully measure performance by work product, not hours sitting at a desk.

And it's not just a good deal for the rank-and-file:Getting results can mean getting a promotion for the boss.

Otter said last summer he hopes to eventually get 10 percent to 15 percent of state workers off roads in the Treasure Valley, where 11,000 of them live.

If, say 1,100 people could avoid a 15-mile round-trip commute two days a week, that would save 229,000 gallons of gas annually and put eight fewer tons of air pollutants into the air.

The governor asked Toni Hardesty, director of the Department of Environmental Quality, to track of how telecommuting employees were pinpointed, creating a model for the private sector to follow. Hardesty has yet to make public the results.

Telecommuting by state employees needn't be limited to the Treasure Valley. A social worker, a teacher or a brands inspector can't phone it in, but a budget analyst or a computer programmer certainly could.

The obstacles are mostly institutional. It takes an administrator of considerable courage to imagine folks working from home. And it comes down, really, to whether bosses trust their employees.

A supervisor is, in essence, a coordinator who makes sure people work with each other and in the same direction. There's no reason that couldn't happen in cyberspace as effectively as in an air-conditioned room full of clock-watchers trying to beat the evening commute.

Our view: Why are state employees clogging the highways when many of them don't have to? What do you think? We welcome viewpoints from our readers on this and other issues.