A city seat with your name on it, two race nights at the Speedway, and Kuna takes its cameras down

Welcome to issue sixty-four. Thursday's storms did what storms do, and Friday is the hangover: cooler, a few leftover showers in the morning, and then the valley starts drying out in time for the weekend. Bring a jacket to whatever you're standing outside for tonight.

Today: the city is handing out nine seats on the board that argues about your roads, a Meridian baby boutique packed up and moved a mile down Eagle Road, Kuna quietly took its license plate cameras off the poles, and the Speedway runs two nights in a row. Know someone who should be reading this? Forward them the sign-up link →

Let's get into it.

Browse the highlights — read Meridian Local Scoop online →

🧠 Trivia: Meridian has eight places on the National Register of Historic Places. Seven of them are single buildings — houses, a bank, an old telephone exchange. The eighth isn't a building at all. What is it, and where do you find it?

(Answer at the bottom.)

The weekend belongs to the quarter-mile oval on S. Main — the Speedway runs Friday and Saturday, which it only does a handful of times a year. After that the week goes quiet until Thursday, when a free six-week women's health series starts at the south Meridian Y and two different bars run game nights four blocks apart.

Dropped on purpose: two things that looked like Meridian events and weren't. "The Ultimate Lift" launch on Sept. 24 is listed on the Meridian Chamber's community calendar, but the venue on the detail page is the Boise Centre on W. Front St. And Monday's "The Conversation Is the Marketing" workshop is at a WaFd Bank on N. Meeker Ave in Boise. That's two more for a tally we've stopped finding funny. We also went looking for a Friday-night high school football listing and couldn't confirm a kickoff time from a source we trust, so we left it out rather than guess.

No watches or warnings were posted for Ada County as this went out. Thursday's Red Flag Warning for parts of southern Idaho and southeast Oregon expired at 9 p.m. Thursday. We still don't have an alerts feed we fully trust, so treat that as "we found nothing," not "there is nothing" — check NWS Boise before you commit to an outdoor afternoon.

Friday, September 18 — Meridian

Overnight low around 50. Sunrise 7:28 a.m., sunset 7:51 p.m.

The National Weather Service point forecast for Meridian has mostly sunny with a high near 75, and a 20 percent chance of showers before noon. That's six degrees cooler than Thursday, which is the front going through rather than anything dramatic.

⚠️ A note on where these numbers come from, because it matters today. The NWS file we normally lead with was last refreshed midday Tuesday and has not moved since — three days frozen, and byte-for-byte identical to what we read yesterday and the day before. So we checked it against a live one. CBS2's Thursday-morning forecast, written at 4:10 a.m., says "Friday turns cooler with more showers before we begin drying out Saturday," and its live three-day strip has Friday at 74 for the Boise area. Two sources, one degree apart, both pointing the same direction. Plan for mid-70s and a wet morning.

The rest of the week: Saturday 79 and sunny — good news if you have Pink Lady Classic tickets. Sunday 82, Monday 84. Direction check for the nerds: the Boise-area reading ran one degree cooler than the Meridian point today.

Everybody in this town has a road opinion. There is a formal place to put it, and the city is currently taking applications for it. The Meridian Transportation Commission advises city leaders on roads, transit corridors, bike lanes, sidewalks, pathways and lighting — the multi-modal stuff that decides whether you can actually walk your kid to school in south Meridian or whether you're driving four blocks. It seats up to nine voting members on three-year terms, meets on the first Monday of each month at 3:30 p.m. at City Hall, and pays exactly nothing. The deadline to apply is 5 p.m. on Friday, October 2.

The mechanics are straightforward and slightly old-fashioned. You need the application plus a letter of interest and a résumé, and you can either submit it online or physically deliver it to Mayor Simison at Meridian City Hall, 33 E. Broadway Ave. You have to live inside Meridian city limits or its area of impact. The successful applicant is appointed by the mayor and then confirmed by City Council. "Citizen involvement is an essential part of a strong local government," the city's notice says, which is the kind of sentence that's easy to skim past until you remember the commission's subject matter is the thing you complain about most. And transportation isn't the only board with room on it right now — the city keeps a running list of every committee and commission taking members, and a few of them are considerably less crowded. Read the city's notice, and see the full commission list →

Evvie Beans Baby Boutique opened this past weekend at 2126 N. Eagle Rd., Suite 110 — the strip next to Chipotle and Chick-fil-A — after a little over a year in The Village at Meridian, where it sat beside Chico's. Same owners, same stock, about a mile down the road. It's open Monday through Saturday 10 a.m.–8 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Owner and founder Lexi Skinner started the shop with her husband back in 2022, and the reason she ended up making her own clothing line is the most relatable part of the whole story: she liked boutique-quality baby clothes and, as a young parent, could not afford them. "That experience planted the seed for Evvie Beans, which I named after our daughter," she told BoiseDev. The house bamboo line now runs up to size 6T with matching pajamas and robes for adults, and the new store carries other baby and toddler gear alongside it. The part Skinner seems most pleased about isn't retail at all — the new space has a dedicated event room, and she's floating toddler tea parties, story times, car seat safety trainings and birth classes for it. Which is a small but real answer to a thing people say about Meridian a lot: that it has plenty of shops and not enough places to just be. Read more at BoiseDev →

Twenty minutes south, and worth a Meridian reader's attention because this argument keeps landing in Ada County: five automated license plate reader cameras installed across Kuna in July have been taken down at the request of Mayor Joe Stear's office. Stear said the Axon cameras are off "for now," and that both the Ada County sheriff and the Kuna police chief agreed to remove them until the Legislature provides guidance. The hardware was Axon's Outpost reader — cameras designed to sit at intersections and major thoroughfares, read plates, collect what Axon calls "other vehicle data," and live-stream video.

Two things stayed unanswered. Residents asked what installing and removing the cameras cost, and Stear said the city can't give specifics because of how Kuna's police budget is structured — and doubted the police or sheriff's office could either. And it remains unclear what happened to the data the cameras collected while they were running; the Ada County Sheriff's Office has been asked. Tyler Cain, who founded De-Flock Idaho, called the removal a win for privacy rights and argued you can't build workable guardrails around the technology. The Meridian connection is direct enough: the same sheriff's office covers a lot of ground next door, and plate-reader cameras were already part of the conversation here after an arrest at The Village last month. Read more at Idaho News / CBS2 →

Brought to you by Meridian Local Scoop. What's faster than word of mouth? The Meridian Local Business Spotlight! Keeps you up to speed on what's happening around town — and connects local businesses to our community.

🧠 Trivia answer: it's a farmstead — the Mittleider Farmstead Historic District, at 575 Rumple Lane.

Meridian's eight National Register listings are, with one exception, individual buildings: the Tolleth House and the E.F. Hunt House on E. State, the R.H. and Jessie Bell House on E. Pine, the Halbert and Grace Neal House on W. Pine, the Clara Hill House up at 1123 N. Main, the Meridian Exchange Bank at 109 E. 2nd, and the old Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company building at 815 N. Main. The Mittleider Farmstead is the odd one out — it's listed as a historic district, meaning the Register is protecting a whole working group of structures and the relationship between them, not one handsome façade.

Which tells you something about what this place actually was. The city's preservation plan is blunt about the inventory: the surveys turned up grain elevators, a feed mill, a wagon shop and a cheese factory, and outside the old core, farmsteads, hay derricks and irrigation works. It also notes there are no geological sites or monuments recorded in Meridian at all. Our favorite entry in the whole survey, for the record, is a building on W. Franklin Rd. logged under the name Kit Kat Klub — which somebody, some day, is going to have to explain to us.