A Kuna food truck goes permanent in Meridian, and diesel sets another record

Welcome to issue sixty-five. A few showers may hang around this morning before the valley finally dries out — the weekend's good half starts sometime around lunch and doesn't stop until Monday. If you've been putting off the yard, tomorrow is the day.

Today: a Kuna food truck is about to become a Meridian restaurant off Eagle Road, an automated plate reader put a Meridian man in custody on a felony warrant, diesel in Idaho went up 95 cents in a month, and Public Safety Day is a week out. 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: An outfit formed in 1904 has Meridian's name on it, still moves water to farms and back lawns across two counties — and its head office isn't in Meridian at all. What is it, and where does it actually sit?

(Answer at the bottom.)

Everything happening in Meridian today we already gave you yesterday — chief among it the Pink Lady Classic, 6:30 p.m. at the Speedway on S. Main, which is the loudest thing that will happen in this town all month. So this week's board looks forward instead. It is quiet Sunday through Friday, and then Saturday the 26th arrives carrying three separate events, two of which are the same idea from opposite directions: fire trucks you can climb on, and a motorcycle dealership raising money for the people who drive them.

A note on a thin board: the free calendars produced almost nothing new for Meridian this week, and most of what is on them between now and Friday we have already run. We would rather hand you six real ones than pad the list with a Boise event wearing a Meridian label — which, for the record, the Chamber's community calendar offered us again.

No watch or warning was posted for Ada County as this went out. A Fire Weather Watch was in effect Friday for parts of central and southern Idaho, on lightning and gusty winds. 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.

Saturday, September 19 — Meridian

Overnight low around 50. Sunrise 7:29 a.m., sunset 7:49 p.m.

The National Weather Service point forecast for Meridian has sunshine and a high near 79. CBS2's meteorologist, writing at 3:42 Friday morning, is a shade less optimistic: "Showers stick around in areas Saturday before drier and warmer weather returns Sunday." Split the difference and plan for a mid-to-high-70s day with a shower risk that fades as it goes.

⚠️ A note on where these numbers come from, because it keeps mattering. The NWS file we normally lead with was last refreshed midday Tuesday and has not moved in four days — byte-for-byte identical on four consecutive reads. So we check it against something live every morning. Today the live Boise three-day strip has Saturday at 76 and Sunday at 81, against the Meridian point forecast's 79 and 82. Three degrees apart, same direction. That is close enough to publish and far enough apart to mention.

The rest of the week: Sunday 82 and sunny, Monday 84 — genuinely warm for late September — then 80 on Tuesday. Direction check for the nerds: the Boise-area reading ran three degrees cooler than the Meridian point today.

If you have eaten from the Tasty Thai Kuna truck, the news is that there will soon be somewhere to sit down. Lanna Grills and Bowls is opening at 3223 E. Louise Dr. — the old Indian Spice Cuisine space, tucked in near St. Luke's off Eagle Road — and co-owner Pinpaka McCready says she is finishing the last approvals with the city and hopes to be open this month. The truck is not moving with them. They sold it. "We decided to sell the food truck and move into a permanent restaurant location where we could expand our menu, serve more customers, and create a welcoming place for the community," McCready said.

The menu she describes is not quite what the word "Thai" usually gets you around here: healthy-leaning dishes with Mediterranean flavors and an Asian twist, built on fresh ingredients, grilled meat, sauces, pita bread, rice, soups and bowls. The location has shaped the concept as much as the cooking has. Surrounded by medical offices and business parks, McCready is explicitly aiming at the person with half an hour: "One of our main goals is therefore to provide fresh, good-quality food with efficient service so customers can enjoy a satisfying meal without spending most of their lunch break waiting." Which is a real gap in that pocket of Meridian, where the options within walking distance of a hospital shift thin out fast. The name isn't arbitrary — it points at a specific corner of Thailand, and the reason she chose it is the nicest part of the story. That, and the link to the full menu, are in BoiseDev's piece →

One day after we reported that Kuna had taken its automated license plate readers down, the other side of that argument showed up in Meridian. Police say a plate reader alert led officers to a vehicle in the 2000 block of N. Eagle Rd. at about 10:45 a.m. on Sept. 16, and to the arrest of a 24-year-old Meridian man, Hans Nicolas Gonzalez Bayona, who was wanted on an active felony warrant for sexual abuse of a minor under 16.

He was arraigned in court Thursday. A no-contact order was issued to protect the victim and bond was set at $100,000. We are not going to write more about the underlying case than that, and there is nothing here for anyone to do. We are running it because the technology question is live in Ada County right now and this is a real data point in it: the same week Kuna's mayor pulled five Axon cameras off poles pending guidance from the Legislature, a reader in Meridian put someone with an outstanding felony warrant in custody. Both of those things are true, and neither one settles the argument by itself. Read more at Idaho News / CBS2 →

We held this one back for a while on the grounds that a fuel price going up is not news. It has stopped being a ramp and started being a cliff. AAA Idaho says diesel rose 95 cents a gallon over the past month, set a fresh statewide record on Friday, and went up 7 cents between Thursday and Friday alone — 9 cents in Boise over the same twenty-four hours. For the week, diesel is up 38 cents. Against this time last year it is $2.57 a gallon higher. Regular unleaded is moving too, though nothing like as fast: up 9 cents this week to a statewide average of $4.86.

The cause is not local and there is no local fix. AAA Idaho public affairs director Matthew Conde put it on shipping: "Conflict continues in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, severely limiting crude oil shipments in the Middle East. This week, things were further complicated by drone attacks that shut down Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline." Then the part nobody wants in a quote: "Sadly, there isn't any relief in sight." Diesel is the one that reaches you sideways rather than at the pump — it moves the groceries into the Meridian stores, the gravel onto the subdivisions going up on the south end, and the trailers behind every landscaping outfit in town. A dollar a gallon in a month does not stay in the trucking industry. Read more at Idaho News / CBS2 →

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🧠 Trivia answer: the Nampa & Meridian Irrigation District — and its head office is in Nampa, on First Street South.

NMID was formed in 1904 to get water onto the farmland that Canyon and Ada counties were then busy turning into farmland, by building out a system of canals and storage reservoirs. Some of its Boise River water rights, by its own account, date from the late 1800s — older than the district that holds them — and it added storage rights in Arrowrock and Anderson reservoirs in the early-to-mid 1900s. It has been doing the same job for more than a century, and the reason half of Meridian's older neighborhoods have a ditch running behind the fence line is that the district got there before the subdivisions did.

The pleasing part is the geography. A district with Meridian in its name, formed the year before Meridian incorporated as a village, runs itself out of Nampa — and its 1919 district office building over there, designed by Tourtellotte & Hummel, has been on the National Register since 1982. Meridian's name is on a National Register building in another county. We are choosing to be flattered.

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