Holes by a bus stop for nine months, a wall of names, and 231 new white coats

Welcome to issue sixty-seven. Monday is sunny and 84, which is not a September number, and the week gets warmer before it gets sensible — Thursday peaks at 88 and then the bottom falls out on Saturday. Take the warm days while they are on offer.

Today: a fiber contractor left open holes next to a Meridian school bus stop for nine months and they got filled the day after a reporter rang, a wall on the east side of town keeps 360 missing Idahoans from going missing twice, and 231 people put on white coats on Friday in a state ranked dead last for doctors. 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: One of Meridian's oldest parks — 23 acres, enormous cottonwoods, a fishing pond — spent most of its life belonging to a government that was not the City of Meridian. Which park, and what became of the government that owned it?

(Answer at the bottom.)

This is the flattest week the Meridian board has produced in a month. Art Week is over, Potato Days hasn't started, and Tuesday and Wednesday have nothing on them we can attach a verified Meridian address to. So the list is short, and the three big things we are not bulleting get named here instead of padded out: the Monday Night Market is on tonight at Storey Park, 4–9 p.m.; Potato Days returns to Kleiner Park Friday through Sunday; and Public Safety Day is Saturday, 10 a.m.–1 p.m. at the training centre on Watertower. All three ran in recent issues. The one to actually circle is two weeks out — Oktoberfest closes the middle of downtown on October 3.

A note on how this list gets made: three more "Meridian" events came through the calendars this week and all three were somewhere else — a library craft afternoon in Nampa, a storytelling night and a seniors' expo both in Boise. We open every detail page and read the address block before anything goes in this box. It is why the list is sometimes short and never wrong about where you are driving.

✅ No watch or warning was posted for Ada County as this went out. We still don't have an alerts feed we fully trust, so read that as "we found nothing," not "there is nothing" — NWS Boise is the place to check before you commit to an outdoor afternoon.

Monday, September 21 — Meridian

Overnight low around 53. Sunrise 7:31 a.m., sunset 7:45 p.m. — and the equinox itself lands tomorrow, after which the nights start winning.

Sunny all day, south-southeasterly wind at 3 to 5 mph. Nothing to plan around; the only hazard is forgetting it is late September and getting caught out in the afternoon.

✅ Where these numbers come from. The National Weather Service file we lead with is stamped midday Sunday — a second consecutive genuinely fresh day, after the four-day freeze that ran through last week. We checked it against the live Boise three-day strip anyway, which had Monday at 83 against the Meridian point's 84. Direction check for the nerds: Boise ran one degree cooler Monday and two cooler Tuesday. Split the difference and dress for the mid-80s.

The rest of the week: Tuesday 85, Wednesday 84, Thursday 88 — the hottest day, Friday 80, and then it falls off a cliff: Saturday 70, Sunday 72, with overnight lows down to 46 Friday night and 44 on Saturday. If you have a Saturday outdoor plan, that is the week's real news.

Crews from FatBeam Fiber arrived in a neighbourhood off Pine Avenue near Fuller Park back in January to put internet lines in the ground. Residents say most of them had little or no warning. "We started getting some angry homeowners reaching out like why is somebody in my front yard just digging up the grass," said Julia Putnam, the HOA president. The crews moved through quickly. Then, nine months after the work finished, some of the large access holes were still open — one in a front yard, and one right beside a sidewalk and a school bus stop that families use every day.

"We have kids and community members that walk up and down the sidewalk… it's literally just a hole waiting for somebody to step in and get hurt," Putnam told Idaho News 6. Neighbours say they spent months calling, texting and leaving voicemails. "It worries me about kids or animals falling into that hole," said Cathy Erickson. "I think it's a matter of time, especially once it starts snowing." FatBeam told the station it normally notifies neighbourhoods weeks ahead of a project but could not confirm whether that happened here — and then, the day after a reporter got in touch, crews were back on the street. The company says the questions are what brought these particular holes to its attention, and that they are being filled. It also asks that if there is one like this left in your neighbourhood, you call them directly. The neighbours had been photographing these things for months, and the pictures are the part that explains why nine months felt long. Idaho News 6 has the footage →

Friday was POW/MIA Recognition Day, and Idaho is home to 360 service members still listed as missing in action, plus an uncounted number who died as prisoners of war. Most of them have no grave anyone can visit. At Meridian's Rock of Honor Memorial, they have a wall. "POWs that never got to come home, the missing in action where those bodies were never found. They wanted a day that they would be honored," said Eric Wrazin, who runs the memorial. "POW/MIA day is not just for those folks to be remembered, but to honor those family members."

One of the names is Orlie Pfost. He was 31, and he was not a soldier — he was working for Morrison-Knudsen on Wake Island, one of more than a thousand American civilians building naval facilities out there before Pearl Harbor. Japanese forces took the island and took him with it. His family waited years to learn anything; he was ultimately killed at a prison camp in Japan, and his body came home in 1949. He is buried in the Meridian Cemetery, section 100F, row 9, which is close enough that you could go and stand there this week. "Having him on this wall here and remembered — those stories are important," Wrazin said. There is a second Meridian name on that wall with a harder story still: 1st Lt. Charles Cairns, who survived something most people did not, and then did not survive what came after. Idaho News 6 tells his story → You can also read about the memorial itself at rockofhonor.org.

The Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine — the medical school on the ISU campus here in Meridian — put white coats on 231 students on Friday, its largest incoming class yet. Thirty-nine of them are from Idaho. The ceremony is mostly symbolic, a first coat and a handshake, but the arithmetic behind it is not: the Idaho State Board of Education has the state ranked 50th in the nation for physicians per capita, and 44th for primary care. Dead last, and near-last again.

The reason a first-year ceremony counts as news is that doctors tend to practise near where they trained, which is exactly why the state has spent years trying to build medical education and residency slots here rather than exporting students to train elsewhere and hoping some come back. Among Friday's class was Wyatt McDonald, an Idaho native. "I do plan to stay here because I'm from here. I love it here. I grew up here. My family is here, and I know that it's a great place to practise as well as one of the biggest areas of a physician shortage," he said. "So it's really important to me that we get more doctors — especially the place that raised me." Ask again in eight years. Read more at 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: Fuller Park — and for most of its life it belonged to the Western Ada Recreation District, not the city.

Fuller Park sits at 3761 W. Park Creek Dr., 23 acres of old cottonwoods, ball fields, picnic shelters and a fishing pond, and it is one of the oldest parks in town. For decades it was not a City of Meridian park at all. It belonged to the Western Ada Recreation District — a separate local government with its own elected three-member board and its own line on your property tax bill. Voters created it in 1971, back when Meridian had fewer than 2,000 people, for the specific purpose of building a swimming pool. The Meridian Pool opened in 1973, and the district went on quietly running it, and Fuller Park, for the next half-century while the town grew around it by a factor of seventy.

Then Ada County voters approved dissolving it. As of September 30, 2024, the Western Ada Recreation District owns and operates nothing — the pool and the park went to Meridian Parks and Recreation, and the district's own website now just points enquiries at the city. Which is why Fuller Park turns up on meridiancity.org today as if it had always been there. Two of the shelters still carry the names the old district put on them: the Walt Casey Memorial Shelter and the Gladys Ingram Memorial Shelter. Nobody renamed those, and nobody should.

Every contribution helps us cover more local restaurants, small businesses and nonprofits making a difference around town — and keeps the Scoop free, independent and light on ads. Join the neighbors who've already chipped in.

Choose the option that's most convenient for you: