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Happy Saturday, Meridian! The heat stopped being a punchline this week: Idaho recorded its first heat-related deaths of 2026, three of them in seven days, and today's forecast is right back around 101 with the smoke still parked over us. So read the weather section like it's actually load-bearing today. The good news is that most of what's worth doing this weekend happens either before 11 a.m. or after the sun quits — a market on Broadway at 9, a movie projected over the wave pool at 7:30, and another market at Storey Park tomorrow morning. Let's get into it.

🧠 Trivia: Meridian is now Idaho's second-largest city, north of 145,000 people. Back in the 1990 census, how many people actually lived here? (Answer at the bottom.)

Seven Meridian things between today and next Saturday, and note what's not here: Kleiner Park Live doesn't come back until Aug. 14, when Soul Patch plays the bandshell. Plan accordingly. 🎉

🔥 Saturday, August 1 — Meridian

Overnight low in the mid-60s · Areas of smoke · sunny and hot

This is the day to take seriously. The forecast puts us right around 101, and Idaho DEQ has an orange "unhealthy for sensitive groups" air quality call running from today through Monday — Saturday's index is forecast around 135, Sunday around 125. Heat plus smoke is a worse combination than either one alone, and the story two sections down is the reason we're saying so. Practical version: outdoor stuff before 11 a.m. or after 8 p.m., water before you're thirsty, and check on the neighbor who won't run the AC because of the bill. Before you commit to an afternoon outside, look at the National Weather Service point forecast for Meridian and the DEQ air quality forecast — both move faster than a newsletter does.

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare reported Thursday that three Idahoans died of heat-related illness in a single week — the state's first heat deaths of 2026. All three were over 55, all lived in different parts of southern Idaho, and all of it happened during a stretch where the thermometer basically refused to come off triple digits.

We've spent most of July making jokes about the heat in this newsletter, so here's the unfunny version: heat kills quietly, it kills indoors, and it disproportionately kills older people living alone in houses where the AC is either broken or being rationed. If you have a parent, a neighbor or a tenant in that category, today is a good day to knock. That's the entire ask. Read more →

Mindful Coffee — the gluten-free, organic, bake-it-in-house shop that opened here in Meridian back in March — is adding a second location in downtown Boise, at 1202 W. Front St. in the Saratoga building. BoiseDev reported Thursday that owner Brooke Ochojski wasn't planning to move this fast; the Meridian store just did well enough from day one to make the decision for her.

"The goal was to be able to bring Mindful all over the Treasure Valley," Ochojski told BoiseDev. "But we obviously had to start somewhere, which is why we opened our first location in Meridian." The menu stays the same, the look will be a little different, and the target is late fall. Five months from opening to expansion is a genuinely good sign for a small shop — and it started on this side of the county line. Read more →

You know the unfinished building. Everyone in Meridian knows the unfinished building. BoiseDev reported Tuesday that the developer behind that failed project, Tommy Truax, is now the subject of a lawsuit from within the ownership group that runs the raft rental operation at Barber Park — with claims that he pulled money out of the company without consent, plus counterclaims flying the other direction over hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Which is a strange sentence to write, and that's sort of the point: the same name attached to the concrete shell you drive past keeps turning up in filings about other people's money. Nothing here is decided, and lawsuits are only ever one side's version until a judge says otherwise. But if you've ever wondered why that building has stayed a building-shaped outline for so long, the court docket is where that story lives now. Read more →

Al's Sporting Goods, the Utah chain that took the 43,000-square-foot space off Milwaukee Ave. next to Barnes & Noble in 2023, will close permanently on Oct. 17. A storewide closing sale is running until then, with discounts deepening as inventory thins out. It's not in Meridian, but plenty of Meridian garages were stocked there.

The timing detail worth noting: Al's arrived in the Treasure Valley the same year Scheels opened its flagship Idaho store here in Meridian. Three years later one of them is holding a liquidation sale and the other is still a regional destination with an aquarium in it. That's not a mystery so much as a math problem. Read more →

Brought to you by Meridian Local Scoop.

Trivia answer: about 10,000. The 1990 census put Meridian at roughly 10,200 people — a farm town with a main street, not a city. By 2020 it was about 117,600, a better-than-tenfold jump that made Meridian one of the ten fastest-growing large cities in the country, and it's north of 145,000 now. Put another way: between 2010 and 2020 alone, this city added roughly four times its entire 1990 population. If you've lived here thirty years and feel like you're a stranger at your own intersection — you're not imagining it, and the census agrees with you.

Hit reply and tell us. Too long, too short, missed something happening on your street — we read all of it, and tips from readers are how half the good stuff gets in here.

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