ISU is clearing land for a Meridian campus, the airport opens a $107M rental car garage, and the free drop-off for your old paint

Go outside this morning and it'll feel like a different month than yesterday. The wind is up, the temperature is down about ten degrees, and by tomorrow there's a real chance of rain on your windshield for the first time in a while.

Today: a university that has quietly started clearing ground for a bigger Meridian campus, a $107 million garage that changes how you pick up a rental car, the free Monday service that will take the paint cans out of your garage, six things to do between Friday and Sunday, and a trivia question about a school most of us drive past without noticing. Let's get into it.

There is a university campus inside Meridian city limits right now, on Eagle Road, and it has been there for years. Roughly how many students and working professionals does it serve — and what does it let ordinary Meridian residents walk in and use?

(Answer at the bottom.)

Honest note: this is a quiet week. The Labor Day weekend heavyweights we already ran — the Meat & Tater BBQ Fest and Main Street Market on Saturday, Bash on the Grass and the Labor Day races on Monday — are all still on, and still worth your time. We're not going to re-list them as if they were news. Here is what's genuinely new on the calendars, and yes, a downtown game shop is carrying more than its share of it.

Nothing new turned up for tonight or Thursday anywhere we looked, and we'd rather tell you that than pad the list. If your church, club, league or shop has something on this week that isn't on any calendar, hit reply — that's genuinely how the good ones get in here.

Today: mid-70s, and gusts around 20 to 35 mph. That's the actionable part. Anything light in your yard — patio umbrella, trash cart lid, the cornhole boards you never put away — should be dealt with before you leave the house. Shower chances go up too, though the wetter weather is aimed mostly at the central Idaho mountains and southeast Oregon.

Thursday is the wet one: a 40 to 70 percent chance of showers in the Treasure Valley, highs in the upper 60s to low 70s, which the National Weather Service puts at roughly 10 to 15 degrees below normal for early September. After the summer we've had, that will feel like autumn arriving in a single afternoon.

How we got these numbers, because it matters: the NWS machine-readable file for the Meridian forecast point has now been frozen since Aug. 23 — nineteen consecutive pulls, and it no longer contains a row for today at all. So this forecast comes from two live, dated sources instead: CBS2 meteorologist Eric Walker's Sept. 1 write-up of the incoming low, and the live Boise three-day strip, read repeatedly through the evening (Wed 76 / Thu 68, rock steady while the current reading wandered). Boise usually runs three to four degrees warmer than the Meridian point, so plan for the higher end of anything we print.

Straight up: this is not today's news. It's a Meridian story that has walked past this newsletter twice already dressed as something else, and it deserves a proper look.

Idaho State University owns property at 785 S. Locust Grove. Earlier this year the university donated the unoccupied building sitting on it to the March Mayhem Fire Conference, which used it for a live-fire training exercise — search and rescue, thermal imaging, real burns — for regional first responders, in partnership with the City of Meridian. Good story on its own.

But ISU's own announcement is explicit about why the building came down: clearing the site is the first step toward a Planned Unit Development that expands the university's footprint in the Treasure Valley. ISU says it is now working directly with the City of Meridian and Hummel Architects on what goes there. Translation for anyone who lives near Locust Grove: a university is planning to grow into your neighborhood, and the planning is happening now, before there is anything to look at.

We'll chase the PUD filing when it hits the city's docket. Read more →

Meridian doesn't have an airport, it has the airport, and this one changes a trip most of us take a few times a year. The new Rental Car Center opened with a ribbon cutting Tuesday: a seven-story garage, nearly 1,000 rental car spaces, a customer service building, and a 4,000-square-foot covered pedestrian walkway straight from the terminal. Visit Boise's Carrie Hughes said it more than triples the old rental car capacity.

The other half of it is what the space frees up. Deputy Director of Engineering and Planning Beth Sumner said moving rental cars off their old footprint creates the room needed to build the airport's future Concourse A expansion — so if you fly out of Boise, expect construction news to follow this. The ribbon cutting lands in the airport's 100th anniversary year. Crews poured more than 23,000 cubic yards of concrete and about 200 craft workers worked on it.

Read more →

Filed under things you're already paying for and probably aren't using. The city runs a Monday residential household hazardous waste mobile collection program, and the list of what it takes is longer than most people assume: paints, gasoline, cleaners, televisions, rechargeable batteries, and vapes, among other things. No additional charge at drop-off.

You are funding it either way. Meridian Public Works separated the HHW fee out of the combined trash-and-recycling line on your monthly utility bill so you can see it — which means the line item exists whether or not the paint cans ever leave your garage. There is also a straightforward explanation on the same page for why trash service costs more than it used to: the Republic Services contract escalates annually with the CPI garbage-and-trash-collection index, and the Ada County Landfill raised its disposal rate.

If you have been stepping over a half-can of deck stain since spring, this is the one. Read more →

One more note on today's lineup, since we'd rather say it than hide it: no Meridian-datelined news story published in the last five days survived verification this morning. Two that looked promising were months old with current-sounding framing. So today's news box is one Meridian story we chased down properly, one regional item that genuinely affects you, and one service you're paying for. That's the honest version.

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.

It's the ISU Meridian Sam and Aline Skaggs Health Science Center, and it serves about 1,000 students and working professionals across more than 30 undergraduate and graduate programs.

Here's the part almost nobody knows: it runs four low-cost clinics that are open to the public — the Delta Dental of Idaho Dental Residency Clinic, a Speech/Language Clinic, a Counseling Clinic, and a Medication Therapy Management Clinic. You do not have to be a student. If you've been putting off a dental visit or looking for affordable speech therapy for a kid, that's a phone call worth making.

The campus is home to the L.S. Skaggs Pharmacy Complex and the Skaggs Treasure Valley Anatomy and Physiology Laboratories, it partners with West Ada School District and The College of Idaho, and it's been named one of the country's top ten branch campuses. Which puts today's lead story in perspective: ISU isn't arriving in Meridian. It's been here, quietly, and now it wants more room.