Police arrest a man after a Friday shooting, 1,195 more homes off McMillan, and 90 degrees

Ninety degrees and nothing attached to it — no advisory, no asterisk, no product text from the Weather Service telling you to check on your neighbors. Enjoy it while it lasts, because Monday is 92 and Tuesday is 93.

Housekeeping, briefly: yesterday's issue greeted you with "Happy Sunday" on a Saturday. That was us, not you. Today it's actually Sunday.

In today's issue: Meridian Police say a Friday-afternoon shooting on NW 15th Street was an isolated fight between two men, and one of them is in custody. Neighbors north of SpurWing are telling the city that fire trucks already can't get through Black Cat and Jayker, and a 500-home proposal is about to make that argument for them. And another 1,195 homes are being drawn on 207 acres off McMillan — a separate project from the one you're thinking of. Six things to do, five of them this week. A meme about what 90 degrees now feels like. And a trivia question about the road in that second story. Let's get into it.

🧠 Trivia: Black Cat Road runs the whole west side of this town, and it has not always been called that. What was its name before? (Answer at the bottom.)

Six, all in Meridian proper, all new to this newsletter — and after a fortnight of thin near-term lists, five of them land inside the next five days. One starts this afternoon. The regulars are still running too: Monday Night Market at Storey Park tomorrow, Art Spark at Kleiner and the Meridian Lanes summer concert both Saturday. Go anyway. Below is what you haven't seen here yet.

Today — Sunday, Aug 23

Tuesday, Aug 25

Wednesday, Aug 26

Thursday, Aug 27

Thursday, Sep 10 — but you have to call this week

Also worth putting on the calendar now, further out: the Wyakin Foundation is running a free suicide awareness and discussion workshop on Tue, Sep 8, 6–8 p.m. at Grand Canyon University, 1144 S. Silverstone Way — recognizing warning signs, what to do in a crisis, and speakers on the veteran suicide crisis. Food provided, RSVP by Sept 3. We'll run it again closer to the day.

Seventeenth issue running the standing ask: if you know something happening in Meridian that never makes it onto a calendar — a church thing, a park thing, a garage-sale-that-is-really-an-event thing — hit reply. That's the gap, and readers are the only people who can fill it.

☀️ Sunny and hot, high near 90, low around 59. No precipitation, no active advisories, nothing to plan around. After a stretch that included a Heat Advisory running to 9 p.m. Friday and a Wind Advisory with 65 mph gusts behind it, a plain 90 counts as a quiet day.

📈 It doesn't stay quiet. Mon 92, Tue 93, and the overnight lows climb with them — 59 tonight, then low 60s. The open-the-windows-at-nine trick still works this week, but the window on it is closing.

🌡️ 90 in Meridian, 90 in Boise. Second day running that the NWS Meridian point forecast and the live Boise reading agree exactly. Boise often runs a few degrees hotter than the Meridian point; right now it isn't. Take 90.

Fine print, unchanged and worth repeating: the NWS point-forecast feed we pull hasn't refreshed since Wednesday morning — six cycles stale now. We're publishing its Sunday number because two live sources land on the same figure: the current Boise reading (90) and CBS2's Friday forecast, which put the valley in the "upper 80s to low 90s Sunday." Where sources disagree, we tell you both. Where they agree despite a stale feed, we say that too.

Three today, all three Meridian datelines, all three filed in the last 36 hours. Every date checked against the article's own timestamp.

Meridian Police were called to the 600 block of NW 15th Street at 4:25 p.m. Friday on a report of shots fired. Officers secured the scene and, in the department's words, determined it was an isolated incident with no ongoing threat to the public — which, if you live in that pocket and spent Friday evening wondering what all the lights were about, is the sentence you were waiting for.

According to the department's release, Nathaniel Corder and Philip Thompson got into a physical fight, the argument escalated, and Corder allegedly produced a firearm and shot Thompson. Thompson was taken to a hospital by ambulance with serious but non-life-threatening injuries. Corder was taken into custody at the scene and was later arrested on charges of aggravated battery and marijuana possession.

Two more details, because they're in the release: after treatment, Thompson was booked into Ada County Jail on outstanding warrants including a probation violation and a fugitive warrant. A third person at the residence, Brittny Allen, was not involved in the shooting but was arrested on an outstanding misdemeanor failure-to-appear warrant. The investigation is ongoing, and nobody has been convicted of anything — these are charges and allegations.

Idaho News 6 / KIVI staff, published Sat, Aug 22, 9:39 a.m. MDT.

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The Brighton project called Ibaia — you may know it as Basque Ranch — would put almost 500 homes on roughly 266 acres north of the SpurWing subdivision. Neighbors have been telling Idaho News 6 that the problem isn't the houses. It's whether an ambulance can reach one.

This is the part that lifts it above the usual growth grumble: Meridian Fire said the same thing, in writing. In documents submitted during the review process, the department raised concerns that the project's proposed access routes may not provide reliable emergency access if roads become congested or blocked, and it is requiring an emergency access route through Duck Alley.

Steve and Nancy Everard, who live near the site, say the main access runs right through their back yard, and that Black Cat and Jayker are already a problem at busy times. Nancy Everard described a call where responders "were stuck in traffic." A neighbor, Doug Hastings, put it plainly: "at a heavy traffic time, the fire truck was at a dead stop." And Nancy Everard drew the line most people in this town would recognize — "We're not against development of that land. We knew when we purchased our home that it was going to be developed… So it's not the development, it's the manner in which it is being developed."

City officials say no final approvals have been granted and the project can't move forward until those issues are resolved through the review process. So this one is still live, which means the hearing calendar is the thing to watch. Brighton and Meridian Fire did not respond to Idaho News 6 in time for publication.

Idaho News 6, Kalkidan Meyer, published Fri, Aug 21, 6:19 p.m. MDT. The station notes the piece was in part converted to its platform with the assistance of AI; only stated facts are used here.

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Preliminary planning documents show 1,195 homes on 207 acres of Corey Barton-owned land in north Meridian, on McMillan Rd. between Can Ada and Star. The developer is Trilogy Development and the early paperwork calls it Fields District 207.

It is not "The Fields." That's Mark Bottles' separate 480-acre project, the one City Council approved in July. Two different projects, similar names, same corner of the map — worth getting straight now, because you're going to hear both names at meetings for the next three years.

The mix: 464 single-family homes, 405 townhomes, 94 "cottages," and 232 apartments across 58 four-plexes, plus a school site, a playground, sports courts and fitness facilities. One detail to watch — the site plan includes a common driveway shared by four homes, and Meridian's City Council has said out loud, repeatedly, that it doesn't like common driveways. That's the sort of thing that gets redrawn before it gets approved.

It's early. Trilogy still has to file a formal application with the city and work through the approval process before anything happens. But the Fields subarea has been called one of Meridian's last areas of growth, and between this, The Fields, Springday, Dayspring, Windsor Commons and Ibaia, "last" is starting to look like a schedule rather than a description.

BoiseDev, Sydney Kidd, published Fri, Aug 21, 2:16 p.m. MDT.

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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.

Post Road. And Black Cat Road is named after a cat that never existed — it was a sign.

In the 1930s, Chester Eggers started a farm on what was then called Post Road. He needed a name for it, saw a black cat logo in a magazine, and went with Black Cat Farm. His wife Myrtle had a steel black cat cut at Gate City Seal in Boise, and Chester hung a sign beneath it reading "Chester Eggers' Black Cat Farm, ½ mile south."

That was the whole thing. People started using the cat as the landmark, then as the name of the road, and eventually the county made it official — the way their grandson Drew Eggers tells it, everybody was already calling it Black Cat anyway. The sign stood at the corner of Black Cat and Franklin for decades, outlasting the bars across the street that eventually became the Kit Kat Klub, and Drew took it down himself for road-widening work with plans to put it back up when the crews finished.

Which is a useful thing to hold in your head while reading today's other stories. Drew Eggers on the town he graduated into: "In 1971, when I graduated from Meridian High, the population of Meridian was about 3,500 and we had one stop light." The road that neighbors are now telling the city a fire engine can't get down is named after one farmer's hand-lettered sign advertising a farm half a mile away.

Source: "Meridian's farm roots and Black Cat sign live on," Meridian Press / Idaho Press, quoting Drew Eggers directly. ⚠️ Two things left out on purpose: that column carries no publication date and its population figure is long out of date, so we haven't used it; and we can't confirm the exact year the county made the rename official, so we haven't given one.