State police break ground on a $29 million lab, a gluten-free bakery is coming to Overland, and 90

Ninety degrees today, and that is the first sentence this newsletter has been able to write in about ten days that doesn't come with a warning attached. Both advisories — the heat one and the wind one — expired Friday night. If your patio umbrella is now in a different yard than it was on Thursday, that's why.

In today's issue: the Idaho State Police break ground Tuesday on a $29 million forensic lab at their Meridian headquarters, and the numbers behind it explain a lot about how the state actually solves crimes. A gluten-free bakery is going into the old Coned Pizza space on Overland, and the reason it took so long involves an HVAC crew. The Boise-based Mediterranean chain with a spot at The Village just sold a stake to an Eagle firm. Six things to do, a meme about your lawn furniture, and a trivia question about the passenger railway that used to run through this town. Let's get into it.

🧠 Trivia: Long before I-84, you could get on an electric passenger train in the Boise Valley and ride a loop through Meridian, Nampa, Caldwell, Middleton, Star and Eagle. In what year did the last car run? (Answer at the bottom.)

Six this week, all six in Meridian proper, all six new to this newsletter. Straight talk about the shape of this list: only one of them falls inside the next seven days. The coming week is a wall of things we've already run — Monday Night Market at Storey Park tomorrow, Art Spark at Kleiner and the Meridian Lanes summer concert both next Saturday, The Princess Bride at Victory Gardens Friday and Saturday. All still on, all still good. Go anyway. What follows is the stuff you haven't seen here yet.

Thursday, Aug 27

Sunday, Sep 13

Wednesday, Sep 30

Wednesday, Oct 14

Wednesday, Oct 21

Saturday, Oct 31

Sixteenth issue running that the Chamber calendar produced nothing usable for the coming week — it's lead groups, a networking lunch that still won't publish a venue, and two events that turned out to be in Boise. 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. Ninety is close to normal for late August around here, which after a week of triple digits reads like a favour. Nothing in the forecast today: no precipitation, no advisories, no asterisks.

💨 What actually happened Friday night, since some of you woke up to a rearranged yard. The National Weather Service ran a Wind Advisory from 6 to 10 p.m. Friday alongside the tail end of the Heat Advisory, and the product text was not subtle: "south winds 25 to 35 mph with gusts up to 65 mph," with "areas of blowing dust and visibility as low as one mile" pushing north through the Snake Basin, worst between 8:00 and 9:30 p.m. The Heat Advisory expired at 9 p.m. the same evening. Both are done. If a trampoline moved, it wasn't personal.

🌡️ 90 in Meridian, 90 in Boise. Exact agreement between the NWS Meridian point forecast and the live Boise reading — the tightest it's been in this newsletter's short life. Boise usually runs a few degrees hotter than the Meridian point; today it doesn't. Take 90 and get on with your Sunday.

📅 The week out: Sun 90, Mon 92, Tue 93. Overnight lows in the high 50s and low 60s, so the open-the-windows-at-nine trick still works.

Fine print, and it's the same fine print as the last four days: the NWS point-forecast feed hasn't refreshed since Wednesday morning — five cycles stale. We're publishing its Sunday number because the live Boise reading and CBS2's Friday forecast ("upper 80s to low 90s Sunday") both land in the same place. Where anything disagrees, we tell you both.

Three today, and for the first time in five days the lead is a Meridian dateline about a Meridian building. The other two are food, which is what August produces. Every date below was checked against the article's own published timestamp.

Idaho State Police will put shovels in the ground Tuesday on a 20,000-square-foot forensic laboratory at its headquarters campus here in Meridian. The price is $29 million, paid for with federal American Rescue Plan Act money that came to Idaho. Construction is scheduled to finish in January 2028.

What goes inside: DNA casework, latent print examination, digital forensics, and NIBIN — the federal ballistics database that lets investigators link one shell casing to another crime three counties away. Moving those four units into a new building frees up the existing headquarters lab for chemistry, toxicology, the DNA database operation and alcohol analysis. The design also makes room for whole genome sequencing, which is the technology currently prising open cold cases around the country.

Here is the number that makes the case for the building. In fiscal 2026 alone, ISP's lab system took in 16,069 case submissions, including 3,745 DNA samples, and served 114 law enforcement agencies, prosecutors in all 44 counties, 14 public defender offices and 44 coroners. Idaho does not have a lab in every city. It has this one, and it is on our side of the county line.

"Our scientists need modern facilities that can keep pace with advances in technology and the growing demands placed on our laboratories," said ISP director Colonel Bill Gardiner, who called it "a long-term effort." Hoffman Construction is the general contractor, Lombard Conrad Architects is leading design. This is Phase 1 — later phases are drawn but not funded. There's also more parking and low-water landscaping in the package, which is the least glamorous sentence in any press release and the one most likely to affect your Tuesday drive.

Idaho News 6 / CBS2 News Staff, published Thu, Aug 20, 3:24 p.m. MDT.

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The Wheatless Crumb is going into 2976 E. Overland Rd. in South Meridian, at the Overland and Eagle corner, in the space that was Coned Pizza. It's scheduled to open mid-September, and it will be owner Sabryna Hawes's first bricks-and-mortar shop after years of Facebook orders, farmers markets and pop-ups that kept selling out.

The backstory is the part worth reading. Hawes was diagnosed with hypothyroidism in her twenties, then with Hashimoto's disease in her thirties, and by her early forties she was dealing with joint pain, hair loss and brain fog. A functional medicine doctor told her that with Hashimoto's she could not have gluten. She didn't believe it, went and read the research herself, found pages of it — and then, in her own words, got angry that nobody had told her sooner. She gave up bread, missed it, and started making her own.

The detail that tells you what kind of operation this is going to be: a pizza place ran in that space for years, which means airborne flour got into the ventilation system. Hawes brought in an HVAC company to strip and sanitize the ducts before she'd bake in there. "I can't afford to have my clients get sick," she said. "This is a medical issue… it's not a preference." For people who have to eat this way rather than choose to, a kitchen where you don't have to interrogate the staff is not a small thing.

Expect savory breads and bagels, rosemary focaccia, cinnamon rolls, caramel pecan rolls and scones.

BoiseDev Eats (Gretchen Zuko), published Fri, Aug 21, 12:56 p.m. MDT. ⚠️ Note the URL on that story reads Aug 18 — BoiseDev's slug dates run ahead of the actual publish time, so we checked the timestamp.

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Zullee Mediterranean Grill — the one at The Village at Meridian — has sold a stake to Alturas Ventures, an Eagle investment firm, with the stated goal of expanding across the western United States.

The chain started life in 2009 as Kabob House in Yakima, Washington. Ahmed Baqer bought it in 2011 and rebuilt the menu around how he grew up eating in Bahrain; in 2022 it was renamed Zullee and the headquarters moved to Boise, with the first Idaho store opening in Nampa. There are now five restaurants across Idaho and Washington. A third local outpost is planned at Orchard Park, and Baqer has said he wants more in the valley.

The Meridian read on this: Alturas says it is taking on real estate, marketing and financing while Baqer and his team keep the menu and the service. That is the normal shape of these deals, and it usually means more locations sooner. Whether the food stays the same after the money arrives is the question every regular asks and nobody can answer in advance — but the counter-order, table-service hybrid and the halal, vegan and vegetarian options are the things people actually go for, so those are the ones to watch.

Terms weren't disclosed.

BoiseDev (Don Day), published Wed, Aug 19, 10:27 a.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.

1928. Electric service on the Boise Valley interurban was discontinued on May 26, 1928, and Meridian has not had passenger rail since.

The system went up fast. Boise chartered a street railway in 1890, and by 1905 crews were building lines meant to connect Boise, Nampa, Caldwell and the farm country in between. One company, the Boise & Interurban Railway, reached Caldwell along the north side of the valley — through Eagle, Star and Middleton — on Aug 16, 1907. The other, Boise Valley Railway, laid track up Fairview hill to Ustick Road and followed it before curving south to Nampa; that line was later relocated to run through Meridian. Pittsburgh money eventually consolidated the whole thing, the Nampa–Caldwell link closed the loop in 1912, and by 1916 it had all been folded into the newly formed Idaho Power Company.

Here is the part that belongs in a Sunday newsletter. According to the Idaho State Historical Society, a popular Sunday-afternoon pastime was to ride the interurban cars around the entire loop — for the sake of it. Cars ran as often as every thirty minutes on good days, more usually every ninety. Then people bought automobiles, ridership fell, the numbers stopped working, and one line at a time it was replaced by buses.

Most of the intercity track was pulled up. Most of the track inside Boise was simply paved over and forgotten, and the state's own history note says the rails and ties still surface through the asphalt occasionally, just to remind everybody it happened.

Source: Idaho State Historical Society Reference Series No. 220, "Boise Valley Electric Railroads," prepared by Bill Dougall (revised September 1982). ⚠️ We've left out the block-by-block route through downtown Meridian — several accounts describe it, but the historical society's document doesn't, and we're not going to draw you a map we can't source.