The mayor weighs in on the rats, no school Wednesday, and a sunny 81

Welcome to issue sixty-two. Yesterday topped out about where it promised to and today does it again — sunny, high near 81, and then a 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms rolls in after midnight, so enjoy the daylight while it's dry.

Here's your trail: the mayor has finally said something on the record about the rats, and the short version is that nobody yet knows how bad it is. There's no school today — all grades, whole district, and it's a calendar day rather than anything dramatic. Boise State has $8 million to find out how chips behave when you cook them and irradiate them. Dutch Bros is giving away a dollar a drink on Friday. And the trivia is about a house on E. State Avenue that the city thinks arrived in the mail, except the dates don't work.

Let's get into it. (Know someone who should be reading this? Send them here →)

Browse the highlights — read Meridian Local Scoop online →

There's a two-storey house on E. State Avenue, built in 1907, that the City of Meridian's own researchers believe was ordered out of a mail-order catalogue and shipped here in pieces. There is one fairly serious problem with that theory. What's the house — and what's the problem? (Answer at the bottom.)

A quiet midweek — today is a school holiday, not an event, so the board doesn't really start until Friday, when every Dutch Bros in town turns into a fundraiser. Saturday is card tables at Phoenix Fire. Then the back half of the month gets busy fast: an exotic-car showroom throws its doors open on the 25th, and the 26th has both a pickleball tournament and a walk at Hillsdale Park.

Friday, September 18

Saturday, September 19

Worth putting on the calendar now

Left off on purpose: the West Bench Farmers Market (Boise, despite the Meridian calendar listing it) and a Monday networking session that's also Boise. Three more genuinely-in-Meridian listings — a healing circle tonight, an "ISHA 2026 Convention" at the ISU campus on the 25th, and something called "CKC – Meridian 2" at Vertical View Climbing Gym on the 26th — got dropped because we couldn't work out what they actually are or exactly where they meet, and we'd rather leave them out than send you somewhere wrong.

Wednesday, September 16 · Meridian

Overnight low: 54°

Sunny through the day, light and variable wind turning northwest around 5 mph in the afternoon. Then it changes character after dark: a 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. If you've got anything on the patio you'd rather not find soaked, bring it in before bed.

Thursday is where our two sources stop agreeing, so here are both. The National Weather Service point forecast for Meridian has Thursday mostly sunny and near 81, with a 20 percent chance of storms after noon. CBS2's live three-day strip has Thursday at 75 with showers. Both were pulled this evening. Plan for warm, and watch the sky from lunchtime on. Friday eases to about 75 with a 20 percent shower chance before noon, and then the weekend dries out and climbs: 79 Saturday, 82 Sunday, 84 Monday. For once Boise and Meridian are reading within a degree of each other — the valley strip has today at 80 against our 81. Sunrise 7:26 a.m., sunset 7:54 p.m. Full local product from the NWS Boise office →

Mayor Robert Simison has issued a statement on the rat activity people across Ada County have been complaining about all summer, and the honest headline is that the county is still working out the size of the problem. The statement follows a public meeting the Ada County Commission held on Sept. 2, which put public health officials, city representatives, professional exterminators and members of the public in one room to start assembling a response. That meeting was driven by residents — their reports, their sightings, their questions — rather than by any agency's own data.

And that's rather the point. Simison says the picture is still coming into focus, and that much of what has been gathered so far is anecdotal: activity reported near water, near irrigation systems, and near places where food is easy to get at. In a city built around canals and laterals, that describes a lot of Meridian. Central District Health added the reassuring half — sightings may be climbing in some areas, but there's currently no evidence of an associated rise in disease. What the city wants now is better information, and it's asking residents to supply it: report sightings to the Idaho State Department of Agriculture. Officials were also blunt that the cheapest and most effective steps are the ones at your own back door — secure the trash, get the pet food indoors, clear outdoor food sources, keep the property tidy, and call a professional exterminator if you've found evidence. There is real money going into tracking this now, too, and the sum Central District Health has to spend is in the article. The grant figure is in the piece →

West Ada is closed today, Wednesday Sept. 16, for all grades. It's a Professional Learning / Collaboration day, it applies district-wide from kindergarten through twelfth, and it has been sitting on the board-approved 2026–27 calendar since April — which is no comfort at all if you only remembered it last night. No buses, no classes, teachers in the buildings.

Since we're here, the rest of the term is worth a glance, because the next few days off are the awkward split kind. Sept. 25 is a no-school day for grades K–8 only, for teacher preparation — high schoolers still go. Oct. 7 brings evening parent-teacher conferences for K–12. Oct. 8 is off for K–8 for conferences, with grades 9–12 doing their conferences that evening instead, and it's also the end of the first quarter. Oct. 9 is off for everybody. Then it settles down until Nov. 3, another all-grades Professional Learning day, and Thanksgiving break from Nov. 23–27. If childcare needs booking, the split K–8 days are the ones that catch people out. West Ada's calendar page →

Boise State has been awarded $8 million to build up its semiconductor research, aimed at a specific question: how do you make a chip survive extreme conditions — high temperature, radiation, mechanical stress? The money arrives through EPSCoR, the federal Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, and funds a new program called XTREME. The named applications are energy, defense and space exploration, which is a more interesting list than it first sounds.

The Treasure Valley angle is in the partnerships. XTREME pulls in the University of Idaho, College of Western Idaho, College of Eastern Idaho, College of Southern Idaho and BYU–Idaho, plus Micron and Idaho National Laboratory on the industry side. "It's good to be part of the conversation and to start enhancing our research infrastructure and capabilities across the state to support research in that area," said David Estrada, a professor at Boise State's Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering. His postdoctoral researcher Michael Curtis, who grew up here, put the local pride more plainly: "During my PhD, I was able to travel and see some of the really big schools across the nation and compared to them we have a world class facility." Estrada said the aim is to grow Idaho talent into Idaho jobs rather than watch graduates leave the state to find the work — which, with Micron expanding across the valley, makes this a labour story for Meridian as much as a research story for Boise. Read more →

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The Tolleth House, 134 E. State Ave. — and the problem is that Sears wasn't selling houses yet. It's a two-storey Queen Anne built in 1907, with a wrap-around porch, narrow shiplap siding and an irregular plan that manages thirteen exterior corners. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on Dec. 20, 1996. Researchers for the City of Meridian found evidence pointing to it being a Sears Catalog Home, put up from mail-order plans in the company's 1905 catalogue. The snag: Sears didn't start offering catalogue homes until 1908. What the 1905 catalogue did offer was full-colour wallpaper samples. So either the house is a year or three ahead of the product, or the trail leads somewhere else — the city's own note says further research is needed, and nobody has done it.

The people in it are the better story anyway. Harry Tolleth was a partner in Champlin-Tolleth, a mercantile and grocery company headquartered right here; by 1913 he had his own, Tolleth Mercantile Co., later Tolleth's Grocery. He lived in the house until he died in 1936. Della Tolleth stayed on — until her death in 1975. That's sixty-eight years in one house on one street. The next owner, Gwen Alger, opened an antique shop in it, which may be the most fitting possible second act for a building that might have come out of a catalogue.