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Happy Tuesday, Meridian!
Ninety-five today, ninety-six tomorrow, and then it finally starts letting go. If you have anything outdoors to do this week, do it Thursday or later.
In today's issue: the orange recycling bags in your cart are being discontinued — not by the city, by Hefty — and there is a date you should know about. The state police break ground this morning on a $29 million forensic lab off Stratford, and we've got the numbers on what actually happens inside it. Six things to do, five of them in the next three days, including trivia tonight and mahjong tomorrow. A meme. And a trivia question about how much work that lab is doing. Let's get into it.
In this issue
🟠 The Hefty ReNew orange bag program is being phased out — what to do with the ones you have
🔬 Idaho State Police break ground this morning on a $29 million forensic lab in Meridian
🏛️ Your council votes tonight on a Briar Ridge time extension, 6 p.m. at City Hall
🎲 Trivia at Voodoo tonight, mahjong at The Lark House tomorrow, bingo at the Senior Center Thursday
☀️ 95 today, 96 Wednesday, then a slow slide to 87 by Sunday
🧠 Trivia: how much work Idaho's forensic lab gets through in a year
🧠 Trivia: The state breaks ground in Meridian this morning on a new forensic lab. Roughly how many case submissions does Idaho State Police Forensic Services handle in a single year? (Answer at the bottom.)
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Better week than last one. Five of these six are inside the next three days, and two of them are tonight. The free calendars finally coughed up something that isn't a networking lunch.
Tuesday, Aug 25 — today
City Council: the Briar Ridge time extension — 6 p.m., Meridian City Hall, 33 E. Broadway Ave., or streamed at meridiancity.org/live. This is not a glamorous one, and that's rather the point: Briar Ridge Subdivision (TECC-2026-0002, on the west side of Meridian Rd. between W. Lake Hazel and W. Amity) is asking for more time on its final plat so it can get the City Engineer's signature. Plat extensions are the boring hinge that most Meridian subdivisions swing on, and this is the meeting where they get decided. Public hearing, so you can speak. Add to calendar
Trivia Tuesday at Voodoo Brewing — 7–9 p.m., 713 N. Main St., Ste 120. Pop culture, sports, music and assorted nonsense, teams or solo, downtown and walkable from most of old Meridian. If you have been meaning to try the Main Street brewpub and needed a reason that isn't just "beer," here it is. Details · Add to calendar
Wednesday, Aug 26
Bird, Bams & Bites: Mahjong Night at The Lark House — 5:30–9:30 p.m., 1748 W. Island Green Dr. Introductory American Mahjong instruction and open play with Ok Let's Mahjong, refreshments and drinks included. Ticketed, roughly $60–$125 depending on what you book, so this is a proper night out rather than a drop-in. Mahjong is having a genuine moment and this is the low-embarrassment way to learn it. Details · Add to calendar
High Desert Off-Road monthly club meeting — 7–9 p.m., Idaho Pizza Company, 405 E. Fairview Ave. The southern Idaho off-road club does its monthly get-together over pizza on Fairview. The listing is thin on specifics, so treat this as "turn up and ask" rather than a programmed evening — but if you own something with a lift kit and no one to go out with, that is exactly what a club meeting is for. Details · Add to calendar
Thursday, Aug 27
Thursday Night Bingo at the Meridian Senior Center — 4–9 p.m., 1920 N. Records Way. Five hours of bingo inside Kleiner Park at the Center at the Park. It is not an over-55 event in the way people assume — the senior center's bingo night is one of the cheapest, most sociable weeknight things in this town, and the money stays in the building. Details · Add to calendar
Saturday, Sep 5 — worth booking now
Blood on the Clocktower at Phoenix Fire Games — 6 p.m., 94 E. Fairview Ave. Free to play. Treasure Valley Blood on the Clocktower runs a session at the shop: a large-group social deduction game — think Werewolf with a much better engine — where the whole table is trying to work out who to trust. Free participation, no equipment, and the sort of thing that is far better in person than it sounds on paper. Details · Add to calendar
Still on and previously covered here, so no repeat write-ups: Art Spark at Kleiner and Meridian Main Street Market both Saturday, the Meridian Lanes summer concert Saturday afternoon, The Princess Bride at Victory Gardens Friday and Saturday, Celebrate Hope at The Village Saturday, and the Rocky Mountain–Owyhee football opener Friday at 7. All good, all still worth going to.
Nineteenth 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. Two of today's six came off Facebook rather than any calendar, which rather proves the point.
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☀️ Sunny and hot, high near 95, low around 64. South-southeast wind 5 to 7 mph. No precipitation, and no advisory in effect for Meridian.
📈 One more up day, then the corner. Wed 96 is the peak, then Thu 92, Fri 90, Sat 88, Sun 87. Friday night's football opener should sit in the mid-80s at kickoff.
🌡️ Meridian 95, Boise 96. The usual direction is back — Boise reads a degree warmer than the Meridian point forecast today. We print the NWS number, but plan for the upper end, especially if you're outside in the afternoon.
🔥 Fire weather, worth knowing: CBS2's Eric Walker reported yesterday morning that a Red Flag Warning is up for parts of southwest Idaho and southeast Oregon, with storms staying mostly south of the Snake River and most of our area dry today. That warning is not specific to Meridian, but if you're heading out of the valley this week, check before you light anything.
Fine print: the NWS point-forecast feed we pull has frozen again — it's still serving the product issued 1:48 p.m. Sunday, exactly the one-cycle-then-stall pattern we've flagged before. So today's numbers were checked against a live same-day source: the CBS2 forecast published 3:50 a.m. Monday ("mid to upper 90s Tuesday and Wednesday before a gradual cooling trend") and the live Boise three-day strip reading 96 for Tuesday. They agree, so we're publishing. Where sources disagree, we tell you both.
Two again, both Meridian, both filed inside the last 24 hours, both dates checked at the source. Five desks were swept; the ones that produced were the city's own newsroom and BoiseDev.
Those orange bags in your recycling cart are being discontinued
AI illustration.
If you've been buying the Hefty ReNew orange bags — the ones for plastic film and clamshells and all the other hard-to-recycle plastic that curbside won't take and the Meridian Transfer Station won't take — the city posted yesterday that the program is being phased out.
The city is unusually pointed about whose decision this was: "This decision was made by Reynolds Consumer Products (Hefty) without input from the City." That's a public works department that clearly liked the program.
Here are the dates that matter. Republic Services will keep hauling your orange bags with the regular curbside recycling until June 30, 2027, so nothing changes at the curb this year. Hefty pulls the bags from retailers by the end of 2026. After June 30, 2027, if you're sitting on unused bags you contact Hefty for return-and-refund instructions. And the blunt part: what you used to put in the orange bag now goes in the trash.
Two things worth remembering while you adjust. Squishy water bottles, plastic #1 and #2 bottles and jugs, and plastic #5 tubs are all still fine in your regular comingle recycling — none of that changes. And leftover Hefty EnergyBag orange bags are still accepted. Roughly nine more months of normal, then a habit to unlearn.
City of Meridian news release, BreAnna Clifford, Communication Specialist, posted Aug. 24, 2026.
The $29 million forensic lab breaks ground this morning — here's what goes in it
AI illustration — not a photo of the ISP campus or of Tuesday's groundbreaking.
We told you Saturday that this was coming. It happens this morning at 10:30, at Idaho State Police headquarters, 700 S. Stratford Dr. — and BoiseDev has now published the detail that makes it interesting, which is what the building is actually for.
The 20,000-square-foot lab is due to be finished in January 2028 and will house DNA casework, latent print examination, digital forensics and ballistic evidence. It is being built to take on emerging work too, including whole-genome sequencing for forensic DNA analysis and cold cases — which is the line in the release that should get your attention, because cold cases are exactly what that technology reopens.
The load it's absorbing: ISP Forensic Services handles more than 16,000 case submissions a year, including 3,745 DNA samples in fiscal year 2026, for law enforcement, prosecutors, public defenders and coroners across the whole state. Once the new building opens, some operations move out of the existing headquarters lab, freeing space there for chemistry, toxicology, the DNA database and alcohol analysis. This is Phase 1 of a larger planned expansion, and it also brings more public and employee parking plus low-water-use landscaping.
Hoffman Construction is construction manager and general contractor, with Lombard Conrad Architects leading design and SmithGroup consulting. Speakers this morning: Gov. Brad Little, ISP Director Col. Bill Gardiner, and Forensic Services Laboratory Systems Director Matthew Gamette.
BoiseDev, Sarah Jacobsen, published Mon, Aug. 24, 10:42 a.m. MDT.
Meme of the Day
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Trivia answer
More than 16,000 case submissions a year. That's the workload Idaho State Police Forensic Services carries — and the reason a $29 million building is going up on Stratford Drive rather than a remodel.
The detail underneath that number is the interesting one. 3,745 of those were DNA samples in fiscal year 2026 alone. And the lab doesn't work only for police: it serves prosecutors, public defenders and coroners across Idaho too. That last part matters more than it sounds — the same lab that helps convict is the lab a defense attorney relies on to test the state's evidence. A backlog there isn't a police problem, it's a courts problem, and it lands on everybody.
The forward-looking piece is whole-genome sequencing, which the new facility is being built to support. Conventional forensic DNA typing looks at a small set of markers; whole-genome sequencing reads vastly more of the sample. For a fresh case that's incremental. For a decades-old cold case with a degraded sample and no database hit, it's the difference between a file that stays closed and one that doesn't.
Source: Idaho State Police, via BoiseDev (Sarah Jacobsen, Aug. 24, 2026), citing ISP's own press release on the groundbreaking.
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