The road district signs off on $261 million, a grass fire flares south of Kuna, and football is back tonight

Today looks like the last easy one for a bit — mid-80s, and then a chance of actual thunderstorms rolling through in the afternoon, which is a sentence we have not been able to write in weeks. Below: the highway district signed off on a $261 million budget for the roads you sit on every morning, a grass fire flared up four miles south of Kuna Butte and was knocked down inside a day, and the city is asking teenagers to come help run the place. There is a charity car show in a furniture store parking lot on Sunday, and high school football starts back tonight with two Meridian schools playing each other.

Let's get into it.

🧠 Trivia: Meridian's oldest city park is named after an actual person — a former mayor. What's his name, and what year did the park open? (Answer at the bottom.)

Six things, all of them physically in Meridian, none of them repeats. Three of them happen in the next four days.

Still running and already covered here: Art Spark at Kleiner and the Main Street Market tomorrow, The Princess Bride at Victory Gardens tonight and tomorrow, Celebrate Hope at the Village on Saturday, line dancing on Big Al's patio tonight, the Monday Night Market at Storey Park. Skipped on geography again this week: the West Bench Farmers Market and IDeal's 25th birthday, both of which are in Boise despite showing up on a Meridian calendar.

And the standing ask, twenty-second issue running: if something is happening in Meridian that isn't on any calendar — a garage band, a church potluck, a neighborhood thing — hit reply and tell us.

Today: mid-80s, breezy, and a real chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Overnight low around 58. Tomorrow lands in the same neighborhood — mid-80s — and then the weekend keeps sliding cooler.

The change is moisture. CBS2's Eric Walker wrote on Wednesday that the bigger shift arrives Friday and Saturday as more moisture moves into southwest Idaho: showers and thunderstorms become more widespread, some storms could be strong, and heavy rain and flash flooding become concerns rather than fantasies. After a month of cloudless 90s, plan for the possibility that a storm actually shows up over your evening.

The fine print, because we owe you this one. The National Weather Service point-forecast file for Meridian has now been frozen on the same five-day-old copy for ten straight cycles, and that file says today is "mostly sunny and hot, high near 90" with no rain at all. We are not publishing 90. CBS2's live three-day strip, read twice last night, has Boise at 84 today — and Boise almost always runs a few degrees hotter than Meridian, not cooler. When the stale file and the live read disagree by six degrees in that direction, the live read wins. Call it mid-80s and keep an eye on the sky.

Ada County Highway District commissioners approved the Fiscal Year 2027 budget 5–0 after a public hearing at their Aug. 26 meeting. Inside it is a $133 million capital program covering more than 100 projects, plus the money to actually maintain and operate the county's roads, sidewalks, traffic signals and bike lanes. The certified property tax levy brings in about $58.5 million. Fiscal 2027 starts Oct. 1.

In a separate unanimous vote the commission moved to recover $2.27 million in foregone property tax revenue from past years — money it was entitled to levy and didn't. Of that, $1.7 million goes to the Cloverdale Road project between Victory and Overland, which is scheduled to break ground during the fiscal year; the rest goes to maintenance. "Maintaining a growing transportation network is a balancing act between addressing the needs of today and investing in the future," Commission President Miranda Gold said. Worth remembering that essentially every street in Meridian that isn't a state highway belongs to ACHD, not the city — which is why a Boise-datelined budget vote is a Meridian story.

Read more → (CBS2/KBOI News Staff, published Wed. Aug. 26, 7:41 p.m.)

The Cave Fire started Wednesday afternoon about four miles south of Kuna Butte and grew fast enough to draw a heavy first response: one overhead, four engines, two dozers, an investigator, a helicopter, an Air Attack and multiple retardant planes from the U.S. Wildland Fire Service Boise unit and the BLM Boise District, with Kuna Rural, Melba and Upper Deer Flat fire departments assisting. Swan Falls Road closed from West Nicholson Road down to Swan Falls Dam for several hours, and reopened Wednesday evening.

By Thursday CBS2 reported crews had full containment. No evacuations were ordered. This is the only story in today's issue that isn't Meridian-proper, and it earns the slot for a plain reason: that country is twenty minutes from most of us, the smoke drifts north, and Swan Falls Road is how a lot of Meridian people get to the river.

Read more → (KIVI/Idaho News 6 staff, published Wed. Aug. 26, 7:22 p.m., with the containment update from CBS2.)

The city posted a call Thursday inviting Meridian youth to apply for seats on its commissions — the volunteer bodies that weigh in on parks, planning, transportation and the rest before anything reaches the council. Under the city's own rules a youth commissioner may be under eighteen at the time of appointment, can't be a city employee, and can't sit on more than one board or commission at once.

Applying is an online form, or a paper application with a résumé and letter of interest delivered to the Mayor's office at 33 E. Broadway Ave. by 5 p.m. on the closing date. We could not read a specific deadline off the city's page, so we're not going to invent one — check the posting or call the Mayor's office at (208) 489-0534 before you plan around it. If your kid is closer to "curious" than "committed," Monday's MYAC kick-off in the events box above is the softer entry point.

Read more → (City of Meridian, posted Thu. Aug. 27.)

Killed on the way to this issue, in the interest of showing our work: the Haven outpatient clinic at Cottonwood Creek (real, but published Aug. 11, and we already ran it Aug. 14), the Village at Meridian's final-phase tenant list (we've run it four separate times now), and a widely-repeated claim that the council just annexed 20 acres near Lake Hazel and Locust Grove for 167 houses — we could not pin that to a dated article, so it stays out.

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 Storey Park — named for former Meridian Mayor Don Storey — and it opened in 1980, which makes it the oldest city park Meridian has.

Fourteen acres at Main and Franklin, and it does more work than almost any other piece of ground in town: the Meridian Pool is there, the Storey Bark Park off-leash area is there, and the Meridian Chamber of Commerce office building sits on it too — which is unusual, because the Chamber isn't a city entity, it's a tenant on a public park. The Monday Night Market you've been walking through all summer is at 205 E. Franklin Road, which is Storey Park's address. The adult baseball diamond is Mo Brooks Field, and either picnic shelter can be rented for an afternoon for less than the cost of dinner out.

The nice detail is the neighborhood. The park sits within a few hundred yards of the Meridian Dairy Barns and the Meridian Speedway — so the oldest park in town is parked right between the two loudest reminders of what this place used to be.

Source: the City of Meridian's own Storey Park page. We're not asserting anything about Don Storey's years in office — the city page names him as a former mayor and stops there, so we do too.