The Warriors host Centennial tonight, Meta flips the switch in Kuna, and the last line dance of the summer

The rain that showed up yesterday isn't quite done with us. Expect a damp start — patchy fog before ten, a 30% shot at showers before noon — then it should break up into something perfectly decent by kickoff. And there is a kickoff: Meridian High hosts Centennial at 7 p.m. tonight, and the Warriors are 1-0.

Also in here: Meta's enormous new data center outside Kuna is switched on and running, a Meridian father in the I-84 case picks up a second charge, the last line-dancing night of the summer happens tonight at Big Al's, and there's a brand-new Sunday market at Storey Park this weekend. Let's get into it.

Before the federal government ever got into the irrigation business out here, one privately dug canal was the biggest project of its kind in the Boise Valley. Which canal was it — and what did the man who started it intend to float down it, besides water?

(Answer at the bottom.)

Friday, September 4

Sunday, September 6

Thursday, September 10

Friday, September 11

A note on what's missing: the Labor Day heavyweights — Meat & Tater at Kleiner on Saturday, the Main Street Market, the Labor Day races at the Speedway on Monday — all ran here in the last few days. They're still on, they're still worth your time, and we're not going to re-list them with a fresh coat of paint. Also worth remembering: there is no Monday Night Market on Labor Day, September 7. It's back on the 14th.

Friday: patchy fog before 10 a.m., a 30% chance of showers mainly before noon, then partly sunny. High around 69 to 70. Light wind turning westerly in the afternoon.

Friday night: a chance of showers, with thunderstorms possible after midnight. Low near 50. If you're at the game, take the jacket; the second half is going to feel like actual September.

The weekend: Saturday is the good one — mostly sunny, low-to-mid 70s. Sunday looks similar and a touch warmer.

Fine print, as always: the NWS point-forecast file we use for Meridian is still serving a forecast issued August 23 — twenty-one straight pulls of the same frozen data — so these numbers come from the live NWS Boise point forecast and are cross-checked against CBS2's live three-day strip (Fri 69, Sat 72), which was reading the same thing this evening. Boise usually runs a few degrees warmer than we do, so if anything, plan for the lower end.

Meridian High opened the season on the road at Borah last Friday and won it 35-13 — 35 points scored, 13 allowed, which is exactly the kind of tidy first week a coach wants. The Warriors are ranked 13th in Idaho at the moment.

Tonight they're home at 1900 W. Pine Ave. against Centennial, who dropped their opener and will be looking to fix that. Kickoff is 7 p.m. Next Friday is Owyhee, also at home, so there's a good two-week stretch of Pine Avenue coming.

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Meta's new AI data center out near Pleasant Valley in Kuna is now open and fully operational, serving traffic worldwide. Bradley Davis, Meta's global economic development director, called it "the culmination of 1.2 billion in capital investment into the state of Idaho." Construction started in 2022 and went through several phases, including a redesign of the cooling system.

That cooling system is the interesting part for anyone in the valley who thinks about water. The Kuna facility runs a closed loop — the same water stays in the system, ideally for a decade — which Davis says lets it use "virtually no water for the majority of the year." Meta has a company goal of being water positive by 2030. Power is the other question: the Idaho Public Utilities Commission said earlier this year it expects this one building to instantly become Idaho Power's single largest customer.

Worth knowing that data centers are not broadly popular — a Gallup survey in March found 71% of Americans opposed to them, a Fox News poll in July found 70% — with environmental impact the usual reason given. This is the closest one of these has come to Meridian, so it's yours to have an opinion about.

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Austin Summers, the Meridian man facing felony charges in the November 2025 I-84 crash that killed his 7-year-old son, was charged on August 31 in Valley County with failure to stop for a damage accident — a misdemeanor. It came less than two weeks after he posted a $250,000 surety bond in the Canyon County case, where a judge had reduced bond from $500,000 on August 18. What led to the new charge wasn't immediately available.

In the original case he faces one count of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and two counts of felony injury to a child. Court documents say investigators put him at 73 to 75 mph in a 65 zone when his GMC struck the back of a Ford F-450 that had lost engine power in the right lane, and that cellphone data showed his phone in use in the minutes beforehand.

He's due to be arraigned on the Valley County misdemeanor September 15, and back in Canyon County for a hearing in the manslaughter case September 10.

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Two things we chased and killed today, so you know what the filter caught. An idahonews story headlined "Police arrest man after parking lot fight in Meridian" reads as fresh and is dated February 24 — the incident was February 22. And a Meridian PD arrest sitting near the top of KIVI's Meridian page looks current and is August 28. Both were caught by checking the article timestamp rather than the headline, which is the only thing that has ever worked.

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 was the Ridenbaugh Canal — the largest pre-federal irrigation project in the Boise Valley — and the thing its founder meant to float down it, besides water, was lumber, headed for a sawmill the canal would also power.

The founder was William B. Morris, an early Boise City settler who in 1877 claimed over 17,000 acres under the Desert Land Act and hired the men who would become his own future farmers to dig the thing. He got seven miles in before he died in 1878. His widow Lavinia and his nephew William Ridenbaugh could afford to maintain those seven miles and not much else, and the canal changed hands repeatedly — 1889, 1890, and again in 1894 for $123,149. By that last sale the main canal ran 51 miles, with 271 miles of secondary canals and laterals, 23 large gates, 109 check gates, 296 taps, 280 weirs, 33 culverts and two 500-foot flumes. It sold to the Nampa & Meridian Irrigation District in 1906.

Source: the City of Meridian's 2014 Historic Preservation Plan, prepared by TAG Historical Research & Consulting.