Ustick is open again, Idaho out-farms Washington, and pumpkins on Friday

Fog for the first hour, then sun and a high in the mid-to-upper 70s — the kind of day the valley owes us after Monday's drizzle. Ustick Road is finally open again between Ten Mile and Linder, Idaho farmers just quietly out-earned Washington's for the first time since Calvin Coolidge, and the corn maze season starts Saturday. The events board is thin and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Let's get into it.

🧠 Today's trivia: Meridian has a mayor, a city council and a public works department. So why can't a single one of them fix the pothole on your street? (Answer at the bottom.)

Straight up: almost everything happening in Meridian over the next seven days has already been in this newsletter — Bike Night at High Desert Harley, the Autumn Market and Juniper Market on Saturday, Race 4 Hunger at the Speedway, the Monday Night Market's return on the 14th, the Learning Experience playdate, Ladies & Links, the Backyard Bash. We'd rather hand you one genuinely new thing this week and five worth putting on the calendar now than re-plate last week's list.

Sunday, September 13

Friday, September 25

Saturday–Sunday, October 3–4

Saturday, October 3

Saturday, October 10

Running something in Meridian? Hit reply. We would love to have a fuller board next week.

Today: patchy fog before 9 a.m., then sunny. The National Weather Service puts the high near 75 at its Meridian point, three miles east of town. Boise's live reading has today at 79, and Boise is running three or four degrees warm against the Meridian number right now — so plan for the top end and dress for upper 70s. Overnight low around 48.

Rest of the week: Wednesday mostly sunny, near 78 (Boise says low 80s). Thursday 81. Friday 79 with a 30% chance of showers — worth knowing if you're headed out to a pumpkin patch this weekend.

The fine print you're owed: the NWS Meridian point-forecast page hasn't refreshed since Thursday lunchtime — same numbers, same timestamp, four days running. Its own validity window still covers today, and Boise's live temperatures agree with it within a few degrees, so the numbers hold. But that window closes Friday, and we'll tell you if we lose it.

The stretch of Ustick between Ten Mile and Linder that has been shut since December is carrying traffic again — one lane in each direction, not the finished road. The Ada County Highway District closed it to widen Ustick to two lanes each way with a centre turn lane, raised medians, ten-foot multi-use pathways on both sides and a new pedestrian bridge over Five Mile Creek.

Neighbours have been living with the overflow all year. One resident told Idaho News 6 the detour dumped the traffic onto Ten Mile and McMillan instead; an employee at a nearby liquor store said the closure added more than ten minutes to her commute and visibly dented the store's numbers until her regulars started coming back last week. ACHD says construction continues through the end of October, so expect dust, delays and the occasional flagger for a while yet.

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USDA figures released September 3 show Idaho farmers and ranchers took in $11.949 billion in cash receipts in 2025, edging past Washington's $11.926 billion. The federal government has been keeping this scoreboard since 1924, and Idaho had never once been ahead. As recently as 2023, Washington was still nearly a billion dollars clear.

What flipped it was animals, not row crops. Idaho's cattle and calves receipts are up 49% since 2023, and milk brought in $3.83 billion on its own — more than three times what potatoes earned. Which is a fact worth sitting with in a town that still throws a festival called Dairy Days.

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Lowe Family Farmstead opens its fall season Saturday, September 12 and runs through October 31. It's a twenty-minute drive from most of Meridian, at 2500 S. Eagle Rd. in Kuna, and it's where a lot of this town's Octobers happen.

The farm says it built Idaho's first full-fledged corn maze back in 1997, which makes this its 30th season — and it's leaning into that alongside America's 250th for this year's theme. New for 2026: the Barnstormer, a 150-foot slide built around the flight of a cropduster, plus an expanded livestock area and gift shop. Hours are 4–9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, closed Sundays.

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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.

Nobody at Meridian City Hall owns your street. The Ada County Highway District does.

Back in the late 1960s, people living inside Boise city limits were taxed twice for roads — once by the city, once by the county — and the county spent almost none of it inside the cities. The result, as local historian Susan Stacy has described it, was smooth county roads and city streets full of potholes. In 1971 the Legislature let any Idaho county with 75,000-plus residents vote to hand every city and county road function to one independent agency, and ACHD opened for business the following year.

Five and a half decades on, it still runs every public street in Meridian, Boise, Eagle, Kuna, Star, Garden City and the unincorporated county — more than 5,000 lane miles. A Boise council president once summed the arrangement up as something that "doesn't exist anywhere else." So Ustick reopening is ACHD's doing, and so is the pothole nobody at City Hall can help you with.

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