– It looks like a banner season for goatheads! They’re everywhere! (For library-types: puncture vine. It’s a noxious weed with caltrop-like seeds, the bane of cyclists / dogs / bare-footers.)

– It’s official! ACHD has every road in the county either undergoing chipseal, or torn up. (Not really, but it sure seems like it.)

– Parks
1) Rhodes Park is finally undergoing a major facelift, for the entitled skateboarders. The hobo camp has been displaced around the corner; the Weekly says illegal activity is threatening the services offered at the legit homeless shelters.*
2) Esther Simplot Park – I’ve been watching with interest all year. They created a huge mountain of what I assume was tainted dirt that had to be removed. Now it’s back to flat, and hopefully the finished product will start taking shape.
3) New park proposed at the site of the old Franklin School @ Orchard. Locals are lamenting that there will also be a gas station / convenience store… at least it will be paying some property taxes. The park, however it shakes out, will be small. But there are fairly big parks nearby (Borah and Cassia).

* Regarding the burgeoning homeless population… how do we distinguish between the truly needy (temporary setback, mental illness, young children, etc.) and the “lifestyle by choice” needy? And care for the trulies, while NOT making our community attractive to the choicers?

Despite his ability to avoid criminal charges, trouble follows Bujak like a tail.

What amounts are you talking about?

For example random picks: 2300 Heron. 210,000 value 2,200 in taxes.

600 W Boise Hills. 4 bd/2bath 280,000 value 4,300. -No exemption.

Reverse engineering says it’s more important to ask what they are doing with all that money?
Police and Fire expenditures are the beasts that need to be reeled in.

EDITOR NOTE–It is all in the sales pitch. Bieter and Team Dave are attempting to sell yet another North End benefit “foothills levy” with no earmarks for the SW Boise open space, conservation easements, etc. They use $2.50 a month per $100,000 assessed value as the meager cost. Truth is, median value is nearly double that value which means the true cost is somewhere around $54 per residence–much more for commercial property of higher value–and there is no real benefit to citizens who live on the Bench where “increased density” is chewing up habitat along the desert, farm land, ditch banks, and other riparian zones. If they irrevocably designated areas for open space and wildlife habitat in the SW bench, the measure would have more appeal.

EDIOTR NOTE–Point well taken.

How about a discussion of why the Guardian is not on Facebook?

“but we cannot get folks to run for office or challenge politicos who seek to limit the rights we think we have.”

Are there empty election seats?
The lack of challengers doesn’t mean “we don’t have the right” to challenge.
Unless you are a poor minority, you actually do have the rights you “think you have”. But then poor minorities don’t think they have those rights, so every one really does have the rights “they think they do”. 😉

It would be fun to follow all the money. What did Wells Fargo buy for their $25,000? Who is going to do the study? Was it bid out or just handed to a member of Team Dave (via a rfp)?

Maybe we are going to rename the foothills the Well Fargo Foothills?