Development heads east: 2,300 houses proposed outside Boise. 15,000 more may be coming
Darwin Roy says he was content living in his house in Boise’s North End until one Sunday morning in 1995. He went outside to have a coffee and a cigarette, only to realize that his neighbors’ new deck allowed them to look right into his backyard. So he walked back in the house and told his wife, “We’re moving.”
Twenty-five miles to the southeast, a few miles north of Interstate 84, Roy found an 8.8-acre lot off Indian Creek Road, surrounded by sagebrush and cheatgrass. He and his wife built a home there, where they have been living since 1998.
Roy’s neighborhood is part of an unincorporated hamlet called Mayfield, one of the original settlements along the Oregon Trail. It’s just a half-hour outside of Boise but a world away. Neighbors live on 10-acre lots, with distant views of snow-capped mountains. Transportation comes in two varieties: pickup truck or horse. Residents spot elk wandering around the hills far more often than they spot the sheriff.
“I didn’t move out here to live in the city,” Roy said.
But the city may be coming anyway. A few weeks ago, Roy and his neighbors were shocked to hear that developers are making plans to build a 2,300-home subdivision that could welcome up to 10,000 new people to the area over the next three decades.
Westpark Co., a Meridian development firm owned by Greg Johnson, is applying to build the 760-acre planned community on land it owns north of I-84 in Elmore County, just east of the Ada County line. Westpark has described the project, called Mayfield Springs, as “the gateway to Elmore County.”
Mayfield Springs would include a town center with a school, commercial lots and apartments, plus hundreds of houses on lots as large as an acre. The developer would pay to build the roads and wastewater system and would provide police and fire service until enough property tax comes in to pay for them.
Adjacent to Westpark’s property, another landowner, John McCallum, has plans to sell his 5,000-acre ranch. In 2011, Elmore County approved a development there called Mayfield Townsite that would be allowed to build up to 15,200 houses.
By comparison, Mountain Home — the largest city in Elmore County — had 5,500 households in 2018. Whoever buys McCallum’s land will acquire the right to build the houses, too.
If built, the two communities would turn the rural Mayfield area into another Boise suburb — the first to its east.
The two possible developments are evidence that even as Boise attempts to turn away from 75 years of sprawl, it cannot stop developers from targeting neighboring jurisdictions that are eager for the extra tax dollars growth will bring — but perhaps naive about the long-term costs that have bedeviled Boise, Meridian and other cities.
The cost of growth
People, it turns out, are expensive.
When an area grows, new infrastructure like roads, police and fire stations, and sewage systems are required. While the developer may pay to install new infrastructure, local government becomes responsible for maintaining it. Taxes may start out low in suburban areas, but as public payrolls grow with rising population and service needs, jurisdictions must increase them.
That’s the dilemma that Ada County is facing right now as it grapples with decades of growth. In 2019, the Ada County commissioners voted to collect foregone taxes after they realized they faced $320 million in unfunded facility needs.
Separately, Ada County Highway District Vice President Kent Goldthorpe says the district doesn’t take in enough money through property taxes to pay for maintenance of new roads developers are building.
That’s the kind of knowledge that comes from experience with growth — experience Elmore County lacks. Elmore County’s population fell to 27,259 in 2019 from 28,813 in 2008. Compare that with Ada County, whose population has grown 24% in the last 10 years, to 487,000 in 2019 from 392,362 in 2010.
Elmore County Commissioner Wes Wootan said he is excited for the property tax revenue the county will collect from Westpark’s development.
“We are in favor of economic development, and growth is part of it,” Wootan said in a phone interview. “That brings something to the county. It’s a good use for land that was not highly utilized. It was just kind of sitting there.”
But in Ada County, Commissioner Diana Lachiondo is worried that Elmore County will get the property taxes while Ada is left with consequences it has no way to pay for.
“We’d be interested to see what their plan is for financial sustainability and to ensure Elmore County is providing services for those residents,” Lachiondo said in a phone interview, which was her first time hearing of Westpark’s plans. “We don’t want to get into a situation where Ada County residents are subsidizing residents in another county through the use of our paramedics, our sheriff’s office, or our fire services.”
Planned community ordinance
Most of Elmore County’s rural, unincorporated areas allow only low-density residential growth on 10-acre lots. But Westpark was able to propose a higher-density development through the county’s planned community ordinance, which allows for urban densities in the county so long as a developer goes through several lengthy studies to prove that the new growth will pay for itself.
Ada County had a similar ordinance, which ahead of the recession produced communities on the county’s edge like Avimor and Dry Creek Ranch in the Foothills north of Boise. Ada County, too, thought planned communities would pay for themselves.
The ordinance created an opportunity for development to sprawl beyond what Ada County’s cities had allowed themselves. Boise officials worried that the city’s residents would suffer more traffic and lose the economic efficiencies of more compact, closer-in development. They sued Ada County when it approved Avimor, arguing that the community’s residents would use the city’s resources without paying city property taxes. Boise lost the lawsuit, and Avimor kept building.
While their developers promised to build fire and paramedic stations, planned communities grew slowly, and weren’t bringing in enough property taxes early on to cover major up-front investments and operating costs. In Hidden Springs, the first planned community north of Boise, a three-garage fire station has remained mostly unstaffed since it was built 21 years ago.
Ada County officials increasingly came to view planned communities as a drain on county resources. In 2010, the county tightened its rules on them. Then in 2016, the county’s new comprehensive plan further encouraged urban development within city limits and discouraged it elsewhere. It’s a policy Ada County Commissioners Lachiondo and Kendra Kenyon have echoed as they’ve argued against approving more planned communities.
Elmore County’s planned community ordinance remains in place, opening the path to developers like Westpark to build at urban densities on cheap land that is still within commuting distance of Boise.
“It’s the logical direction that Boise should have grown years ago,” Greg Johnson, owner of Westpark, said in a phone interview. Westpark Co. also built the Patagonia and Gramercy Heights communities in Meridian, among other subdivisions.
Houses in Mayfield Springs would come in a variety of sizes, from apartments to starter homes around $300,000 and homes on one-acre lots for $600,000.
“We’re taking a population that could live in Ada County, but these people can’t afford to live in Ada County with current housing prices,” Johnson said.
Housing close to … what?
As commuters everywhere know, the lower price of distant housing comes at the cost of higher gasoline bills and time spent on the road. One of Mayfield Springs’ immediate benefactors may be the Stage Stop gas station off Interstate 84.
But Johnson said he hopes that as more people move east of Boise, jobs will move that way, too.
“We do plan on growing jobs in this area so that people can live here and work here and not have to drive across county lines to work,” he said.
Until those industries spring up, Johnson said Mayfield’s residents will see shorter commutes to Boise than Canyon County commuters do. “It should relieve some of the congestion that we’re right now pushing to the west,” he said.
Is water at risk?
Lacey Wilde’s backyard overlooks the future site of the Mayfield Springs development. She doesn’t look forward to seeing a sea of houses there. But more than that, she’s concerned she’ll lose her water.
Wilde and the other 20 homeowners in her subdivision share a single well. Snowmelt from the mountains to the north refreshes the groundwater supply each year.
A water consultant for the developer, Tim Farrell, said there’s more than enough water to sustain the area. “This is going to be an extremely efficient, water-wise community,” he said.
The wastewater treatment plant will produce recycled water. And, he noted, current residents’ water rights would supersede Westpark’s if they did start to see their water levels fall.
Neighbors see what’s happening in the rest of the county and view pledges like Farrell’s with skepticism. Mountain Home is running out of water. The Elmore County commissioners got permission from the state to divert water from the Anderson Ranch Reservoir, which feeds the Boise River, to bring more water to their county. Boise protested the county’s application, arguing for conditions that would protect Boise’s senior water rights.
Sitting out on her deck in the late afternoon, Wilde shakes her head.
“If there’s no water in Elmore County, how does this development make sense?” Wilde asked.
The impact on rural Mayfield
On Tuesday night, March 3, Darwin Roy was one of about 65 people who showed up to the Boise Stage Shop, which alone contains a gas station, convenience store, restaurant — all the basic necessities for a small community.
Pickups lined up outside a renovated barn turned event center where consultants for Mayfield Springs were hosting a neighborhood meeting. On a disco-ball-lit stage, the consultants set up a feeble projector, displaying maps of the project.
Residents chimed in with their concerns: Can the schools handle these new families? Will it fit the character of the area? What about traffic?
Hethe Clark, the developer’s Boise lawyer, came with answers. There were plans to build a new charter school. Large-lot houses would be built nearest to the current neighborhood, to provide a better transition from old to new. And the developer would be fronting the cost to provide police and fire services until the community’s property taxes could pay for them.
Before Clark could get a word in about the roads, a woman in the front row cut in. “It’s taken us 20 years just to get one road paved,” she said, referring to the county road leading into the main subdivision there. “And yet Elmore County can take care of the infrastructure for this development? I don’t understand. You expect them to handle this influx?”
“The developer will be responsible for building all the roads in the project,” Clark said. From there, he said, the houses should add to the property tax rolls, providing funds for road maintenance.
Because some of the roads in the project are in Ada County, not Elmore County, the developer is working with the Ada County Highway District to mitigate the impact on ACHD’s budget, Clark said.
As for Ada County’s worries about being forced to subsidize the development?
“These folks are going to be doing work in Ada County, they will be paying the sales taxes there,” Clark said.
The developer will also conduct an economic impact study to determine whether the property taxes the project brings into Elmore County can cover the community’s future needs, he said.
Toward the end of the two-hour meeting, some residents started to get exhausted. Clark insisted that Johnson intended to build a community that Elmore County could be proud of. But residents grew frustrated that Johnson hadn’t come to explain himself.
“Why isn’t Mr. Johnson content to just divide the land into 10-acre parcels?” one woman asked.
“Money,” murmured a few residents.
Johnson told the Statesman that wasn’t it.
“Land close to existing transportation is a good place to put some residential density, as opposed to large-acre lots forever chewing up land,” he said. “That’s under-utilizing resources.”
But Roy had his own evaluation of the developer’s intentions: “It’s the mindset of: We own the land, we can do whatever the hell we want with it.”
Correction: Westpark hosted a meeting with neighbors on Tuesday, March 3. A previous version of this article had an incorrect date.
This story was originally published March 8, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
