800 homes, 2,400 people and maybe a new school: Coming near Idaho 44
Fast-growing Star is showing no signs of slowing.
In February, Star residents and City Council members clashed over competing needs for a new school and improvements to a treacherous road, with the school proposal winning out.
Last month, another proposal also including a school came before the City Council, to the dismay of many residents who wanted the land’s agricultural history preserved. The proposal was for a 300-acre development along the north side of Idaho 44 with 800 homes, a city park, an elementary school and a 30-acre commercial and office district.
The council voted to approve the development — with a number of conditions. The Middleton school district has put a $20 million bond on the May ballot for the new school.
821 homes, town homes and ‘fourplexes’
The proposed development, called the Terramor Subdivision, is planned between Kingsbury and Blessinger roads in northwest Star near the Middleton border.The site is in the Canyon County portion of the city, which straddles Canyon and Ada counties.
Challenger Development, a Corey Barton development company, asked the Star City Council at a public hearing on March 18 to annex and zone the land as residential and commercial, and to enter into a development agreement with the city.
According to plans filed with the city, Terramor would include 456 single-family homes, 253 town homes for sale, and 112 fourplexes for rent. The gross density would be roughly three dwelling units per acre.
Star Police Chief Zach Hessing estimated at the hearing that the development would house roughly 2,400 people.
“This is not just another subdivision,” said Becky McKay, owner of Engineering Solutions, who represented Challenger at the hearing.
McKay said the development would include two swimming pools, three playgrounds, six pickleball courts and four miles of multi-use pathways, not including sidewalks.
The “identity” of the community, McKay said, would be focused on the park and the school.
Challenger would deed 10 acres for the park to the city, which would design, build, and operate it. Preliminary concepts include baseball fields, which McKay said were a need identified by city staff. Challenger would also construct a series of pathways around the park.
Mayor Trevor Chadwick requested that the land for the park be deeded to the city in the first phase of Terramor’s development, which McKay agreed to.
In the development’s southwest corner, 12 acres would be donated to the Middleton School District to build a 700-student elementary school. The district, McKay said, is in “desperate need of an elementary site and an affordable site to develop.”
Challenger would donate and prepare the land for the school in Phase 1 as well. McKay said Challenger would also “be constructing their roadway, installing their sewer, their water, whatever power needs, utility needs they need, have to have.”
Development compatible with future ‘transit corridor’
Terramor would cluster commercial and office space near Idaho 44, also known as State Street. Though tenants have yet to be identified, McKay said they would be “neighborhood compatible,” and the idea of a RV storage facility had been floated as a possibility for one of the six commercial lots.
McKay said the developer would build a road called Terramor Way running north from Idaho 44 to Cornell Street just south of the Lemp Canal. Cornell, which is in Canyon County, is eventually anticipated to connect east to Floating Feather Road in Ada County.
This north-south road aligns with a neighborhood transportation plan jointly adopted by Star and Canyon County Highway District 4, McKay said. It would be Terramor’s only access to Idaho 44, which McKay said would “help facilitate this and keep this as a transit corridor, limiting the accesses so that we can have higher volumes in the future.”
In a phone interview, McKay said Terramor Way, an east-west road within the development, and anticipated improvements to align Cornell with Floating Feather would “take pressure off of the state highway.”
McKay said State Street is intended to be widened to five lanes in the future, but it would “still only have a finite capacity” as the region keeps growing.
“If we can provide these other alternatives, it helps with the transportation within the Valley,” McKay said. “So it’s better for everyone.”
‘Meridian on steroids’: Residents dread traffic, growth
Several members of the public spoke at the hearing, including Mark Christiansen, a Middleton City Council member who signed up to testify as “neutral.”
Christiansen said the pockets where Challenger plans on building homes are more dense than three units per acre.
Christiansen also worries that the traffic study accompanying the proposal underestimates the impact that the elementary school would have once built.
“Middleton has gone through a number of issues with traffic related to their schools,” Christiansen said. “I read the the traffic statement and I see the numbers and I understand them, but I also know the realities of a school bring a whole different density issue, and that is very concerning to the majority of us.”
Other residents, some of whom said they live beyond city limits and did not have the opportunity to vote for the City Council members, raised concerns about housing density and the way that the land would change.
“Most of us moved away from Meridian to get away” from dense construction there, said Lori Billaud. “This is Meridian on steroids.”
Billaud said she wanted to see the fourplexes dropped and some town homes swapped for single-family homes.
Walter Lester, who lives on Idaho 44, said the city’s comprehensive plan includes the objective to “preserve rural landscapes.”
Lester said he lived on a farm not far from the Boise Airport for 40 years until it was annexed for the construction of a roundabout. “Progress is progress,” he conceded, but after finding his home in Star, he doesn’t want to see something like that happen again.
“Never in my mind would I imagine that my beautiful backyard, my beautiful deck, everything that we have back there” would be overlooking two-story fourplexes, Lester said. He said the subdivision would “block the Foothills. Block the mountains. All the reasons I moved here.”
City officials commend ‘thoughtful’ plan
City Council Member Kevin Neilson closed the March 18 hearing by stating, “A couple of folks mentioned, ‘Look, we don’t live in Middleton. We don’t live in Star. We don’t get to vote. Our voices aren’t heard.’
“Your voices were heard tonight,” Neilson said. “You may or may not have wanted this development to be approved, but I feel like the things that you shared tonight … I can tell in the conditions we put here, our council took those to heart.”
Neilson said he appreciated the “thoughtfulness” of the application and the way in which dense uses were clustered toward the state highway, which he said was another objective of the comprehensive plan.
The council voted unanimously to approve the development – with a laundry list of conditions, including extensive buffers, wider pathways, and the nixing of a proposed office building closest to neighbors.
McKay told the Statesman that she’s worked on similar large-scale developments. “I always drive through them, you know, years later and talk to people that live in them, and we always get real positive feedback,” she said. “That they’re a community.”
McKay said the development could take 15 to 20 years to complete.
Middleton seeks $20 million bond for school
With Terramor approved, the Middleton School District’s next step is to secure the funds necessary to build its elementary school.
In a phone interview with the Statesman, Superintendent Marc Gee said two of Middleton’s three elementary schools are “well over capacity.”
Heights Elementary School is at 145% capacity, and Mill Creek Elementary School is at 114% capacity, Gee said. He said 22 elementary classrooms are portable units.
The district first started looking for a site for a new school in 2015, and in 2018 ran a bond that failed three times. A fourth with an updated plan including a building for career technical education, or CTE, failed in 2022.
Gee said he’s “optimistic” that this time is different, because the cost to taxpayers is lower. The district is dedicating $8 million in state facilities money to the project, and Challenger is donating the land and installing sewer, water and other land improvements free of cost.
The 2022 bond was for roughly $59 million, which translated to about $161 per $100,000 of taxable property per year. The bond on the ballot this May is $19.9 million — just $34 per $100,000, Gee said.
The district approved the bond to go on the May 20 ballot. It would need 66.7% of the vote to pass.
Gee said that’s a high bar. But passage would also reflect a community consensus, he said: “We’re looking at this as, you know, this is a community project, and getting 66 and two-thirds just assures that this community is behind this project and we can move forward to make things better for our kids.”
