Canyon County Pride is this weekend in Nampa — with new park restrictions
Canyon County Pride is scheduled for this weekend in Nampa, though festival organizers must now contend with added restrictions from city officials.
The free event is returning to the city’s Lakeview Park on Sunday, June 14, and is slated to host a dozen food trucks and over 100 vendors, organizers said, for what is expected to be a packed crowd.
“It’s outdoors, we’ll have live music, we’ll have performances, we’ll have turkey legs, we’ll have country music,” Tom Wheeler, president of Canyon County Pride, said in an interview. “All the things that people who live in Canyon County so appreciate and attend other festivals just like it.”
However, in a change from years past, Canyon County Pride will be held under new attendance and location limits from Nampa authorities. While the event has typically been held across all of Lakeview Park — one of Nampa’s largest public spaces — the city has adopted a new policy confining large events to the park’s northern side.
Large events on the park must also contend with a newly imposed cap of 5,000 attendees, raised from an initial proposed ceiling of 1,500.
“As our city has grown, we began having internal discussions at the end of last year” about limiting use of Lakeview Park for large events, Amy Bowman, a city spokesperson, wrote in an email. Curtailing the size and space of large events is intended to ensure the rest of Lakeview Park remains open to the public, she added.
The only event that is expected to rival the size of Canyon County Pride in Nampa is the city-sponsored Festival of the Arts, Bowman wrote.
While Clay Long, chief of staff to Nampa’s mayor, told the Statesman in a December statement that the Festival of the Arts would be exempt from the city’s new restrictions on events in Lakeview Park, Bowman confirmed this week that the new rules now apply to the Festival of the Arts, as well.
However, she added, city officials now project that the Festival of the Arts will draw an estimated 5,000 people daily throughout its two-day run in August — despite the city’s Parks and Recreation Division publicly claiming that the festival “attracts over 18,000 visitors from across the Treasure Valley.”
Bowman did not directly respond to questions about how Nampa plans to enforce its restrictions on attendees or on what prompted the revised attendance numbers. The Festival of the Arts — like Canyon County Pride — is free to attend for the public.
This year will be Canyon County Pride’s third year running. The event faced pushback in conservative Canyon County when it was established.
Some residents called for the Pride festival to be shut down in 2024, and then-Mayor Debbie Kling wrote in a public statement before the first Canyon County Pride that the event “does not reflect the personal beliefs and convictions of myself, the Nampa City Council, and many living in Nampa who have already reached out to us requesting it be canceled,” though added that the city could do little to stop it.
Canyon County Pride ultimately drew more than 2,000 festivalgoers to its debut, alongside a collection of counterprotesters. Some 4,000 people also attended the event in 2025, according to Wheeler.
Beyond Canyon County, Pride events and symbols in other parts of Idaho have faced similar resistance, and in some cases, threats.
In 2022, 31 members of the Patriot Front, a white nationalist group, were arrested for planning to riot at a Coeur d’Alene Pride parade. Five men were ultimately convicted.
And earlier this year, the city of Boise was forced to take down a rainbow Pride flag placed in front of City Hall after Idaho legislators voted to fine local authorities for flying flags beyond an approved list.
Still, Canyon County Pride organizers are optimistic about this year’s event.
“Of course we’ve faced pushback,” Wheeler said. “I think, anything that’s worthwhile, sometimes you run into that. The resounding motivation to keep going is the outpouring of support that way outnumbers the few folks that have negative things to say.”