As growth heats up, two Idaho fire districts consider joining forces

On a good day, Assistant Fire Chief James Trumble said the Kuna Rural Fire District has six firefighters on call. From the station on the corner of Boise Street and North Linder Road, those six firefighters can operate two fire engines, which serve an area of approximately 110 square miles.

“That’s on a good day,” Trumble said. “If somebody takes a day off, gets sick, or gets injured, and I can’t get someone to come back on overtime, I have to shut down one of those engines.”

The station receives about four calls each day, which already has the fire district stretched to its limit, Trumble said. One in four calls the Kuna Fire District receives needs to be routed to fire departments in neighboring areas.

“Right now we don’t even have a ladder truck to respond to calls,” Trumble told the Idaho Statesman.

A solution may be at hand. Thanks to House Bill 208, which passed in 2025, fire districts in Idaho can consolidate into a single entity to pool resources and work together to cover service areas that may be understaffed. Kuna’s neighbors in the Nampa Fire Protection District may be the answer to Kuna Fire’s equipment and staffing problems. The two fire districts are considering consolidating into a single massive one, which would serve about 165,000 people across some 210 square miles.

Both districts are holding town halls to see what the public thinks, and firefighters say there’s an urgent need to address new growth.

Kuna’s population is exploding. It’s among the 15 fastest-growing cities in the nation, according the U.S. Census Bureau. The city’s population has ballooned by 30% over the last five years to more than 30,000 residents, and city officials aren’t expecting that growth to slow down.

Kuna Rural Fire District, which is an independent taxing district separate from the city of Kuna, operates with a budget of less than $6 million.

Eleven miles up the road, the Nampa Fire Protection District has a budget exceeding $39 million. That pays for 110 personnel working out of six fire stations, a training division and the administrative office. It also covers a fleet of response vehicles that includes four fire engines, a 100-foot aerial platform truck, a 75-foot ladder truck company, a squad truck, a Type 5 bush rig and a technical rescue team.

If the consolidation plan between the two fire districts is approved, the newly formed district would be better able to respond when the need arises.

“People might not understand that this will have an impact on homeowner’s insurance,” Trumble said. “Once you have an aerial fire truck accessible to your home, it can lower your homeowner’s insurance.”

In Idaho, properties more than 5 miles from a fire station can be assigned a high Public Protection Classification rating, according to the Idaho Surveying and Rating Bureau. This may increase premiums and could make it harder to secure standard policies or trigger coverage denials for people living in high-wildfire zones.

Letting ‘growth pay for growth’

Thanks to the passage of a bond in 2025, Kuna Rural Fire District is opening another fire station on West Kuna Road near Ten Mile Road in the fall, but there’s a snag: The district can’t afford to staff the new station without a bigger budget.

In Idaho, fire districts collect impact fees based on growth in the area they cover. These can help the district buy new equipment and build additional stations, but they can’t pay for new firefighters, Trumble said.

Once Station Two is built, Trumble said, Kuna Fire has eyes on building a third station on the east side of the district on Cloverdale Road just south of Kuna Mora Road. All three stations, he said, would expand coverage for Kuna Fire and bring insurance rates down for residents all over its service area, but requires the staffing resources of Nampa in order to operate.

“What we’re really trying to do is position ourselves so that growth will pay for growth,” Trumble said. “If we have a larger budget as a consolidated district, then that means we can actually collect that new growth funding that’s supposed to come to us, but can’t because of legislature restrictions.”

An 8% growth cap on all taxing districts including cities, counties, fire districts, ambulance districts and other non-school taxing districts was passed in 2021 under House Bill 389, but lawmakers decided earlier this year to allow ambulance and fire districts to raise their caps to 15% when they passed House Bill 959.

To make the merger work, the two districts would have to re-balance the levy rates on homeowners in both areas. Kuna residents would pay $20 more per $100,000 of property value in their taxes, while Nampa would see a decrease of $2 per $100,000, according to Nampa Fire Protection District Chief Kirk Carpenter.

“We’ve been talking about this type of collaboration since I was hired by Nampa Fire in 1998, so it’s exciting to see a path forward for bringing these two districts together to serve this community,” Carpenter said. “This isn’t the first time we’ve looked at this. In the past, it was considered much more as a takeover by Nampa, but as both departments grew over the years, we kept revisiting the idea as a capacity-driven move to save taxpayers money while we gain a new voice as a larger, united entity.”

The boards of commissioners for both districts still have to vote on whether to go ahead with the plan, and before they do, they’ll give the public several opportunities to weigh in.

Town hall meetings are scheduled in both districts on the proposed plan.

Meetings in Nampa are scheduled for 6-8 p.m., July 20, and Aug. 6, at the Nampa Fire Training Center at 300 W. Railroad St., Nampa.

Kuna is scheduled to host its meetings 6-8 p.m., July 15 and Aug. 5 at the Kuna Fire District Station One at 150 W. Boise St. in Kuna.

If 25% of electors in either district were to sign a petition challenging the plan, the public would need to vote, which would then require a simple majority for the consolidation to move forward, according to Idaho Code.

Residents with questions are encouraged to reach out to admin@nampafire.org or the Kuna Fire District through its website.