Eagle mayor has a baseball business operating from his house. Police are investigating.
The Eagle Police Department is looking into a baseball training business that has been operating at the home of Eagle Mayor Jason Pierce without a permit.
In a phone interview, Pierce told the Idaho Statesman that he is taking the steps to move the business out of his house since he learned of the code violation from police a week ago.
“They’ve given me 60 days,” Pierce said. “There won’t be any business run out of it.”
The business, Pac-West Baseball, is owned by Chris Frith, a former pitching coach at The College of Idaho and a Meridian resident. Its address is listed as 1980 W. Floating Feather Road — the same address as Pierce’s house. The business uses the three batting cages, mounds and training equipment in Pierce’s garage.
“Pac-West has nothing to do with me,” Pierce said. He said he does not own a stake in the company, but Pac-West did pay him “a little bit to keep the heat going and the lights on.”
According to its website, Pac-West’s directors include Paul Peterson, Jesse Villanueva, and Pierce’s son, Brendan “Beezer” Pierce. Jason Pierce said his son does not own a stake in the company.
Seven-week training camps at Pac-West cost $450, according to the company’s website. Renting the training center costs $20 per hour per batting cage and pitching mound. Renting the entire space costs $60 per hour.
This aerial view of Pierce’s home on Google Maps shows Pierce’s house, bottom of image, and a garage structure behind it (top of photo), as well as several parking spaces to the west of the two buildings. The garage was built in 2017, according to permits filed with the city.
Pierce’s 2.5-acre property is zoned for a residential estate, according to the Ada County property assessor’s website.
Pierce said beyond PacWest’s use of his garage, he also invited “Little League kids to come use it for free.”
“The batting cages were built for my son to have them and work out,” Pierce said. “Then people noticed that we had them... then Pac-West asked to use them.”
How should the site have been zoned?
Pierce said he was not aware that he could not allow Pac-West to run its lessons and baseball training camps out of his garage.
He had no permit whatsoever, but told the Statesman he thought that what he was doing required only a “home occupancy permit,” which is required for those who operate small businesses from home, such as an accounting service or a day care business.
However, a Statesman review of city code suggests that Pac-West’s operations went beyond the bounds of a home occupancy permit in an area zoned for residential use.
A home occupancy permit requires that a business take up no more than 25% of a home. According to a building permit, Pierce’s garage measures 4,300 square feet, making it larger than his home.
Home occupancy permits also do not allow people other than members of the family residing in the home to engage in the business. They also require that home occupations cannot generate more than four vehicle trips per day.
Pierce said about 200 businesses in Eagle are run from houses without permits.
Pierce’s house came under scrutiny after an Eagle resident told Eagle police about Pac-West Baseball.
“With this coming to a head, I think we’re now going to have to go through the whole city and look at all the people that don’t have a home occupancy permit — which I think is kind of ridiculous,” Pierce told the Statesman. “Because of this story, we’re going to have to go after all of them, too, which is kind of a shame.”
But he did say it is good that there will be “continuity” in compliance in businesses across the city. “Once we notice there’s something wrong, there should be something done,” he said.
Pierce said Eagle’s economic development director has been working during the last two weeks — before Pierce was made aware of his own code violation — to loosen restrictions on home occupation permits.
Doing business without a permit
The news comes just weeks after Pierce shut down the Eagle Landing community center, opened in December, the last month of former Mayor Stan Ridgeway’s term, for operating without an occupancy permit.
“What we’ve done is we’ve told the public that we have different standards than they do to open a business in the city of Eagle,” Pierce previously said of The Landing. “That is the wrong message to send your residents.”
But Pierce said that what he was doing at home was different than the code problems with Eagle Landing, which the City Council on Tuesday voted to sell.
“The Landing community center is something the government is providing for you,” he said. “When somebody gets sued for something done wrong, it’s taking money from all taxpayers to pay for those lawsuits. If someone got sued or hurt here, it would fall on Pac-West and myself.”
Pierce said it is “weird” that the police are looking into this only now, given that he has been hosting baseball teams there for three years.
“Every time I saw Mayor (Stan) Ridgeway, he would ask me how it was going. So I didn’t think there was any problem,” Pierce said. “Obviously, if the mayor knew you were doing something wrong, he would tell you.”
Ridgeway, in a phone interview, said that isn’t true. He said he did not ask about the operations. He said Pierce told him he was building an RV garage.
Ridgeway said the city has struggled with code enforcement. Eagle contracted with the city of Boise until last year to prosecute code enforcement violations and follow up with residents to ensure they were bringing their property into compliance with city code, but Ridgeway said he wasn’t satisfied with the service Eagle received.
Last year, the city began to contract with the Ada County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office with the hopes it would be able to bring code violations under control.
“We beefed everything up, and it should be going forward now,” Ridgeway said. “We were trying then. But we made changes so it would work.”
Frith, Peterson and Beezer Pierce of Pac-West Baseball did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
