Eagle moves forward with $10 million land purchase, sports park plans in the Foothills
Eagle residents will have a new regional sports park after the City Council approved a $10 million purchase of 84 acres in the Eagle Foothills.
The Eagle City Council unanimously authorized the purchase of 84.3 acres and donation of 600 acres from developers GWC Capital LLC for the sports park, which will be located at Idaho 16 and Equest Lane in the Spring Valley development. Plans for the park include baseball, soccer, football and rugby fields, as well as pickleball and tennis courts and a playground.
“This is going to be huge for the city of Eagle, to make sure that we start getting some of this private land into public ownership,” Eagle Mayor Jason Pierce said at the meeting. “We talked about how many people, for years, have used a lot of these pieces of property. And being able to make sure that it stays open to the public forever is going to be huge for the folks that walk up there.”
The park would also include a trailhead, where hikers can access the Bureau of Land Management land east of the park site, said Nicole Baird Spencer, long range planner for Eagle during the Tuesday afternoon meeting.
The council approved the purchase in a special meeting at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, to the criticism of some Eagle residents who said they were unaware of the meeting until a day before.
William Ziebell, an Eagle resident, said at the meeting that the city provided short notice for the vote, which would be “another item” for the Eagle citizens recall effort. A group of Eagle residents are circulating a petition to recall all four members of the City Council and mayor.
“Twenty-four-hour notice, special meeting, held on work day, in the week leading up to Christmas, talking about a $10 million purchase agreement,” Ziebell said. “It doesn’t leave a lot of room for full disclosure, especially if you can’t see documents until after the deal is done.”
Baird Spencer said the city will pay for the land mostly with impact fee reimbursements to Spring Valley, which means the developer would pay its impact fees, but Eagle would give them back. Idaho law allows cities to impose impact fees on new construction to offset the cost of certain local services that must be provided.
Eagle would pay $2.5 million in cash and pay the rest of the $7.9 million as an impact fee reimbursement to GWC Capital quarterly, Baird Spencer said.
While previous discussion by the City Council included a shooting range in the Eagle Regional Sports Park, but the presentation on Tuesday did not include one.
During the meeting, a few residents asked why the council hosted a special meeting in the afternoon, instead of saving the items for a regularly scheduled meeting, when more working residents could attend. Mayor Jason Pierce said the agenda items did not need public comments, and therefore didn’t need a regularly scheduled meeting to approve the items. Pierce said GWC Capital also likely needed to get the items done before the end of the year.
This story was originally published December 20, 2022 at 5:16 PM.
