Community advocate challenges Garden City’s longtime incumbent mayor. Here’s our choice
Hannah Ball brings an energy and a brand of exuberance to the Garden City mayoral race.
She’s challenging incumbent Mayor John Evans, who’s been in that position for four terms, since 2006.
Evans is decidedly more stolid in how he’d approach his next term as mayor, listing his priorities as “maintaining the city’s fiscal and operational integrity,” addressing the floodplain issue and upgrading the city’s utility system.
Ball expresses her enthusiasm for, as she puts it, “outside-the-box solutions,” and doing things differently to promote affordable housing, increase transparency in city government and improve public safety. She presents a bold vision for Garden City as a “mecca” for small startups, and craft food and beverage makers.
While Ball’s ideas and goals are commendable, Evans is able to respond with more pragmatic answers that show a deeper understanding of how city government works.
For example, during an interview with the Idaho Statesman editorial board, Ball suggested that the city hire a grant writer to apply for grants to execute creative ideas in the city. Evans pointed out that the city already writes grants, and ticked off a list of projects in the city that were executed with grants.
At the same time that Ball listed public safety as one of her top priorities, she also suggested that the city spends too much on the police department.
We, too, were shocked to learn that Garden City — which collects $4.6 million in property taxes — spends all of that and then some on the police department, to the tune of $5 million.
However, Evans ran down a list of factors that contribute to that high cost. He pointed out that 91% of traffic-related incidents involve people who live outside of Garden City. In all, Garden City police receive 18,600 calls for service per year, Evans said, adding that it has one of the busiest police departments in terms of activity per officer. With more than 1,300 commercial parcels, he said, Garden City has different demands for service than, say, the city of Star, which Ball used as a police department budget comparison.
The size of the police budget and factors behind the need for such a high budget need to be addressed, but we believe that Evans has a greater knowledge of the details than does Ball to solve the problem.
Ball once had out-of-the-box solutions for a section of Garden City at 34th and Carr streets, which she envisioned as Garden City’s version of Boise’s Hyde Park. Her plans included tiny homes, townhomes, cottages, live-work spaces and micro-commercial sites. As mayor, she said, she would seek to incentivize affordable housing by trading off such things as height and parking requirements if developers set aside affordable units.
Evans, who gives Ball great credit for revitalizing the 34th Street area, said the city has been working with developers and organizations such as the nonprofit NeighborWorks Boise to build affordable housing, noting that 25% of Garden City’s housing stock is mobile homes. Evans added that, unless the government builds affordable housing, developments need to pencil out for developers in the private sector. Evans added that he’s working with legislators to get money into the Idaho Housing Trust Fund, a state fund to support affordable housing initiatives that’s never been funded.
We are encouraged by Evans’ openness to new ideas, and he applauded some of Ball’s ideas during our interview with both candidates.
In the end, one of the deciding factors for this board’s decision was that Garden City, long considered the ugly stepchild of Boise, is slowly but surely developing into a vibrant, exciting place to live, work and even attract Boise residents to make their way across the river to dine and do business.
Despite his many years in office, Evans is not entrenched in old ways, and seems open to exploring new ideas. That’s a recipe for success that shows, as Garden City is heading in the right direction under Evans’ leadership.
Garden City voters should keep that momentum going and re-elect Evans for another term.
BEHIND THE STORY
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Members of Idaho Statesman editorial board interview political candidates, as well as advocates and opponents of ballot measures. The editorial board is composed of journalists and community members. Members of the Statesman editorial board are: Statesman editor Chadd Cripe, opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto.
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