Incumbent Holli Woodings faces wide variety of challengers in Boise City Council race
Holli Woodings has been an outstanding Boise City Council member for the past four years. It would take a very strong candidate to unseat her.
In this year’s election for District 5 on the Boise City Council, none of the candidates is strong enough to give us reason to recommend replacing Woodings on the council.
Woodings, a former state legislator and Democratic nominee for Idaho Secretary of State, gives us every reason to endorse her reelection to a shortened, two-year term in this first city election being done by district.
As Woodings pointed out in an interview with the editorial board, two years is a short term, barely enough time for a newcomer to learn the position. With four years already on the council, Woodings won’t need a learning period.
Her opponents are Katie Fite, Crispin Gravatt and Steve Madden.
Fite, a public lands advocate for Wildlands Defense, wants more transparency in city government and affordable housing. She also wants to protect public land and expressed her displeasure with a proposal to sell Murgoitio Park land to developers. While Fite is very good at identifying several problems, we found solutions either to be lacking or unrealistic.
Madden is a semi-retired newcomer who moved to Boise three years ago to get away from the liberal politics of California. He advocates for slowing down growth, saying that too many people are moving into Boise. He said he did not see the irony in his position, and he seemed to incorrectly assume that building new buildings and housing is spurring growth rather than recognizing our construction boom is in response to people, like Madden, moving to Boise.
Madden lists public safety as his top priority and said he is “not a big fan of injecting principles like some of the woke and CRT (critical race theory) principles and political correctness and social justice into policing practices.”
He said he doesn’t support what he called a “citizen watchdog committee,” ostensibly referring to the Office of Police Accountability, calling it a “solution in search of a problem.”
Perhaps Woodings’ strongest challenger is Crispin Gravatt, who is chair of the city’s Public Works Commission and a senior research analyst for the Idaho STEM Action Center, is energetic, upbeat, positive and full of ideas.
We think his learning curve would be too steep for a short, two-year term. He lists his top priority as fighting climate change, an important issue, for sure, but perhaps not the most important issue for a City Council member right now.
He does list affordable housing as his second priority, but his solutions include finding ways to “raise local wages” through a utility offset and upskill workers to increase wages to meet rising housing costs. Those are good ideas but likely won’t move the needle much in solving the affordable housing crisis.
Gravatt did speak knowledgeably in favor of the city’s housing bonus program to incentivize affordable housing units. Long-term, he advocates for more regional planning, a noble if naive goal.
Woodings, meanwhile, already has been dealing with these issues for the past four years and as City Council president, has proven to be a capable leader. She recognizes affordable housing and growth as the biggest challenges facing Boise right now, and she is in favor of rewriting the city’s zoning code to be more responsive to housing needs and affordability.
Woodings supported turning 8th Street into a pedestrian patio and treating vaping like cigarettes in public spaces. She understands the issue of rising property taxes and, as a former legislator, vows to work with the Legislature to increase the homeowners exemption.
In the end, with Woodings on the council, Boise is heading in the right direction, and we see no need to make a change.
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, assistant editor Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto.
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