The numbers behind a long-planned development that would add thousands of homes to Boise city limits is getting a second look.
Since 2021, city staff and the Murgoitio family have been in talks over plans to annex 380 acres between Maple Grove and Cole roads and turn it into a master-planned community with 3,500 housing units. The project, called Murio Farms, if approved, would add nearly 9,000 new residents to the City of Boise by 2040.
And it didn’t get a warm welcome from city staff or the Planning & Zoning Commission.
Boise City Council took up the Murgoitio family’s application for annexation and a specific area plan to develop the parcel on Tuesday night with city staff cautioning against an approval. A report released earlier this year from internal staff warned the project would cost more to provide services to than it would bring into the city and the Ada County Highway District found it would cause “significant” traffic congestion.
But, after hearing from the Murgoitios’ attorney Deborah Nelson, council unanimously voted to instead take the project to a work session to hammer out more details for conditions of approval in the coming months. This could include additional housing affordability requirements, how much commercial space will be included in the community, transportation planning and the real impact on the city’s finances.
After that work session, it will return for another public hearing and vote.
“The ability for the city in the long run to support these services so we’re not disinvesting across the entire city is the key to this. Growth has to pay for itself,” Mayor Lauren McLean said.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place
Murio Farms wasn’t always in the red.
When the project first came to the City of Boise in 2021, the city’s calculations said it would be a net positive for the city’s finances to approve. This changed during the past several years while traffic studies were conducted as two separate forces squeezed the project until it went into the red.
First, the Idaho Legislature passed HB 389 in 2021. Part of the complex property tax relief package included a new provision capping cities at only taking in 90% of tax revenue on new construction, instead of the former 100% of the value. This makes it harder for cities to make up the cost of annexing developments like Murio Farms and paying for new services residents will need.
And at the same time, inflation increased the cost of doing business in nearly every area of the City of Boise’s budget. This left less room for extra costs when it came to calculating how Boise could afford to provide police, fire and other services to new areas of the city.
The city also experienced an exponential hike in how expensive the city’s calculations found it would be to police Murio Farms. This is because in the past year, the city opted to increase the number of police officers per 1,000 residents in response to asks from the Boise Police Department to try and staff up to stay ahead of the curve of crime as the city grows.
Making this change to say what the city believes is the adequate level of police service in the city means it was the number it used to calculate the cost of annexing Murio Farms into the city, even if the cost of police officers in this figure is far higher than the city actually pays now at its current staffing levels.
Sherack said all of these factors made Murio Farms “way off” from being financially feasible.
Council: Let’s take a second look
The need for more housing and Nelson’s arguments on behalf of the Murgoitios gave the project a second life.
Nelson took issue with several aspects of the city’s analysis. She pointed to the hike in police officer level of service over 2021, as well as the city’s assumption that all of the single-family homes in the development would be owner-occupied and thus get the homeowners’ tax exemption. She also argued that the homes in the project were valued at $11,000 lower in the city’s financial analysis than the city’s fiscal year 2024 budget calculates for an average Boise home.
These arguments, plus the need for more housing in Boise as the area’s economy continues to boom, made council members decide to ask staff to analyze the financial review at a deeper level.
“If Boise employees cannot find housing in Boise, they will go elsewhere promoting regional sprawl, extending commute times and generating more traffic and emissions,” Nelson said.
Nash was especially interested in the figures used to calculate the cost of policing. He said the city was using the level of service it hoped to achieve, but likely won’t for multiple decades due to funding, to calculate the cost for the project as opposed to what the city would actually be spending.
“I’m not interested in reverse engineering this to get it to a yes, but I do want to challenge some assumptions of levels of service around police and if there are other really conservative or aspirational assumptions that we’re making, ask staff to look a little bit harder understanding that otherwise there is a lot we like about this project, we want more homes and we need to demonstrate that growth can pay for itself,” he said.
Hallyburton agreed that he wanted to find a way to see if it would make financial sense for the city, but he was also concerned about traffic in Southwest Boise. He said the city needs to collaborate with ACHD to confirm plans to extend Lake Hazel Road to the east to give traffic another outlet to move in and out of the area, as well as the stalled work to realign Orchard Street.
He also said there needs to be plans to widen Cole and Maple Grove roads to five lanes, along with improving the general network of roads to carry residents in and out of the area.
“We can widen the roads all we want, but unless there is a better network for people to get to where they need to go, widening the roads doesn’t work,” he said. “We have all the data in the world that says it won’t solve the issue and a better network will.”
