Foothills projects

by Lora Volkert @ Idaho Business Review

Dorothy McKay’s request to Boise Planning and Development Services seems fairly straightforward.
McKay owns eight acres that she wants transferred from one planning area to another. Her parcel was orphaned in a land swap between the cities of Boise and Eagle. It’s separated from the rest of the land in the planning area by a road, a canal, a cemetery, a subdivision and a landfill. It no longer has much of anything in common with the rest of the area.

McKay may sell the land one day for residential development, according to her application to the city, and the change would allow a developer to build four units to an acre instead of one.

There’s just one problem: The land is in the Foothills Planning Area.

The planning staff has decided to recommend that the city approve her request, Comprehensive Planner Bruce Eggleston said. The parcels, located on Hill Road Parkway, are flat, not hilly. There are no threatened or endangered species on the land. Any scenic values the land may once have held were lost when Dry Creek Cemetery, the landfill and the subdivision were built.

But that doesn’t stop it from being a touchy subject to bring up.

“‘Tricky’ is a rash understatement,” Eggleston said when asked how tricky it is to deal with Boise Foothills land.

People get emotional about the Foothills, he said. “They’re the identity of all Ada County, especially Boise.”

So even in seemingly clear cases like McKay’s, city planners have to be doubly careful when evaluating requests and provide a clear justification for their decisions, Eggleston said.

“We don’t want to establish a precedent where just any land could be taken out of the Foothills,” he said. “The standard has to be as high as possible.”

It’s especially important to set good standards now. For the last four years, the city hasn’t had a single application for a building or a zone change in the Foothills area, Eggleston said. But that’s changing.

Harris Ranch plans about 350 housing units in the Foothills in its next phases. Avimor and The Cliffs are planned entirely in Foothills areas. Kastera Homes is working on feasibility studies and preliminary plans for a 270-acre Foothills development around Hill Road and 28th Street, and Capital Development is doing the same for a 160-acre development across Collister from Quail Ridge in the Foothills.

Developers want to be seen as doing their part to develop responsibly and preserve as much of the Foothills as possible.

Wayne S. Forrey said Kastera is working with the city to analyze what areas of the land the company purchased need to be preserved and made accessible to the public, and what areas are appropriate for development.

“We don’t want to be an insensitive developer,” he said. “We love the Foothills as much as your readers do. Just because we own the land doesn’t mean we can’t be good stewards of the land.”

Avimor developer SunCor plans to preserve open space within the planned community and make the trails it builds in those areas available to the general public, said developer Bob Taunton. It also sited the community in a way that would minimize any changes to the view from the highway.

“We approached what we’re doing from the standpoint that we want the community to have a benefit to the region beyond the residents in there,” he said.

But some citizens are bound to be upset by development in the Foothills.

“I think you build up there, you’re going to step on somebody’s toes,” said Jeannette Duwe, spokeswoman for Skyline Development, which plans to build The Cliffs.

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