Fires in a Growing Area of Boise Could Trap Residents

(TNS) — For many, it seemed like there was a new blaze choking the Boise area in smoke every week this fire season, with flames burning through the region’s grassland and creeping toward homes and businesses.

In September and October alone there were several fires in or near Boise, including when a hiker lit used toilet paper and started the over-750-acre Three Point Fire near Lucky Peak Lake or the nearly 10,000-acre Valley Fire that burned up to the Harris Ranch community.

One southeast Boise area, however, has faced an onslaught of fires.

Residents of the Sunny Ridge, Painted Ridge and Bonneville Pointe subdivisions — roughly a mile-and-a-half east of the main Micron campus — woke up in early September to a fire that bloomed from 20 acres to 540, according to prior Idaho Statesman reporting. A few weeks later, residents faced a 350-acre blaze.

But unlike most areas of Boise that have multiple streets for residents to escape on, residents of those neighborhoods have one two-lane option: Columbia Road, which curves west into Technology Way, the Micron campus and Highway 21.

Residents say evacuation efforts could trap them if the wind blows the wrong way or Columbia becomes blocked. They say it’s only getting more dangerous as developers add homes to the area.

“Without a secondary access road, thousands of people will have to use the same dead end road to evacuate,” said Sunny Ridge resident Rachaelle Larsen-Grimsrud in an email to City Council in September 2023. “As more homes are added without an additional evacuation route, the risk to life increases exponentially.”

An increasing risk of fire in Southeast Boise

The developers of the subdivisions, longtime Boise developer Jim Conger’s the Conger Group and Corey Barton’s CBH Homes of Meridian, have repeatedly acknowledged the fire risks and the need for a second road despite efforts to build a fourth, 410-home subdivision called Rush Valley.

Larsen-Grimsrud said in a phone interview that adding 400 homes dependent upon the road “could be catastrophic.”

She said that during one of the most recent fires, it wasn’t evacuating that was the problem, it was people driving in — whether emergency-services vehicles or “lookie-loos” who wanted to get close to the fire.

And the fires, she said, are becoming more common and getting closer. There were no fires for the first few years after she bought her house in 2015, but now there’s an average of at least one a year.

“I keep a record of dates, and I have videos of every instance that I’ve been home,” she said.

There were four fires this year, Larsen-Grimsrud said: two in June, one in September and one in October. Though she doesn’t have documentation, she believes there were one or two fires between 2016 and 2019. One of the more recent fires melted her neighbor’s entire fence line.

“Most of the fires are man-made fires,” she said.

Homes in the area, which sit on the Columbia Bench, are some of the most at-risk in the city, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildfire Risk to Communities Map. Citywide, homes in Boise have a greater risk of fire, on average, than 98% of communities in the nation.

The Columbia Bench is one of several geological “benches” in the Boise area — a type of raised landform. This can be seen most clearly from the eastern edge of the Columbia Bench, where cliffs drop down to the Boise River near Lucky Peak State Park. The rest of the bench is bordered, roughly, by Interstate 84 on the west, Gowen Road/Highway 21 on the north and a line running east from I-84’s Eisenman Road-Memory Road interchange on the south.

A historical map from Ada County’s Fire Adapted Communities network shows the Columbia Bench as being one of the most fire-active areas in the county.

Nobody had mentioned the area’s fire risk when Larsen-Grimsrud was looking to purchase her home at Sunny Ridge, or once she closed on it in May 2015, she said.

An expansive hope for development on the Columbia Bench

Despite the fire risks, the city believed the area had the potential for massive development, according to prior Statesman reporting. Former City Councilwoman Elaine Clegg previously told the Statesman that the area could someday house over 30,000 people.

But even with the big dreams, the city spent months going back-and-forth with Conger in 2017 and 2018 over the fire risks before approving Rush Valley in April 2018, the Statesman reported then. The agreement required the developers to build a second road as more homebuilding phases were complete.

According to Lindsay Moser, spokesperson for the city’s Planning and Development Services Department, there have been several discussions over the years about an additional road for fire access.

“The developer of this property has a (development agreement) which includes (that) if they were to build additional homes, an additional road must be constructed for fire access,” Moser said by email.

Residents have testified to City Council every time developers build a new wave of homes, Larsen-Grimsrud said, yet the city has continued to approve more — though she said CBH Homes’ most recent effort to start on its third phase of Rush Valley has stalled because of the lack of a second road.

“It’s going to come back up again,” she said. “I know it’s only a matter of time before we end up before City Council (again).”

What’s so hard about building a road in SE Boise?

According to Geoff Wardle of Boise’s development-focused Clark Wardle law firm, who represented the developers, they have gone beyond what the city and fire department requested.

When the City Council requested that they build no more than 70 lots before adding a second road, the developers offered to limit that to 158, Wardle wrote in a letter to council in a February 2023 application.

“This restriction was memorialized as a condition of approval attached to the development agreement,” Wardle said.

According to Wardle’s letter, the developers tried to build another access from Columbia Road to Highway 21 for years, but landowners surrounding the subdivisions were not interested.

“This would have alleviated any concern regarding the stretch of Columbia Road in question,” Wardle said. “Unfortunately, over the following years, the applicant was unable to make any headway in obtaining an easement for the proposed emergency-access road.”

The J. R. Simplot Co. owns that land north of Columbia Road, according to the Ada County Assessor’s Office. Simplot, Micron, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Ada County also own pieces of land to the north and south of Columbia.

“When we bought our house … We were told that Simplot had no intention of ever selling the land,” Larsen-Grimsrud said.

According to Larsen-Grimsrud, Simplot likes to use the land north of Columbia for cattle grazing and has expressed an interest in protecting it for wildlife.

“As one of the landowners in the area, we were dismayed by the recent wildfires and want to do what we can to ensure the safety of anyone in close proximity, and to also preserve the land, vegetation and wildlife,” Simplot spokesperson Josh Jordan said by email. “The Simplot Co. is not the only owner of the undeveloped land in the area, and the access routes are all part of the city’s approval process for these type of development projects.”

Jordan said Simplot provided access to the land earlier this year for brush removal to help create a barrier and mitigate fire exposure.

“We will continue to work with other stakeholders, take part in discussions and listen to ideas for how we can collectively ensure the ongoing safety and protection of people and land in the area,” Jordan said.

According to Rachel Bjornestad, an Ada County Highway District spokesperson, people have asked about getting an emergency access road from Columbia to Highway 21, but the agency doesn’t own any right-of-way in the area.

ACHD added a road to its 20-year capital improvement plan in 2021 that would connect Columbia to the Memory Road interchange, she said. But that future roadway is not in the agency’s five-year plan nor on the city’s priority list.

Memory Road is a short strip connecting the southern end of Federal Way to Eisenman Road over Interstate 84. The road ends just past Federal Way and turns into a gravel and dirt access road leading through property owned by Simplot into the southern piece of Micron’s $15 billion expansion.

“ACHD does not own the right-of-way and has no immediate plans,” Bjornestad said by email. “The city did approve these developments knowing that there were no planned new roadways.”

The Conger Group declined to comment. The Boise Fire Department did not return a call requesting comment.

Are there alternative solutions to a new road?

With pushback from nearby landowners, the developers’ most recent attempt at building Rush Valley — with the February 2023 application — sought to drop the second road requirement and instead rely upon for a long list of safety fire measures.

These include:

1. Building all homes to fire standards and including landscape plans that are reviewed within 12 months of occupancy. Follow-up surveys would be done every five years.
2. Controlling activities that are likely to start wildfires (for example, no fireworks or outdoor fire pits).
3. Developing a wildfire emergency plan with the Boise Fire Department.
4. Ensuring that three stub streets, or dead ends, are accessible for emergency services.
5. Increasing defensible space around the boundary to 30 feet.
6. Using an internal trail system to create a series of fire breaks.
7. Becoming a Firewise USA site before the next home occupancy permit.

The safety measures also included building refuge sites within Rush Valley that would allow residents to shelter in place if Columbia Road is blocked or closed, according to Wardle, the developers’ lawyer. The sites would be near the center of the development and include emergency kits including water, food and blankets.

The developers withdrew that application on Oct. 4, almost exactly a month after the September fire that burned near the already built homes.

It’s not clear what the next steps are for Rush Valley or a second access road. A spokesperson for CBH Homes did not return requests for comment.

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