Noah Daly

The Idaho Statesman

(TNS)

Eagle City Council members Tuesday night couldn’t decide whether to go ahead with its plan to build a new fire training center and public works facility next to a popular bike park.

Neighbors and park users oppose the facility’s location, while proponents say the training center needs to go somewhere.

“I’ve been given a tough job here, and we’re trying to find the most cost-effective and strategically positioned spot, but this is the best we’ve got,” Tyler Lewis, chief of the Eagle Fire Department, told the Idaho Statesman late Tuesday night at Eagle City Hall. “The city of Eagle is growing fast, and we already had a difficult time getting Fire Station 4 located. The problem is there isn’t really an ideal location in Eagle.”

The chief and several members of the Eagle Fire Department sat in the back row, listening intently as residents, including first responder families and veterans, implored them and the Eagle City Council to reconsider the location of a new $5.2 million fire training and public works facility.

When years of searching yielded no better options, the department and the city in late 2025 decided to put it on 7.42 acres of land on North Horseshoe Bend Road next to the Eagle Bike Park.

After three hours of deliberations, the council voted to put off a decision on the conditional use permit and design review application. Public pressure focused on how the bike park is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city. The arguments centered around how a four-story training building made of shipping containers and releasing pillars of black smoke would fundamentally change the character of Eagle’s No. 1 recreation destination, according to several residents who spoke before council.

“As recreationalists we have an acute understanding of what our first responders provide for this community,” Sam Blaine, president of the Southwest Idaho Mountain Biking Association, said. “Our concern is just simply where this facility is located. For more than 20 years, these seven and a half acres have been used as part of the Eagle Bike Park. The precedent establishes that recreational land can be converted to another use simply because the city can maintain an overall recreational acreage somewhere else. That’s a slippery slope.”

One of the park’s most frequent visitors is the 77 student-athletes on the Eagle High School Mountain Biking Team, coached by Tanya Jacquot and Karen Headings, who both spoke during the public hearing.

“My understanding is that approval for this facility is being rushed through due to budget deadlines for the year,” Jacquot said during the public comment portion of the hearing. “Despite assurances that the burn tower will only be used on certain days, and it will not affect recreational park users or neighbors, nature is unpredictable. I do not believe this can be as easily controlled as we are being told.”

A spokesperson for the city of Eagle said that while the upcoming fiscal year’s budget needs to be finalized by Oct. 1, the council’s decision to continue the issue until Oct. 20 would not mean it couldn’t be funded for 2027 at a later date.

Right project, wrong location

The parcel represents about 3% of the roughly 200-acre joint Ada-Eagle Bike Park complex, on land transferred from Ada County to the city in 2016, planning and zoning administrator for the city of Eagle Daniel Miller told the council.

Lewis said the acreage itself is the attraction: The burn operation would occupy about 2.5 to 3 of the 7 acres, leaving a buffer intended to keep smoke from crossing the property line. Asked by council member Robert Gillis about complaints or near misses at nearby Station 2, Lewis said he receives one or two siren complaints a month, almost always from motorists rather than residents, and that sirens and air horns are not used at training grounds.

Lewis described the site as ideal for a neighborhood training facility based on the department’s needs: well-positioned and equipped with utilities like sewer and water that they’ll need to operate. Addressing concerns about the type of fire training they’ll be conducting, Lewis said anything burned during the department’s 50 requested live training days would consist of clean wood, pallets, hay or straw.

There will be no uncontrolled burning situations, Lewis assured the council, describing the difference between these highly contained exercises and those where a permanent building is leveled as part of a training exercise.

“This property is so intriguing because it gives us a buffer zone where the smoke doesn’t leave the property line,” Lewis said.

He added that a written burn plan requires weather and smoke spotting, with burns postponed when conditions don’t cooperate.

When residents protested that the city hadn’t looked hard enough for an alternative, city officials argued no comparable site exists. If approved, the facility would also serve as an area hub for public works in Eagle, providing a more convenient location to house the city’s large utility vehicles.

“Part of the challenge here is that Eagle has no industrial park within city limits,” staff said, “and the public works operation needs 2 to 3 acres at minimum.”

The day before the hearing, Eagle Fire held its own public information session at Station 1 on Iron Eagle Drive.

“We went through point by point of how we’re going to ensure all of these health risks and visual concerns will be addressed, but folks were very clear with us,” Lewis told the Statesman. “They just don’t want this type of structure in their neighborhood. They want it in an industrial zone.”

Since there aren’t any industrial zones in Eagle’s comprehensive plan, the council is faced with a challenge. Nearly every speaker expressed deep support for first responders in their protest of the location of the training center.

When the council took over the conversation, several members of the audience shouted to issue a bond or reach out to developers to see if there is a generous patron within the city willing to give the council and the community a viable alternative.

When residents suggested the city buy land elsewhere — and float a bond to pay for it — Mayor Brad Pike responded by putting a price on the idea and challenging the room to accept it.

“If you guys want to float a bond for $15 million, we’ve got to go to the whole city,” Pike said. “Are you willing to pay $15 million to go purchase land from somebody else? This is about what it would cost to go to some developer and ask him, ‘Hey, we want to take away your development and put a public safety building in.’ Nobody supports bonds.”

City staff reinforced the point by citing Eagle’s record at the ballot box, noting that a 1997 bond failed and a May 2003 special election lost 756 to 872. Another attempt failed in 2004 and a November 2012 measure cleared the two-thirds threshold at 66% only to be voided after Ada County failed to distribute ballots to all eligible voters — leaving partnerships with developers and other agencies, Pike argued, as the city’s only practical path to building public facilities.

Council member Nancy Merrill seemed to agree that Eagle is the kind of fast-growing Idaho city where such a partner could be found.

“I think one thing we can all agree on is that we support our fire district, and so I think we owe some answers out here,” Merrill said. “We’ve had a lot of people here tonight with some really good ideas and probably a lot of people that have contacts and developers that they may know. I don’t want you to stop thinking just because the public hearing is closed.”

The issue of where the training center and public works hub will be located is scheduled to return to Eagle City Council on Oct. 20.

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