What each one means
- Weather sunny and 66 today · near-record warmth Wednesday through Friday, highs around 70 · windy Friday, then rain showers likely Friday night
- Daylight sunset comes a little after 5 · after-work loops finish in the dark, so carry a light
- Foothills Trails Ridge to Rivers' Nov. 6 report calls the trails in great shape · dry through Friday afternoon, wet again Friday night into the weekend
- Cottonwoods Ridge to Rivers says the color is still popping in most drainages, as close as Lower Hulls Gulch
- First Frost no frost in the seven-day · lows hold in the 40s until Sunday night
- Air Quality patchy fog this morning in sheltered valleys · no smoke in this morning's NWS discussion
Boise has zero data center applications on file, and tonight the council decides whether to stop taking them for six months. Civic & Policy walks through the emergency ordinance — what counts as a large data center, how long the pause runs, and why the city says it needs one now.
The Market has rents up 16 percent since January, a pace a full year in the city's series has beaten only once. The Bench marks ESPN's first return to The Blue since 2010, and Drive-By History finds the fort that beat the city here by three days.
Boise weighs a six-month pause on data centers it doesn't have
Boise's council votes tonight on whether to slam a six-month door on data center applications nobody has filed yet. The ordinance is ORD-45-26, Mayor Lauren McLean's emergency moratorium, and it hits the regular evening meeting tonight, Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 6 p.m. under Public Hearings. It would stop the city from accepting or processing land-use applications for large data centers for 182 days, take effect the moment it passes, and skip the usual multiple readings on a vote of one-half plus one of the council. The city says it has zero such applications on file right now.
Read the fine print and the thing has teeth. A large data center is a facility of 100,000 square feet or more, or one projected to draw 20 megawatts or more at full build-out from any source, on-site generation included. Buildings on contiguous parcels under common ownership count as one facility. Chop a project up to squeak under the line and the city treats it as one anyway. The moratorium reaches citywide, right down to any property asking to annex into Boise.
The strongest argument for the pause lives in Boise's own zoning code: it carries no land-use standards for this use at all. The findings call that an imminent peril to public health, safety or welfare. Without rules, the ordinance says, the city would be approving blind: facilities that can swallow hundreds of acres, use water comparable to thousands of homes, draw power comparable to hundreds of thousands of homes, carry wastewater the treatment system wasn't built for, and run backup generators along with constant noise and heat.
Boise isn't first in line here. Bannock County adopted a 180-day emergency moratorium on July 30, running through Jan. 26, 2027 on unincorporated county land, Pocatello excepted. Kootenai County passed one in 2025, lifted it, then barred data centers over its aquifer. McLean's language is blunter than any of that. “These mega data centers don't belong anywhere in Idaho, and in the absence of a state-wide moratorium, I'm pulling the emergency brake to protect Boiseans and our precious natural resources,” she said in a city release reported by CBS2.
For scale, Meta's Kuna data center runs about 960,000 square feet, nearly ten times the ordinance's 100,000-square-foot line. The Rhea Data proposal near Blacks Creek Reservoir is about 4 million square feet, but it sits on federal BLM land south of the city. Boise's ordinance governs city entitlements and land annexing in, so neither project is a Boise application this would stop. The ordinance says the city plans permanent rules under Idaho's Local Land Use Planning Act, and it cites Idaho Code 67-6523 as its authority. That permanent-rules process is where the actual standards get drawn.
If you own land that might annex into Boise and someone wants a large data center on it, the pause covers that the moment it passes, and the rule-writing after is the part worth tracking. For everyone else, it is the city's answer to a use its code doesn't describe yet. The two-sentence version: the council hears ORD-45-26 tonight at 6 p.m. and votes after we publish, and if it passes, Boise stops taking large-data-center applications it isn't currently getting, for six months, while it writes the rules. Watching tonight's hearing? Reply with what you heard — a real person reads every one.
Boise rents up 16% since January, a pace only 2021 beat
16.0 percent since January. That's how far Boise rents have climbed in ten months, per Apartment List's November report. Over the same January-through-October stretch of 2025, rents rose 3.4 percent. Nearly five times the pace, one year to the next.
Line up the full-year series and this one jumps the page. 2019 rose 5.2 percent. 2020 went 14.4, 2021 jumped 20.7, then 2022 fell 1.4, 2023 fell 4.6, 2024 ticked up 2.4, and 2025 landed flat at 0.0. Ten months into this year already tops every one of those except 2021.
October itself barely moved. The median slipped 0.1 percent to $1,440, against a 0.3 percent national decline, which left Boise's monthly change 27th of the 100 largest U.S. cities. Year over year, Boise rents are up 12.0 percent while the nation sits at 0.1 and Idaho runs about 5. Of the hundred biggest cities, only San Francisco and Oakland grew faster over the year.
Pricing a lease right now: a one-bedroom runs $1,244, a two-bedroom $1,434. The national median is $1,384 with a 7.0 percent vacancy rate, so Boise sits 4.0 percent above the country and ranks 48th most expensive of the hundred, elbow to elbow with Minneapolis at $1,454 and Irving, Texas at $1,432. Nowhere near the top of the list. Just climbing toward it faster than almost anywhere.
Hold onto $39. That's how far October's $1,440 sits below the $1,479 all-time high from August 2021 this column cited back in September. October's flat month left that high standing. Another 16-percent year would not.
THE TRAILHEAD: The quarterback who hadn't started a game all year threw four touchdowns in Fort Collins, and ESPN is bringing College GameDay back to The Blue for the first time since 2010. Boise State won 64-38. That's eight straight, 8-1 and 5-0 in the Pac-12.
Max Cutforth is a senior out of Nampa's Skyview High. Maddux Madsen was hurt, so Cutforth got the ball, and he went 16 of 19 for 317 yards and four scores before running one in himself in the fourth. His 14.9 yards of total offense per play is the second-best single-game figure Boise State has ever logged. The Manning Award put him on its Stars of the Week, his first. Numbers don't argue. Colorado State's secondary didn't either.
Dylan Riley went for 300 all-purpose yards: 192 rushing, 88 receiving, 20 on returns. One yard short of Doug Martin's program record from 2011. One yard. He scored three times, the first on a 73-yard catch on the second snap of the game. Boise State swept three of four Pac-12 weekly awards — Riley on offense, Terrious Favors on special teams, freshman Rasean Jones (six catches, 116 yards) as freshman of the week. Harry Stewart III punched in two fourth-quarter touchdowns behind a line Danielson says Roger Carreon leads.
Now the part the Albertsons crowd would rather skip. The defense gave up 513 yards. Over two weeks it has surrendered 70 second-half points: 42 to Texas State after leading 28-3, 28 more Saturday. "We've got to execute better," Spencer Danielson said afterward, per Boise State on SI. "And that's the reality of playing defense; you can't take anything off the board." Danielson sits at 20 conference wins in 23 games. The program's winning-season streak is 29 years, longest active in the FBS.
Oregon State (5-4, 3-2) comes to Albertsons Stadium Saturday at 4 p.m. MT on USA Sports. Same opponent Boise State hosted in 2010, the last time GameDay parked here; the show airs 7 to 10 a.m. on ESPN. ESPN's Pete Thamel reported before the Colorado State game that Madsen had a minor knee issue and could be back to start. The staff hasn't named anyone.
The Army got here three days before the city did
A stonemason named Charles May designed those sandstone buildings on Fort Street, the ones most folks blow right past headed into the North End. Major Lugenbeel showed up June 28 and formally located Fort Boise on July 4, 1863. The city of Boise got founded three days later. So the fort, sitting out along the Oregon Trail, beat the town it would one day sit inside.
They went up in 1864. Buildings 1, 4 and 6 date to those Army years. The VA calls them the oldest buildings in Boise, if you set aside a couple of settlers' 1863 log cabins kept around as relics. The place got a new name on April 5, 1879: Boise Barracks. Then the uses kept changing. The U.S. Public Health Service took it over in 1919 for a hospital. The Veterans Administration bought it in 1938. It's the Boise VA Medical Center now, and Fort Boise has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972.
My favorite piece is Building 4. The Surgeon's Quarters, sandstone and brick, where surgeons and their families lived and worked for more than 120 years. The VA cleared out in the 1990s and it sat empty. In 2013, the fort's and the city's 150th year, Preservation Idaho led an exterior restoration, raising nearly $100,000 from volunteers, grants and donations for cleaning, repointing, a new roof and a rebuilt porch. The VA put another $700,000 into the interior and finished the work in 2017. Today it holds the VA's National Telehealth Center, treating veterans all over the country from inside some of the oldest stone walls in town.
📍 HOW TO VISIT: 500 W. Fort St., Boise, where Fort Street runs along the edge of the North End. It's an active medical campus, so stay on Fort Street and look up at the 1864 sandstone. Find the Surgeon's Quarters and let it land: the Army put it up before Idaho was a state, and veterans are still cared for behind it.
Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and the oldest buildings in Boise are the ones still looking after veterans — the old surgeons' quarters among them, now home to a telehealth center that treats veterans across the country.
That's the one you tell at dinner.
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