Mike Wetherell Interview

NARRATOR: Mike Wetherell INTERVIEWER: Brandi Burns DATE: May 31, 2011 LOCATION: Boise, ID PROJECT: Boise Mayor and City Council Members Project START INTERVIEW START TRACK ONE BB: ….get started with the— MW: Go right ahead. BB: So this is Brandi Burns of the Department of Arts and History, and I’m talking with Judge Mike Wetherell. Today is Tuesday, May 31st, 2011, and we are in the Ada County Courthouse in Boise, Idaho. We will be talking about Judge Wetherell’s experience on the Boise City Council. So, before, just to set the background, I was hoping we could talk about, if you lived here your whole life or if you moved here— MW: Okay. Well, I, the first town I lived in after my parents, Claire Wetherell and Bob Wetherell, returned from World War II was in Boise, and that was in late 1945. My mother was a Navy nurse and my father had been a pharmacist’s mate in the Navy, and my mother had been—they’d both been—stationed at Bremerton, Washington. And so after they got married, in those days, a woman that got married in the military was immediately severed. And so my mother became a civilian nurse and became the head of nursing—I believe the name of the hospital was Mercy Hospital in Bremerton, Washington--and then my father fought in the Pacific. And so when they were, my dad was mustered out after the end of the war in the Pacific, they returned to Boise and we lived in the North End of Boise then for about a year and a half and then they moved to Mountain Home. And my father’s family had been in Mountain Home since 1909, and I grew up in Mountain Home and then when I graduated from high school in Mountain Home, went to the University of Idaho, and then after that I went back to Washington, D.C., and I worked on the staff of Senator Frank Church and attended George Washington University Law School, and then when I left Senator Church’s staff in 1977, I returned to Boise and started my law practice, and I’ve lived in Boise ever since. So— BB: Yes. Great. Well, since you’ve been here since 1977, could you tell me a little bit about urban renewal? That’s one of my favorite questions. [Laughter] Since you were on the Council in ’86, it will come, that’s sort of a different phase of urban renewal, but-- MW: Right. I, when I returned to Boise in 1977—I guess I should say that when I worked on Frank Church’s staff in Washington, D.C., of course, I was familiar with what was going on in Boise in terms of urban renewal and I’d been out here to see the early stages of urban renewal because, of course, I traveled to and from the state on behalf of Senator Church. And at that point in time, the only real large urban renewal project that had been completed was the construction of the large bank building on Capitol Boulevard. And there were a lot of vacant lots and parking lots and old buildings that were—they’d chosen not to take down for one reason or another. But the downtown was pretty well gutted. And there was a great dispute going on about what we were going to do with downtown Boise. I was one of those who initially favored trying to put a large retail facility in downtown Boise if we could do it, and there were several proposals that were going on, none of which ever really got off the ground. And finally, in the 1980s—and I can’t remember the exact dates, I believe it was the 1981 election—a good personal friend of mine, Paul Buser, ran for mayor. And at that point, we’d had so many false starts on the downtown that—and I’d been involved in real estate law at that point in my career—and I said, “This just isn’t going to work. We can’t get the investment capital to put in a large retail facility in the downtown core. Parking was a major issue. Even though we had a bunch of gravel parking lots, the ground was too valuable, a lot of people felt, to put in parking. There was a feeling that the difficulty of ingress and egress to that kind of a centralized facility just wouldn’t work. And so Paul decided to run for mayor, and we were four years ahead of our time. [Laughter] And Paul was defeated that year, but it helped, I think, raise the profile of the issue and, of course, I wasn’t popular, too popular, with some of the powers that be or were at that time because most of the power structure, if you will, was still trying to make the downtown mall concept work. And so, as I said, there were several plans that went on, and then in 1984, I was approached by a group of people to run for the City Council. Actually, they approached me at first to consider running for mayor, and I said, “You know, I can’t, I can’t afford to be mayor.” [Laughter] I was practicing law, and my practice was just beginning to show the fruits of my labors, and in terms of the income, I couldn’t afford to be mayor. But I said, “I would run for the City Council,” because even though it was a big time commitment, I could still maintain my law practice. And so I agreed to run for the City Council, and they had also approached—I think there was something going on in the background and I’m still not exactly sure whether it was the, it was a coalition of Republicans and Democrats and independents, and I think there was some push to get me to run as, because of the fact I was a Democrat and there were some people that were pushing other candidates because they were Republicans, but the whole idea, it really wasn’t a Democratic-Republican race, while you had some people playing for position, eventually, in any event, Dirk Kempthorne emerged as the candidate for mayor. And then Sara Baker ran for the City Council, and Jay Webb ran for the City Council. And Jay had been a legislator and was a very effective lobbyist over at the Idaho Legislature. Sara was a small businesswoman. She ran a business with her husband called Bright Ideas, which was a lighting company, and then of course I was an attorney. So it was a fairly balanced ticket, and Dirk, as I recall, was the legislative lobbyist for FMC. And so we more or less ran as a ticket. And we had a sweep that year. All of us were elected, and that gave the forces of change, if you will [laughs] for changing the course of the discussion on how we were going to develop a retail shopping area. I came out very early in that election and said, “You know, I’ve supported some of these downtown proposals; they haven’t worked. I think that the best location is out where the Flying Y interchange is”—although that isn’t what it was called then. I said, “I think that’s the best place and the best location, and the reason I do is because ready access to the freeway, you’re going to bring in people from other areas and other communities, you’re going to bring in people that will be going by on the Interstate, you draw from both the east and the west, and you have a large-enough piece of ground that you can really put in a mall that will be successful.” And, eventually, of course, through a bunch of things that went on, that finally happened, and it’s been a tremendous success over the years. So— BB: So, could you tell me, your City Council position, was that the first public office that you held? MW: I had run for attorney general, statewide, in 1978. And ran as a Democrat. Had a lot of commitments from moderate Republicans, who were willing to support me because the then attorney general, Wayne Kidwell, had broken his pick with a lot of people [laughs]. And I got into the race, and at that point in time, a few months later, Kidwell withdrew and Dave Leroy ran. And I knew I was in trouble as soon as that switch happened, and Dave beat me in that race. And so that didn’t work out too well. [Laughter] And then I had run for the House of Representatives against Rachel Gilbert and came within a few hundred votes but didn’t get those few hundred votes I needed. So this was the third time that I had run, and it was the first elected office that I’d held. BB: Great. So what originally led you to be interested in, I guess, government in general? MW: Well, just government in general? BB: Yeah, and then the City Council? MW: I was raised in a political family. My father had been the state senator from Elmore County in the 1950s and early 1960s, when they still elected senators by county. My mother had been active in politics in Elmore County. She was the vice chairman of the Democratic Party and had been on the Mountain Home city council. So I was taken to political conventions, you know, in cradles. [Laughter] So I’ve been involved in politics for a long time, and then, up at the University of Idaho, I was the president of the Young Democrats for all four of my years at the University of Idaho and active in campus politics. And then when I graduated from the University of Idaho in 1967, I went back to Washington, D.C., and worked on Capitol Hill. Then, after working on Senator Church’s staff for ten years—two of which were up in North Idaho as his field representative—I became Church’s chief legal counsel and administrative assistant, and then took part in the Church presidential campaign in 1976, where I traveled on the road throughout that campaign. So I’d been involved in the political process from the time I was going door-to-door, handing out brochures, when I was about eight years old. [Laughter] BB: So was there any particular issue, besides being approached by that group that led you to run for City Council? MW: Well, I’d been involved, as I said, in Paul Buser’s campaign. I’d always been interested in what was going on downtown since I got back and saw the core of Boise really still not rebuilt. And I pretty much thought after the loss to Rachel Gilbert, which was a very close race and then after that race they had reapportionment and Rachel managed to get several of the Democratic precincts out of that district so that she wouldn’t have a close race with me again. And I wasn’t about ready to move, so I’d pretty much thought I’d focus on my law practice, and then I was approached on this and it looked like an opportunity to do something and I just had a feeling that the attitudes in the community were changing and that I could do something on it. And so I ran. And we managed to get quite a bit done. [Laughter] BB: Yes, that leads into my next question about some of the goals that you might have had, or the whole council and the mayor had at that time? MW: Well, I think our major goal was to get things off dead-center in downtown. I mean, there were some good folks on the City Council. I mean, Dick Eardley, who was the mayor, was a good guy. I’d known Dick for a long time. Glenn Selander was on the City Council then. You just had some good people, but they were focused on this downtown mall concept that I just didn’t think was going to work. And there were the Boise Redevelopment Agency, which was in charge of that, I just thought was in a situation in which they were so locked in that it would be very difficult for them to just make a major change in direction. And my feeling was that we just had to go in and we just had to change the direction and bring in the available resources to make the Boise Mall happen out at that interchange. And my feeling was that there would be a symbiotic relationship between these two. If you’ve got the retail market going and you had an increase in retail activity, it would also benefit downtown. It wasn’t necessarily if you build it out there, downtown’s going to be destroyed. Or if you build it in downtown Boise, you’ll never have an opportunity if you develop in this other area. I thought that the two areas would complement each other, because there’d be basically a situation in which the retail economy of the city would increase dramatically with the placement of the project out on the Interstate, and people who’d come to Boise to shop would also go downtown. And people in Boise would shop both places, and I thought it would work. And it did. We’ve got a pretty vibrant downtown that’s built up over the years. We used the money that was available to set up the local improvement district in downtown to fund improvements in the downtown area. We worked to bring in the farmers’ market. All of this happened over an extended period of time. But gradually we started to build what I kind of viewed as the way that it should go. We took down some old buildings and put up some new ones. Some people didn’t like that but the fact of the matter is that you had to create an ability for people to park, which meant parking garages, because you have to have that ability. We kind of stole that idea from Salt Lake City [laughter], which had figured it out much earlier. And so we just gradually moved things along. We took the old Idaho Building, over by the State Capitol, and I’d been, one of my big things was downtown housing. We had to have housing near the core, I thought. And the Idaho Building project brought some apartments down there. People were just saying, “Oh, nobody will ever want to live down there, you know. Nobody wants to live downtown.” Well, the things were signed up and filled up almost as soon as they became available, and that convinced some of the developers that downtown housing was economically feasible. A lot of the private businesses said, “Well, you know, why do you want us to put money in when the city hasn’t even used its available resources?” So I pushed and the rest of the Council pushed to get the town square area down there, the Grove, built. We had a big thing that was set up for naming what it would be, and I said we ought to call it “It’s About Time” Square. [Laughter] So that the city would be investing in the public improvements to show the private sector that we were serious about what we were going to do, that we were going to put these improvements in. And Ron Twilegar and I started an organization called Friends of Capital City. We set up an operation whereby people could buy bricks with their names on them or the names of relatives and that kind of thing to give ownership to a lot of people in the community in that facility. We promoted artwork down there. The kids playing marbles statue, which, every piece of artwork you ever get, somebody likes and somebody hates it, but that was, that worked out very well. I worked with Boise Water Corporation, because there was another sculpture that was proposed that wasn’t selected but I really liked it—the one of the herons down there—and so I went to Wayne Booe and I said, “Would United Water consider putting that in as a second structure?” and they agreed to fund it. And so we got that put in. You know, there was a lot of that going on. The community became invested in the downtown again. And that was really the turning point, because then you had people that were willing to put their money into the new parking garage and people that were willing to get involved in renovation projects. We had some people that got involved in things like redoing the Idanha Hotel and updating that building. We started putting artwork in downtown so that people would come down and see this stuff and realize that this was a community of interest. And it worked. It didn’t hurt any that the economy was picking up at that time either. I mean, so, we were fortunate. We did a lot of these things, and we had some battles about them, as you always do, but over all, it worked. BB: Yes. Great. Could you tell me a little bit about the farmers’ market [Transcriber’s note: Capital City Public Market], because wasn’t it in a different spot than where it is today? MW: You know, I was, I’m trying to remember where it was. [Transcriber’s note: The market’s first setting was in Eighth Street Marketplace in 1994.] I know that there was, there was a dispute at one point about putting the farmers’ market where it currently is because some of the businesses that were there along Eighth Street were saying that was taking away their parking on a shopping day. Well, you know, I cannot remember where that thing originally started out, but eventually it moved there, and it was one of the best things that ever happened in terms of generating crowds downtown. And the guy that really deserves a lot of credit for that, in pushing that, was Jerome Mapp was big on working on that, and Jerome would probably know the whole history. We knew that a farmers’ market would work in this area. The issue was just trying to work out the different attitudes of people toward what it would be. Would this be competition? Would this be taking away downtown parking? Would this hurt more than it would help? Well, we thought that, when you bring people downtown, that helps. That was the whole idea of Alive after Five was this brings people downtown. And so we tried to get projects that would bring people to the downtown core and so people could see what was going on and see that downtown Boise was once again developing into a vibrant place. So—those were all pieces of the puzzle. And there were things that didn’t work, too. I mean, you know [laughs], after all, we’ve got a big pit in the ground over there [laughter] on a project that, that was just toward the end of my tenure that that project started and then the economy went to hell in a hand basket and people got in big fights over whether it was going to be union labor, nonunion labor. You had a developer who agreed to do one thing, I understand, and then wouldn’t do it and lost financing. Well, you know, if you’re going to get financing from a union fund, which apparently he was trying to do, you’d better keep your promises to the labor people, because they aren’t going to necessarily continue funding you [laughter]. But there were a lot of other problems there besides that as well, and I wasn’t there for the inside on that, so I can’t say. All I know is what I read in the papers, and I learned a long time ago that the paper sometimes gets it wrong. BB: [Laughs] That is interesting, because in ’87 the Eastman burned down, so that wasn’t too long from— MW: Yeah, that was, I was mayor when that happened. Brent Coles, let’s see, Dirk, was Brent Coles mayor at that time? I can’t remember exactly how it worked. I was, I believe I was president of the City Council, no, maybe Dirk was mayor [Transcriber’s note: Dirk Kempthorne was mayor in 1987], Brent was the president of the Council, and I was the pro-tem of the Council, and when that fire started, Brent was out of town, so I had to make the determination, all of the determinations, that night in conjunction with the Fire and Police, and the police chief called me and said, “The Eastman Building’s on fire.” We’d just gotten together a group of people that were going to restore it. And so I told the police chief, I said, “You need to get Pete O’Neill out of bed, go to his house and get him out of bed.” He was the head of the Boise Redevelopment Agency at the time. I said, “We need the head of the building department, Tim Hogland,” I said, “You need Tim Hogland out of bed. We all have to get down to City Hall. We have to have a report from the, from the chief immediately about what the status of this is. We have to have Arthur Hart there; it’s a historic building and it may be necessary for public safety to push down the walls to avoid potential disasters the following day.” And we got all the decisions made, and then Brent returned and he said, “Well, you just keep doing it.” I said, “I can’t keeping doing it. You’re inside the city. And as a result of that, you have to take over.” I said, “I’ll tell you everything that I know,” and then Brent took over from there. But we’d already made those decisions because we didn’t have much choice and we were up all night that night with that thing. So it was just, it was such a tragedy because, as I said, we had just put together, through the work of Ron Twilegar, a group of people who were willing to take that building and completely restore it. And never happened. [Laughs] BB: That’s sad. Oh. Going along with bringing the people downtown, one of my questions was about housing in, even affordable housing, and the efforts that were made during your time on the Council. MW: Well, we worked, of course, to get Community House put together. The housing, one of the brightest guys on the housing issue, once again, was Jerome Mapp. Jerome had been a consultant, well, was still a consultant, on growth and development to a lot of smaller communities. And though Jerome wasn’t the flashiest guy on the City Council, in terms of his knowledge of development and design and that kind of thing, he was invaluable for seeing things in projects. Things would come in front of the City Council and I’d be looking at them and I’d say, “You know, this just doesn’t look right and there ought to be something we can do with the project.” And after Jerome had looked at it for awhile, he’d make a suggestion and I’d say, “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” [Laughter] Because he just, you know, that was his profession. He was a planner, and that was his, he’d had practical experience, and Jerome was somebody who wanted to see it done correctly. My brother, who was still alive then, had worked with Jerome over in Elmore County, and he said, “The thing that you’ll really like about Jerome is that he wants to dot every I and cross every T.” And he said, “The thing you’ll hate about Jerome is that he wants to dot every I and cross every T.” [Laughter] And so, like all of us, sometimes our strengths are also our weaknesses, but he was the one that worked a lot on the affordable housing issues and fair housing issues and was a very good addition to the Council when he was appointed. We, as we’ve said, we worked on federal grants with Community House. We had Cuomo—was it Cuomo, I believe it was, who was the head of Housing and Urban Development at that time [Transcriber’s note: Andrew Cuomo was HUD Secretary from 1997 to 2001], who came to Boise because they were very pleased with a lot of the things that were going on in Boise in terms of affordable housing. We made special provision for subdivisions that would have affordable single-family homes in them. Sometimes those were controversial because people didn’t like some of the concessions that were made. They were afraid they’d become, you know, urban slums or something. That hasn’t happened. You had—if you’re going to make something affordable—you got to reduce costs. And those projects, I think anyway, worked. And my guess is that those affordable homes that were constructed, probably a lot of those didn’t go into foreclosure. [The] problem that happened is when people decided they could afford three times the house they could really afford, and that’s when you started having all the foreclosure issues. No, we worked in that area as well. We also encouraged, and Mayor Coles deserves a lot of credit for this, the neighborhood grants, which would allow neighborhood associations to pick out various projects that they felt would be beneficial to their neighborhoods and gave them input into that process so that you had determinations made by people who actually lived in the area. And the Vista Neighborhood Association did a lot of good things out in the Vista Neighborhood. You had some really good people out there, like Sue Pisani, who worked very hard to make improvements. And it always amazed me that you would have people who would come into those meetings, because I used to go to a lot of the neighborhood meetings, and they wouldn’t want these projects. They thought it was a great idea, but they didn’t want these projects because it would raise property values and increase their taxes. And they were interested in what their tax load was, not the fact that their house was going up in value, and I never understood that, but I heard that at more than one meeting from people who just said, “We don’t want these improvements. It’ll increase our taxes because our property values will go up.” [Laughter] BB: People are funny sometimes. [Laugher] MW: Yes. BB: Speaking of neighborhoods and outside of the downtown area, could you talk a little bit about the growth that was going on - on either the outskirts or how the city began to develop? MW: Sure. When you reach a certain critical mass, you know, one of the things that we did early on was we brought in, this was in the early part, what we called RUDAP, the urban planner group, and they put together a whole series of ideas. You know, sometimes it helps to bring someone in from outside that listens to all the people and says, “Well, you know, maybe you aren’t as far apart as you think.” And we looked at those urban planning ideas and growth ideas and, under Mayor Kempthorne, we started the Boise Visions program, and Boise Visions became a, really a handbook for how we wanted the city to grow. The most difficult thing to explain to anyone is that we live in a society in which legal rights exist in property owners. You would have people come in and say, “Well, make them dedicate a park.” And I said, “Well, we can encourage them to provide a park. We can tell them that we want open space within the subdivision. But we can’t make them dedicate a public park. It’s called the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. You don’t take land without paying just compensation.” And the example I used with some of the people that said this is, “Well, we’ve got a problem in some of the neighborhoods. Maybe your neighborhood is one of them. Would you mind if we set up a picnic table in your front yard and just told people they could use it?” Well, it’s the same thing. It’s just the developer owns more property. [Laughs] And when you dedicate property to a public purpose and require that, that’s known as a taking. And you must compensate the property owner for that property. Now, there are a lot of things that we can do legally. Sometimes, developers will actually come in and say, “We want to contribute five acres of our hundred-acre project to a public park.” And then we can accept the property, because the owner of the property is gifting that in effect to the city, and then we have to develop that. But if we do that, then it goes into the property inventory of the city and it gets developed as other city parks get developed. It becomes part of the system. If the developer goes in and develops it and makes it a private park, then they can exclude people other than people who live in the subdivision because it’s private property. But you have the advantage that that subdivision is going to have a fully developed park. So, you know, balance this, folks, because even though we want parks lands and we, through the years, we had a very aggressive program of acquiring lands for future parks, and I was a big pusher of that and Sara Baker was a big pusher of that, because we said, “We want to acquire this land at pre-development prices. Once you develop the property around it, it goes up dramatically in value.” And some of the real estate people didn’t like that because they said, “Well, you’re land banking,” and I said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re land banking, because we’re going to buy this property at pre-developed prices and have it available in the future to develop parks.” And that has worked out very well long-term for the city. When you have the dramatic population increase that we had from 1985 to 2005, with thousands of new people coming into the community, you have to build houses. And people--a lot, I shouldn’t say “people”—a lot of people never really understood that the very economic growth that was increasing the value of their property and giving us a vibrant downtown and increasing the per capita income of Ada County and the large number of jobs created by Micron and a lot of these other facilities—Hewlett-Packard—also required housing projects [laughs]. I mean, you don’t bring in thousands of people and not have to build, you know, thousands of homes. And so our main concern was trying to make sure that we could get projects that, to the extent possible, had a lot of amenities in them that made them more livable. We required, for instance, sidewalks. That was one of the things that I pushed as soon as I got on the Council was, “We need to require every subdivision to have sidewalks.” A lot of the developers didn’t like that, you know. “Oh, we don’t want these strips of concrete.” I said, and I was talking to one of them, I said, “Have you ever figured out that a sidewalk does not have to be a straight line of concrete? You can have a sidewalk that meanders. You can have a sidewalk that’s set back. You can have a sidewalk that has different designs. You don’t have to have a sidewalk that runs five feet from the nearest road to the front lawn.” And so we worked with the development community and now sidewalks are required. It used to be that sidewalks had to be specifically required by the Council. I got a change in the ordinance that said, “Sidewalks are specifically required unless there is a specific exemption granted by the Council,” which meant that, if they had a project, for instance, that was—let’s say you had five houses and it was set up kind of as a rural subdivision, “Okay, if you want to set it up that way and you don’t have great amounts of traffic, then maybe you aren’t going to have to have sidewalks if you can make the case.” We also put in provisions with regard to so-called water amenities. You’d have people that would want to come in and put in what they called a water amenity, and we said, “Well, okay, you can have a water amenity, but there are certain things you’re going to have to do. You’re going to have to give it a sloping side so that kids don’t walk into a water amenity and drop three feet and drown.” And we put requirements on those. We put requirements on access so that subdivisions didn’t always just have one way in and one way out. And so there were a lot of things that we did—You couldn’t stop subdivisions. There’s no way that you can do that, particularly in this part of the country, but we did try and make the subdivisions be well planned, channel the traffic, and try and make them as livable as possible. We also encouraged multi-family housing, and we created corridors in which you could have multi-family housing. And although people always liked multi-family housing as a concept, as soon as you put in an apartment building next to them, they don’t like it. But that was part of the plan. A lot of these things came in from the Boise Visions project, from special subdivision projects, special studies on subdivision design, and, you know, I think the majority of them worked. Some of them didn’t, I mean, you get mistakes. But that’s going to happen. So— BB: Yes. MW: And Boise Visions, by the way, every year I insisted on a report at the City Council meeting from every department head, “What have you done to implement the Boise Visions program?” And Boise Visions did not become a report that just sat on a shelf. It became a report that was largely implemented over the years. So— BB: That was one of my questions, was about the Boise Visions plan and how it got started and what was done with it? MW: Yes, it was community-based. I mean, we, we had community groups that took part, neighborhood associations, individuals, took a lot of input, meetings with the City Council, study groups, and came up with the project and the book. And if you go back and look at the Boise Visions project and look at the things that were implemented in that project, I think about ninety percent of them were actually implemented. So— BB: Yes. MW: And people that say they weren’t don’t know what they’re talking about. [Laughter] BB: Neat. So we only have like four minutes before I usually stop, but, I’m trying to think of a really quick question but I don’t think I have any. MW: Well, go ahead. BB: So, do you want to— MW: No, we can go over, if you want. BB: Okay. My next one was about—other than the ones that we’ve covered, what were some of the other goals during your Council years? MW: Well, goals change [laughs] and they change because circumstances change. I mean, one of the things I wanted to do, I was liaison to the Fire Department. I was just shocked when I came onto the City Council at the deferral of needs for the Fire Department in terms of equipment and that type of thing. We had old fire trucks, we had a lot of equipment and in fairness to the prior mayor and City Council, there were some bad times in there in terms of economic downturn when they didn’t have a whole lot of funds available. But one of my projects was to try and upgrade the equipment, and I had the support of Mayor Kempthorne and Mayor Coles in doing this, of trying to upgrade the equipment and the materials and the actual fire apparatus of the city, and we did, I think, a very good job of getting additional fire houses, getting additional trucks, updating trucks, updating safety equipment, and that kind of thing for the Fire Department. We, I would go out to the fire houses periodically, and that’s how I discovered that our river rescue boat was practically falling apart, and we got additional funds into the budget to update and improve that equipment. It’s, we got defibrillators on all of the, all of the trucks. We tried to improve the training, and I think we’ve got a pretty good fire department. We had some good chiefs, and we had some folks that were dedicated to that, and as a result I think we were very successful in doing that. I was trying to [laughs]—we also tried to make the best use that we could of federal monies that were available, and that led to one of the bigger mistakes that was probably ever made, and that was with the fire station at the Boise airport. The chief came up with an idea that if we located the airport fire station at a certain location that it could serve double purpose of responding to certain areas in the Vista Avenue neighborhoods and that kind of thing. And so we went ahead and we applied and we got the grant and we moved the facility and we got new equipment for the fire house at the airport, and it was all based upon a response time. Well, the fire chief made a mistake in looking at the map and what he thought was a road was really a canal. As a result, we didn’t have those response times, and we ended up having to come up with, I think it was six hundred and fifty or eight hundred and fifty thousand to repay the federal government, because the fire house didn’t meet the standards when you checked out the response times, and this was not a road, it was a canal. So, you know, there were people that were saying, “Well, we ought to do something about this,” or “Somebody ought to be fired,” and I said, “No, we tell our department heads in this city to push the envelope. Don’t take chance on the fact that we’re going to be losing a federal grant because you don’t try for it, and there are numerous federal grants where we’ve done that, we’ve been successful, it’s worked out. You don’t just go fire people because on one you make a mistake. If you’re going to push the envelope, there are going to be times you make a mistake.” But it was somewhat embarrassing. [Laughter] We still have the fire station at the airport, and it’s still an excellent facility. It just does not serve the dual purpose that we thought that that facility was going to serve when we got it funded. So— BB: That’s an interesting story. I haven’t heard of that one yet. [Laughter] MW: People don’t like to talk about the mistakes. BB: Yeah. I guess we can end for today, and I think I only have enough questions for about another hour and I can schedule another appointment. MW: Okay. BB: But thank you for this opportunity. END TRACK ONE END INTERVIEW Transcribed by Marlene Fritz on December 29, 2011; audited by Abigail Hoover on January 10, 2012