The Falling Star
About 5 years ago, a friend asked me to investigate what was happening in Star, ID. A woman she knew, who lived there needed some help to find out what could be done to stop Mayor Nathan Mitchell from turning Star and the surrounding area into a California style bedroom community. Star is a small rural town about 20 miles outside of Boise with a population of about 4,000 people at the time and the woman who requested help was a member of the Citizens for Smart Growth.
Avimor, a development company out of Arizona was building a planned community of about 600 homes just outside of Star. There were several problems with that. First, there was no market for them. Of the homes that had been built, most were sitting empty and a few were rented. Star did not have the infrastructure for the development - and especially did not have the roads to support it if they did manage to sell the houses. They are miles away from the Interstate and at least a mile or so from the old highway. At the time, Boise's economy was not doing well. The few large corporations in Boise were moving jobs out, cutting back and scaling down which in turn put the rest of the economy in decline correspondingly.
The parent company of Avimor was SunCor, an Arizona corporation. SunCor Development Company was a wholly owned subsidiary of Arizona Public Service (APS), Arizona's largest electricity supplier. SunCor had thousands of acres of land under development in Arizona, Utah, Idaho and New Mexico. They also had developments in California and Mexico.
This section describes the federal government actions that were the set up for what was happening in Star and in fact, for the City of Boise, Ada and the surrounding counties in the "metropolitan region".
Transportation Planning to Communitarian, Central Economic Planning
The Code ** new section added 6/20/2011 **
The part of the story not yet incorporated into the updated version,
Regional Supra Public-Private Government
Vicky Davis
June 18, 2011 - in progress
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Original research done in about 2006