Nampa is Idaho’s third largest city, home to more than 110,000 people, and stressed in many ways, from social concerns to car traffic to politics.
It is about to get a new mayor after this year’s November election. What kind of mayor should it be?
The mayor there since January 2018 has been Debbie Kling, and though she appears to be generally popular and well regarded she’s been riding a tiger ever since. The city has grown by one subdivision or more at a time almost constantly, and the community has struggled with roads, schools (not city jurisdiction but relevant to it), zoning changes, dealing with attempts to upgrade downtown and complicated politics, including cultural warfare. You could label Nampa as conservative Republican ideologically (and many would), but those terms have lost real meaning, and they encompass complicated threads from more or less centrist to highly extreme.
Mayor Kling has often made a point of calling for planning for the future (a centrist mindset), and that seems to have applied to her own job. Of the four candidates filing to succeed her, she has endorsed one, Rick Hogaboam.
The situation here has some similarity to that of the slightly larger and even faster growing city to Nampa’s east. In 2019, four-term Meridian Mayor Tammy de Weerd opted not to run again and (along with other City Hall figures) backed her top administrator, Robert Simison, for the job. Simison won with a solid percentage and was re-elected easily in 2023.
His appeal was that of an experienced manager who could help guide growth in the exploding city. Voters had the option of going with more ideological, rather than managerial, alternatives, but they didn’t go that way. This could portend something about Meridian as it continues to develop.
The contours of this Nampa election, then, look familiar. Kling’s endorsee, Hogaboam, was her chief of staff and also served on the city council. He’s also been appointed and elected (in 2024, unopposed) as Canyon County clerk, a job he said he would leave if elected to the top post in Nampa.
Hogaboam’s campaign themes cover such topics as, “Safe and Thriving Neighborhoods; Sustainable, Thoughtful, and Strategic Growth; Economic Vitality and Opportunity; Transparent and Responsive Governance.” They bespeak a plan to do the job and stick to the knitting, rather than make big changes or deliver large or loud statements.
He has three opponents.
Erick Myricks is a tech entrepreneur and a jazz musician, who declared, “Nampa is going broke—and I’ve got the plan to fix it. I’m pro small-business. I’m pro-agriculture. I’m pro-The People of Nampa!” Not granularly specific, but there’s something of a boat-rocking tone.
Justin Buchholz, a construction truck driver, calls himself “a regular guy” and has appeared on podcasts and forums; his candidacy seems a little undefined, but could become a focus for outsider interests. Or Myricks’ might, if there’s a large enough protesting constituency.
The fourth candidate is Melissa Sue Robinson, who has run many times for state and local offices over the last couple of decades but usually has received only small votes.
The odds seem to favor Hogaboam, as the inside-anointed contender with a convincing strong resume and plenty of local support, running against three outsiders (vectoring in from somewhat different directions) who look likely to split the opposition vote.
But the attitude and feelings of the voters matter too. And that’s where this race, maybe more than others happening this year around Idaho, may provide some larger clues about where the voters are and what they want.
Idaho’s electoral hinge, after all, increasingly has become suburban, and Nampa makes as good a measure of that as any place in the state. Watch closely how they decide this race – a stable experienced figure versus the prospect of one or more boat rockers – and that could tell you something about area politics in the year to come.
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