‘This has been the joy of my life’: Boise City Council member stepping down to become CEO

In 2003, Elaine Clegg was a neighborhood activist working at a Boise urban planning nonprofit.

She had been a board member of the North End Neighborhood Association and, in previous decades, worked to protect Hulls Gulch and other parts of the Boise Foothills.

That year, she was elected to the Boise City Council on a platform of “smart growth,” focusing on building mixed-use and walkable neighborhoods, conserving open space and promoting affordable housing.

Twenty years later, Clegg is in her fifth term on the council, having been a part of city leadership as Boise has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation.

But now she’s leaving City Hall to be CEO of Valley Regional Transit. Clegg spoke to the Idaho Statesman on Tuesday before one of her last council meetings about Boise and her years in government. She plans to soon resign from the council.

The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How are you feeling right now about leaving the council?

Ambivalent. A little sad, a little happy, really excited about my new position. This has been the joy of my life, though. So leaving is a little hard.

You’ve been on the council for over 19 years. How has the city changed since you first came on?

It’s certainly grown the entire time. So it’s a lot bigger now. And the problems are actually relatively the same. They’ve just gotten more intense, I think because of the size. Probably housing is the biggest change. We always had a portion of our community who had trouble affording housing, but it wasn’t nearly as big a group as it is today. And so it wasn’t as big a nut to crack. The pandemic has made it so that people seem a little more on edge all the time. That’s starting to subside a little bit, but it’s still there.

When you say on edge, do you mean about personal stability, or about politics?

Personal stability is impacting the way they interact with the city. So if there’s an issue that they’re passionate about, they’re a little more passionate. If there’s something that doesn’t go their way, it hurts a little more, and so it makes it more difficult to deal with.

Going forward, what are some of the biggest challenges that you think the city still faces and that you hope the council in future years addresses?

One of them is transportation. One of the reasons I’m moving on is to hopefully help with that one. I think if we don’t get a handle on offering transportation choices, we’ll follow the path of many Western cities that sprawl forever — till their traffic gets so bad that they have to do something else. The other biggest issue is housing. Hopefully we can lead the way out of it by figuring out how to get more housing built, increase the supply, diversify the market. I think we’re in a place where only single family housing is for sale because of the financial issues that condos ran into during the Great Recession. Hopefully they can figure out a solution to that and we can have more for sale products and not just single-family ones. It’s a big issue and there are lots of things that have to happen. Certainly the zoning code rewrite and getting that passed is going to be a big help.

Do you think that the rewrite will help that issue you just brought up, about getting more things for sale?

I do. I think the zoning code rewrite, if it passes, will offer all kinds of opportunities for new housing products that we haven’t seen for a long time. Many of the older parts of town grew before there was a zoning code. And so if you look at the products that are available in those neighborhoods, they’re just not available in many of the neighborhoods that got built since the zoning code. So if more of those get built, I think there will be more opportunity for people.

This afternoon I went back and found a 2003 article from the Statesman talking about your election to the council. It talked about your work with Idaho Smart Growth, and described some of your platform as including “steering development toward already built-in areas as opposed to open fields; encouraging businesses and housing to be located closer together to promote walking and reduce driving; conserving open space and creating and maintaining safe, affordable and mixed neighborhoods.”

Nothing’s changed (laughter).

How do you feel about that message now, and what are some of the things you feel like you’ve accomplished over the last 20 years?

We’ve done a lot. There’s a master streets map with a livable streets guide, which ended up helping places like Whitewater Park Boulevard get built, like the bike-ways that we’re now seeing. We’ve passed a specific plan ordinance that help neighborhoods like Harris Ranch get built that are different than some of the other neighborhoods. The master pathways plan and the work I did with transit to ensure that the funding was adequate to fund our best-in-class transit routes. We’ve greened up all of the parks that were on the books when I got elected. There was a lot of park land that the Parks (Department) had brought inside the city and never had any work done on them. All of those are now developed. We’re at a point where we’re buying more park land again, so that cycle is renewing. That’s a good thing. Now we have this 10-minute walk to a park (goal) and a better understanding that a big park far away is maybe less valuable than a small park closer in.

The elections this November could change things a lot. For the first time, geographic districts will be everywhere across the city. How are you thinking about that at the moment and how might that change the makeup of the council?

I hope it doesn’t. It will change where people live, certainly. But what I hope it doesn’t change is the collegiality and the willingness to set aside personal ideologies and work for the good of the city, which I’ve seen the whole time I’ve been here. Right now the council is focused — in terms of where people live — in a certain part of town. But over the years as I’ve served, it’s been different parts of town. So I do think there’s leadership capacity all over. The one thing I worry about is that leadership capacity tends to concentrate. I don’t know why, (but) as I’ve watched it, there will be one neighborhood that’s strong and then another one, and another one. And so I just encourage people who are interested, who are willing to put in the work to learn the issues from all parts of town, to do that so that we have good leadership capacity all over. And keep in mind that this is a big city. Just because you get elected in one district, you work across the whole city.

Are there directions that you hope the city steers clear of?

I hope we continue to steer clear of sprawling outward. I think there’s still a lot of ability to grow inward and grow up. There’s not very much farmland left, but the farmland that is left we should try to preserve. We should look at open space in other parts of the city. Folks on the northern edge of the city have really good access to it. Those further south have less access. Are there places that the city could ramp that up? I think there probably are. I’m excited to be a private citizen — my voice can be heard in a different way again.

With Valley Regional Transit, what are some of the priorities you’re looking to focus on?

We’re going to work on a better bus system. We’re going to do a campaign called ‘Better Buses.’ What do they look like? What do you want to see? And then we’ll figure out how much that costs. And then hopefully, together, if we share that vision, we can figure out how to pay for that. Our biggest issue is that there’s just not enough funding to do the things that people ask for. And the only way we’re going to get there is for people to really embrace a vision of something different and better. So we’re going to work toward that. Of course, the rail is a big issue of mine. I’ll continue to work on that. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to do regional rail here. That could be a game-changer in terms of how people move around regionally in the valley.

On the better bus system, if it requires more funding, are the avenues basically local cities and federal funding? Or are there other places you might be able to get money to build that?

We’re exploring that right now. We think there’s an opportunity for business support. Businesses I’ve talked to are interested in that. We also think there’s an opportunity perhaps for various residential areas to, if they want service, to offer support in a different way than they do today. Ultimately though, I think we’re going to have to hopefully join every other state subdivision in Idaho and have authority to ask voters for our own funding and not have to have all of these separate little voluntary agreements across the region.