Is Masterson right about McLean’s park ‘slush fund’ and high staff turnover? What we found

In his quest to unseat Boise Mayor Lauren McLean, Mike Masterson has made a claim about her record over the last four years that those involved say is misleading.

Masterson’s campaign has made an assertion about conservation-fund money spent on a planned staircase at Ann Morrison Park that rankled the local nonprofit that brought the idea forward.

The former Boise police chief also has cited staff turnover as a big problem under McLean. The Idaho Statesman obtained turnover data from the city through a public-records request. It tells a different story.

Here’s what we learned about both claims:

1. The 99-step Ann Morrison staircase

Masterson’s campaign has incorrectly accused McLean of direct involvement in a project that she did not initiate, the idea for which began before she was mayor.

In September, Masterson announced a plan for his “First One Hundred Days” in office, which included five bullet points about his priorities.

The fifth explained his plan for “Reinstituting Fiscal Responsibility” and accused McLean of improperly spending tax dollars.

Masterson said he would ensure that “money voted for the Foothills will never again be treated as a slush fund for other projects, as Mayor McLean did when she used $850,000 from the voter-approved open-space levy to build a staircase from Crescent Rim to Ann Morrison Park.”

There have been two open-space levies. Boise voters in 2001 approved the first, a $10 million levy to protect recreation trails and environmentally sensitive areas in the Boise Foothills.

In 2015, Boise voters approved a second, more-expansive levy to raise another $10 million to “protect clean water and drinking water, wildlife habitat, critical open space, and native plant species, and enhance recreation opportunities and trails,” according to a copy of the levy proposed to voters. The levy enabled the city to buy property and make “improvement projects in areas such as the Boise Foothills and the Boise River.”

The levy also created a citizens advisory committee to review spending. Community members can submit project ideas, which are then evaluated based on the criteria.

(Two years later, voters again approved the same measure after a clerical error had left the taxes uncollected.)

In February, the City Council gave final approval to an $850,000 proposal to build a 99-step staircase connecting Crescent Rim Drive to Ann Morrison Park. The stairway’s design includes a grooved trough to allow people to wheel bicycles up and down from the park.

There is a steep hill south of Ann Morrison that divides the park from adjacent neighborhoods on the Central Bench, requiring people to take circuitous routes on busy streets to access the park.

Debbie Lombard-Bloom, who is a volunteer member of a campaign by the Harry Morrison Foundation to renew Ann Morrison Park, told the Idaho Statesman that she wrote the grant application to the city when she and others were looking for a way to fund the project.

She said connecting Bench residents to Ann Morrison has been a community priority for years, and that she thought the project aligned well with the city’s goals of putting each resident within a 10-minute walk of a park, while also meeting the criteria of the levy fund.

The application was brought to the city by the Harry Morrison Foundation.

“I don’t think that McLean should be negatively characterized for how that was done,” Bonnie Wilkerson, the board secretary of the foundation, told the Statesman.

She said the foundation is involved in a fundraising campaign with the city to improve Ann Morrison, and that a study commissioned by the foundation in 2018 — before McLean was in office — identified the connection as one of six priorities.

Wilkerson said she met with McLean after she was elected in 2019 to discuss the foundation’s overall vision for the park, but said all her discussions about the staircase have been with parks staff.

Wilkerson acknowledged that some people who live on Crescent Rim have opposed the staircase over concerns about increased traffic in their neighborhood.

Bench-park connection ‘long needed’

During a February presentation before the Open Space and Clean Water Advisory Committee, Parks and Recreation Director Doug Holloway said the city’s software that analyzes which residents in Boise are within a 10-minute walk of a park does not include many homes just above Ann Morrison, because the terrain and lack of a pathway requires people to walk a longer distance down and around to Capitol or Americana boulevards to get to the park.

Foothills and Open Space Superintendent Lisa Duplessie said the staircase would make it easier for 1,800 people living in the adjacent neighborhood to get to the park.

The foundation’s grant application notes that the connection would help fulfill a Ridge to Rivers plan of a north-south “low-stress” route from the Foothills down through the heart of Boise.

Lombard-Bloom said she never approached elected officials or members of the advisory committee about the project while she was working on the grant proposal. She said she knows McLean, because Lombard-Bloom ran unsuccessfully against then-incumbent Elaine Clegg for City Council in 2019, but she said she has never talked to the mayor about the staircase.

The city levy’s advisory committee — whose members are appointed by the mayor — recommended approval of the project in early February on the grounds that it provided more residents with recreational opportunities and enhanced pathways within the city.

Later that month, the City Council approved the project, which Clegg said would be a “unique” opportunity.

“This has been a connection that’s long been needed up to the Bench,” Clegg said at the meeting.

Lombard-Bloom said Masterson’s characterization of the staircase approval as a project improperly pushed through by the mayor is “100% untrue.”

“His facts are wrong,” she said. “I wanted everything to go through the city exactly as it’s supposed to,” she said, adding that the 2015 levy was separate from the Foothills levy passed years earlier, which has no funding left.

Lombard-Bloom said she talked to Masterson about his claims at a Boise State University football game tailgate in early October, explaining the difference between the two levees and the way she had applied for it.

The claim remains on Masterson’s website.

Lombard-Bloom said finding the criteria for the 2015 levy is “super easy” to look up and should have been fact-checked by the campaign.

“When now you know the facts, you should have changed it, and yet you’re still pointing fingers,” said Lombard-Bloom, who added that she’s not in the mayor’s “camp.”

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Masterson campaign, Robin Logsdon, said, “While the language in the second levy was broader than the first, this project is quite a stretch.”

“Ann Morrison Park is not without access,” he said.

In a statement from McLean’s campaign, spokesperson Melanie Folwell said Masterson is “alleging malfeasance and waste” when “that project is a great example of community feedback, public/private partnership, and total transparency.”

“Mike Masterson’s campaign has often traded in complaints and accusations that have been proven false or inaccurate, some so verifiably wrong he’s had to walk them back,” she said.

2. What data say about city staff turnover

Masterson has also made an issue of turnover at city departments, saying on his campaign website that it has been “terrible.”

According to city data shared with the Statesman comparing 46 months of McLean’s tenure with the last 46 months of former Mayor David Bieter’s, 1,140 employees have left the city under McLean, while 1,129 left under Bieter. Boise has more than 2,000 employees. The data does not include Bieter and five staff members in the mayor’s office who left the day the administrations changed.

Under McLean, 20% of those retired, 74% resigned and 6% were discharged, according to the data, which was provided by mayoral spokesperson Maria Weeg in response to a Statesman public-records request. Under Bieter, 18% retired, 73% resigned and 9% were discharged.

But turnover was notably higher in the Police Department, where 97 people left between April 2016 and December 2019 — the last 45 months of Bieter’s term — compared with 165 between January 2020 and September, the equivalent duration under McLean. The department has close to 400 employees.

In a statement, Folwell said that “Masterson has consistently failed to mention that the mayor has added over 30 positions and that, under Chief (Ron) Winegar, retirements are down over 60%, hirings are up 50%. And, yes, some of those hires are from other Ada County police departments.”

Winegar became permanent chief in May after a stint as interim chief following former Chief Ryan Lee’s resignation last year.

Over the same time span, 52 people left the Planning Department under Bieter and 64 under McLean. The department has over 100 employees.

Logsdon said in an email about the staffing that “Bieter’s administration was embroiled in a fair amount of controversy at that point, and a lot of people had served their time,” adding that McLean arrived with a “blank slate.”

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