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Sumner Johnson M_4
SUMNER: And you’ve got to commend Harry, he was big enough to say that “Hey, I better move on.” So, he resigned and went with the State Department. And I didn’t have a real good close relationship with Harry after that, it was a little strained, but I heard it was a much easier job than being superintendent of schools and got paid more.
KEN: Yeah, I’m sure it would have been.
SUMNER: Of course, you see, then, after I -- well, I don't know what you need to know anything personally about me.
KEN: I’d like to.
SUMNER: I married Betty Wisely in 1950, and had a home wedding at their family’s home, 512 19th Avenue South. We lived in a basement apartment at [00:01:00] about 12, 14, something like that, Seventh Street South for a while, and I worked for the city. And then, I went with Briggs and Associates in 1951 and lived in Nampa for four years and commuted but couldn’t develop any work in Nampa. I just couldn’t. Nampa businesspeople wouldn’t hire a Boise firm. And so, I did very little engineering work with the community of Nampa but did a lot around the state. Finally, did move to Boise, or Ada County, for two years. And then in 1957, contracted with the city to do their city engineering work under a contract basis, much the horror of the whole municipal community of Idaho, thinking it wouldn’t work. And the net result, [00:02:00] as I think history proved, is probably the combination was good for the city and good for us.
KEN: Yeah, you brought an element of professionalism.
SUMNER: Yeah. And I found that while I was on the staff, they had me doing everything but engineering, but once I came back as a consultant, they didn’t refer anything to me but engineering. You didn’t have to handle the errand boy duty, so to speak, you got to do engineering. They got more engineering for their dollar. And then it served as a basis for Underkofler and myself to develop and mature. And we were in on the ground floor of a lot of programs that were available to cities and were able to use that in the developing of our company. Then, we eventually brought Bill Briggs [00:03:00] in as a partner, finally incorporated in 1969, as JUB Engineers, maybe 1970. And of course, the rest is history.
KEN: The firm grew rapidly through the ’70s.
SUMNER: Yeah, and in 1978, and ’79, I think at one time, we had 146 people on the payroll. But now, you see, there’s a great reduction in expenditures for public works through the federal level, and even to the state programs. And so, the cities, and municipalities, and of course, through the financing of residential housing, that’s very dormant. There’s not near the demand for engineering work that there was in the ’70s. And so, [00:04:00] we’re down to about 75 people now. Lean, and mean. And we better stay that way. Because it’s a tough world out there today, probably the toughest, economically. And not only in engineering, you talk -- of course, my walks of life are engineering, surveying, contractors, construction, architects, realtors, that type of people, and all of those are in a very, very tight situation right now. And I think it’s probably as much as anything due to the agricultural economy in Idaho is bad, the mining economy is bad, and the timber economy is bad. You read about all the national growth and so forth, but I think it comes mainly in the Sunbelt. Here in the northwest, we don’t feel it. [00:05:00] And of course, it’s impacted Idaho from the state government on down. You probably feel it here in city government, too.
KEN: Oh, yeah. Feel it a lot (inaudible).
SUMNER: I guess I want to -- I’ve got some notes here. I want to see if I’ve covered everything. During that era when we were with the city, as city engineers for about four or five years, myself as engineer up until the last year when Joe Huckabee came to work for us, and he worked on our payroll as the city engineer, district would maybe review them. We did that street planning process where we would develop a [00:06:00] five-year plan and then each year updated it and projected it a year and got involved in that Nampa Transportation Planning that turned out to serve as the basis for nationwide small communities. The drainage study, which was implemented and developed, eventually constructed. The water plan for the transmission network and new well supplies. And of course, then we went into the major expansion of the waste treatment facilities as a result of a study we did in about ’61. And then that was expanded and built in stages in the late ’60s.
KEN: No, mid-’60s, wasn’t it? ’62 and ’63?
SUMNER: Maybe it was.
KEN: The bond issue was in ’61. But I [00:07:00] assumed, perhaps it would have been ’62 or ’63.
SUMNER: I guess it could be. Yes, that’s right. And then, later, we did some expansion for Birdseye -- or, not Birdseye, Carnation. It was some other name, then. But you probably don’t know that we had some pitfalls on that. I mean, you knew we had the pitfalls, but you don’t know why. An interesting thing, we did a pilot study on treating the sugar company’s waste where we took a pipeline from the sugar company and took about, it seems to me 2 million gallons a day of their waste and run it through the old plant and went through very detailed record keeping and so forth and developed our criteria and a pilot study of 2 million gallons a day really isn’t a pilot study, that’s a full-scale study. [00:08:00] And we did it all winter long. Built the plant as a result of that pilot study and we had digestive sludge running out our ears. Didn’t find out till sometime later that during that pilot study stage, the plant superintendent was moonlight dumping some of the sludge to Indian Creek and it wasn’t going through our meter, and he thought it was, and he was doing something illegal as far as that goes, I guess, and didn’t tell us and we ended up with way, way more sludge than we had programmed, and we couldn’t handle it. And we had to go through a process of building an [00:09:00] expansion for sludge polishing tank and so forth. Well, about time we got that done, then that Carnation Potato, whatever they were called, then, came into being. And the state, there was a demonstration, or a pilot study being done, but R.T. French company over -- not American Falls, between Idaho Falls and Blackfoot. Shelley. And based on that result, we designed an aeration basin here to take care of the potatoes. Harland Formal was the state engineer we were working with, and in the process of final design he had heart attack and died. And we submitted our final plans to the health department, [00:10:00] Vaughn Anderson has subsequently told me this, that just before we submitted our plans to the health department, they found out that somebody had salted the hole, so to speak, on that RT French study and the information that they published was erroneous. And we’d made our design on that whole study. And nobody told us. The health department got their heads together, and they thought, “Well, it’ll probably work anyway.” And we went out there and did it and it didn’t work. And we didn’t find out until afterwards why it didn’t work. In fact, [00:11:00] it was a disaster. We couldn’t make it work. Number two, the last day that I worked on that project, the city took it away from us, I found out that the potato people were supposed to give us a maximum load of so much, five days a week, or six days a week. And their average load for 30 days in the month was like 20 percent over any one day maximum allowable, and the operator had failed to catch that. And so, everything stacked up that it couldn’t possibly work. Then the third thing is the old digester dome, which we didn’t do anything with, and the sewer plant operator was going up there every day and taking a sample, had a crack in the top of it. And that sewage gas was coming out of there and was creating most of the odor that would [00:12:00] permeate. I’d drive down the interstate highway and I’d catch that odor, I’d swing over to the plant, and I couldn’t get it. And I could not figure it out.
KEN: (inaudible)
SUMNER: Well, the wind, you’d drive down Nampa Boulevard, or Caldwell Boulevard, same thing. What it’d do is, it was warm, and it’d come out and go up, and then it had to go through a temperature inversion before it’d come back down someplace.
KEN: So, that’s the way it would spread.
SUMNER: And Huckabee finally, some way, found out that, and they sealed that. And basically, the odor, that real serious odor problem disappeared. Well, anyway, I use tell Ernie, I said, “There’s no sense that everybody else be blamed on this, just blame it on us and just let it go ahead.” But you see, nobody was ever taking us to court. And you can see why. Because you see, if we had made all those blunders that appears we did, why, [00:13:00] we’d have a liability exposure. But the state goofed, the city’s operator goofed, and then there was a crack up there that went there for years that nobody knew about it. And it was wasting gas. So, anyway, I just got the digression from when I was going through these. Of course, we talked about the major sewer system extensions. And then that era of Karcher Mall groundbreaking came about. Interesting sidelight, Van Moad about that the land out on the boulevard in the late ’20s was selling for 1,000 dollars an acre. The crash came and the first piece of farmland, so to speak, that sold for 1,000 dollars acre after that was when Harry Daum purchased Karcher Mall, 30 some acres, [00:14:00] 34 acres for 34,000, something like that. It’s an interesting sidelight.
KEN: That is.
SUMNER: Of course, the I-84 planning, and John Brandt had a lot to do with that, because it was originally planned to go down Highway 20. And if it had done that, we’d have been dead. And to the Real Estate Association, they proposed what they call the Ridge Route, to go through on the ridge and leave the good farmland, and so forth. And of course, the goal was to get it towards Nampa. But the state dropped down below the ridge, where it is, going from here to Meridian. And then, industrial corporations...
KEN: Now, what year did the I-84 come through, then?
SUMNER: Well, I can’t answer that. [00:15:00]
KEN: Late, mid-50s?
SUMNER: Oh no. The planning was in the mid-50s, the mapping and so forth. But the actual interstate construction north of Nampa was when Huckabee was city engineer.
KEN: So, ’60s.
SUMNER: And in fact, I was instrumental in getting them to go out and put a watermain through the interstate on 11th Avenue North extension so that we could eventually hopefully serve the state school and hospital. He didn’t put a big enough one in, in my opinion, he put an eight-inch in there, I think. (inaudible) and then he did the same thing on Nampa Boulevard, as I recall, they put that in, we got the sewer line through before. But I think that was from, like, [00:16:00] ’61 to ’65 in there, I think. And the Nampa Industrial Corporation finally got going and momentum, the Hehr Manufacturing, Fleetwood, Western Stockmen’s, that Northland Camps, what was the name of that outfit? I can’t remember now. They all came in. Back to an interesting sidelight, through the history of the Nampa Industrial Corporation, we’ve averaged one industry about every two years, that’s average. And our presidents generally serve about a two-year cycle. In the two years I was president, I had the misfortune that we brought in four industries. Two a year, instead of one every two years.
KEN: What two years were [00:17:00] they?
SUMNER: Oh, that would have probably been ’77 and ’78. In fact, we were going through such a growth...
KEN: Oh, the North American Plant Breeders is one of them?
SUMNER: Well, I can’t remember which, it was Zilog, and I think the seed company east of Fleetwood. I can’t say their name. And probably maybe John Ward Plumbing, maybe North American Plant Breeders, there was four of them came in there in that two-year period. Probably the biggest negative thing in my lifetime that I could have probably done something about if I had the wisdom that I do now, was that they tore the Dewey Palace down while [00:18:00] I was city engineer. Didn’t even realize what a disaster when we were standing by.
KEN: What are your recollections of the Dewey Palace, your earliest recollections? And then, as you were growing up, any recollections you have?
SUMNER: See, I really don’t have a whole lot of recollection of the Dewey Palace. Because of my farm connections. I wasn’t involved in the city, so to speak. But the one thing I can remember as the student Rotarian, when I was about a senior in high school, they met at the Dewey Palace, and I went there for a month and ate lunch with them. And, of course, was quite impressed with the [00:19:00] linen and the whole thing. Now my aunt, Doris Farrell, who lives in the apartments Bart Westberg built, what do they call them?
KEN: The Landmark Towers?
SUMNER: Yeah. She worked in the Dewey Palace for years as a waitress. And she could give you a whole lot of history about the Dewey Palace, and Nampa, as far as that goes, more than my mother, I think. And she’s still of good mind.
KEN: Yeah, we need to talk to her.
SUMNER: But I just didn’t have anything to do, I’ve never had occasion to be in the Dewey Palace, other than through the entryway and into the dining room. So, I don’t ever remember being on the second floor. But it’s unfortunate that somebody didn’t have wisdom back there and keep that from being destroyed. It could be one of the things, but [00:20:00] can’t look back, I guess. In those days, we were trying to get comprehensive planning going, but we didn’t have much success. But we finally planted the seed and eventually did get the comp plan through for Nampa. We did start something that I think you’d used on Midland Boulevard, for instance, the highway department was going to reconstruct 12th Avenue Road, and they were going to do everything but the sidewalks. And we wanted sidewalks but they wouldn’t fund them. So, we said, “Okay, let us create a local improvement district to dovetail with your project and we’ll build the sidewalks with the LID,” which we did. And now since then, they’ve expanded and used it as city’s matching share and so forth on curb and gutters. And that’s used in several communities, too, not only Nampa. [00:21:00] And the city was putting together a local improvement history of some kind out there in Gold Subdivision for sewer in 1956. It was a complete failure. And they had to go in and replace it. And in fact, I’m not sure we didn’t get involved in replacing it because they had arbitrarily made a drop of three feet in a manhole, they got out there and they couldn’t serve two basements. Oh, it was as disaster. But that started the first LID. Then we went through, almost got tarred and feathered at the Council Chamber when we created an LID for curb and gutter and sidewalks in conjunction with street construction, out in Kurtz’s addition. And then, we carried it all through the town, the Fairview addition, and just all over the old parts of town. [00:22:00] And that finally got the town kind of finished. Up until then, it was just dirt shoulders and grass, and people’s front yards, and so forth. Oh, another thing that we got involved with that has been spread all over Idaho. When we came to the city, they charged 50 dollars for a sewer hookup. And they set that back in the ’20s. Well, it’s ridiculous. And so, after that big LID 49, we were able to show what the cost for trunk lines were, and what the cost for lateral were, and from that we were able to project those two elements of the sewer extension. And I don’t even remember what the numbers were now, but it was quite a bit more than 50 dollars. [00:23:00] Each one of them was in the neighborhood of 150 or 200. An interesting sidelight, George Schellenberger was city clerk, and we gave all this stuff to George, the council approved it and everything, and then he would issue the permits and collect them. But he didn’t tell his clerical staff. And pretty soon the sewer contractor found out if they went in while George was off to lunch, they could get it for 50 dollars.(laughs) If they got it while he was there, it was 150 for lateral and 225 for trunk line or something like that, or 375 dollars. And that went on for almost a year before it was caught. And so, the permit was taken out and all the records, but the dollar amounts were wrong. But it just typical of those things that falls through the crack in administration. And then at that era, we started the off-street parking down on Front Street, and we funded that with parking meter revenue. [00:24:00] And we’d run...
END OF AUDIO FILE
SUMNER: And you’ve got to commend Harry, he was big enough to say that “Hey, I better move on.” So, he resigned and went with the State Department. And I didn’t have a real good close relationship with Harry after that, it was a little strained, but I heard it was a much easier job than being superintendent of schools and got paid more.
KEN: Yeah, I’m sure it would have been.
SUMNER: Of course, you see, then, after I -- well, I don't know what you need to know anything personally about me.
KEN: I’d like to.
SUMNER: I married Betty Wisely in 1950, and had a home wedding at their family’s home, 512 19th Avenue South. We lived in a basement apartment at [00:01:00] about 12, 14, something like that, Seventh Street South for a while, and I worked for the city. And then, I went with Briggs and Associates in 1951 and lived in Nampa for four years and commuted but couldn’t develop any work in Nampa. I just couldn’t. Nampa businesspeople wouldn’t hire a Boise firm. And so, I did very little engineering work with the community of Nampa but did a lot around the state. Finally, did move to Boise, or Ada County, for two years. And then in 1957, contracted with the city to do their city engineering work under a contract basis, much the horror of the whole municipal community of Idaho, thinking it wouldn’t work. And the net result, [00:02:00] as I think history proved, is probably the combination was good for the city and good for us.
KEN: Yeah, you brought an element of professionalism.
SUMNER: Yeah. And I found that while I was on the staff, they had me doing everything but engineering, but once I came back as a consultant, they didn’t refer anything to me but engineering. You didn’t have to handle the errand boy duty, so to speak, you got to do engineering. They got more engineering for their dollar. And then it served as a basis for Underkofler and myself to develop and mature. And we were in on the ground floor of a lot of programs that were available to cities and were able to use that in the developing of our company. Then, we eventually brought Bill Briggs [00:03:00] in as a partner, finally incorporated in 1969, as JUB Engineers, maybe 1970. And of course, the rest is history.
KEN: The firm grew rapidly through the ’70s.
SUMNER: Yeah, and in 1978, and ’79, I think at one time, we had 146 people on the payroll. But now, you see, there’s a great reduction in expenditures for public works through the federal level, and even to the state programs. And so, the cities, and municipalities, and of course, through the financing of residential housing, that’s very dormant. There’s not near the demand for engineering work that there was in the ’70s. And so, [00:04:00] we’re down to about 75 people now. Lean, and mean. And we better stay that way. Because it’s a tough world out there today, probably the toughest, economically. And not only in engineering, you talk -- of course, my walks of life are engineering, surveying, contractors, construction, architects, realtors, that type of people, and all of those are in a very, very tight situation right now. And I think it’s probably as much as anything due to the agricultural economy in Idaho is bad, the mining economy is bad, and the timber economy is bad. You read about all the national growth and so forth, but I think it comes mainly in the Sunbelt. Here in the northwest, we don’t feel it. [00:05:00] And of course, it’s impacted Idaho from the state government on down. You probably feel it here in city government, too.
KEN: Oh, yeah. Feel it a lot (inaudible).
SUMNER: I guess I want to -- I’ve got some notes here. I want to see if I’ve covered everything. During that era when we were with the city, as city engineers for about four or five years, myself as engineer up until the last year when Joe Huckabee came to work for us, and he worked on our payroll as the city engineer, district would maybe review them. We did that street planning process where we would develop a [00:06:00] five-year plan and then each year updated it and projected it a year and got involved in that Nampa Transportation Planning that turned out to serve as the basis for nationwide small communities. The drainage study, which was implemented and developed, eventually constructed. The water plan for the transmission network and new well supplies. And of course, then we went into the major expansion of the waste treatment facilities as a result of a study we did in about ’61. And then that was expanded and built in stages in the late ’60s.
KEN: No, mid-’60s, wasn’t it? ’62 and ’63?
SUMNER: Maybe it was.
KEN: The bond issue was in ’61. But I [00:07:00] assumed, perhaps it would have been ’62 or ’63.
SUMNER: I guess it could be. Yes, that’s right. And then, later, we did some expansion for Birdseye -- or, not Birdseye, Carnation. It was some other name, then. But you probably don’t know that we had some pitfalls on that. I mean, you knew we had the pitfalls, but you don’t know why. An interesting thing, we did a pilot study on treating the sugar company’s waste where we took a pipeline from the sugar company and took about, it seems to me 2 million gallons a day of their waste and run it through the old plant and went through very detailed record keeping and so forth and developed our criteria and a pilot study of 2 million gallons a day really isn’t a pilot study, that’s a full-scale study. [00:08:00] And we did it all winter long. Built the plant as a result of that pilot study and we had digestive sludge running out our ears. Didn’t find out till sometime later that during that pilot study stage, the plant superintendent was moonlight dumping some of the sludge to Indian Creek and it wasn’t going through our meter, and he thought it was, and he was doing something illegal as far as that goes, I guess, and didn’t tell us and we ended up with way, way more sludge than we had programmed, and we couldn’t handle it. And we had to go through a process of building an [00:09:00] expansion for sludge polishing tank and so forth. Well, about time we got that done, then that Carnation Potato, whatever they were called, then, came into being. And the state, there was a demonstration, or a pilot study being done, but R.T. French company over -- not American Falls, between Idaho Falls and Blackfoot. Shelley. And based on that result, we designed an aeration basin here to take care of the potatoes. Harland Formal was the state engineer we were working with, and in the process of final design he had heart attack and died. And we submitted our final plans to the health department, [00:10:00] Vaughn Anderson has subsequently told me this, that just before we submitted our plans to the health department, they found out that somebody had salted the hole, so to speak, on that RT French study and the information that they published was erroneous. And we’d made our design on that whole study. And nobody told us. The health department got their heads together, and they thought, “Well, it’ll probably work anyway.” And we went out there and did it and it didn’t work. And we didn’t find out until afterwards why it didn’t work. In fact, [00:11:00] it was a disaster. We couldn’t make it work. Number two, the last day that I worked on that project, the city took it away from us, I found out that the potato people were supposed to give us a maximum load of so much, five days a week, or six days a week. And their average load for 30 days in the month was like 20 percent over any one day maximum allowable, and the operator had failed to catch that. And so, everything stacked up that it couldn’t possibly work. Then the third thing is the old digester dome, which we didn’t do anything with, and the sewer plant operator was going up there every day and taking a sample, had a crack in the top of it. And that sewage gas was coming out of there and was creating most of the odor that would [00:12:00] permeate. I’d drive down the interstate highway and I’d catch that odor, I’d swing over to the plant, and I couldn’t get it. And I could not figure it out.
KEN: (inaudible)
SUMNER: Well, the wind, you’d drive down Nampa Boulevard, or Caldwell Boulevard, same thing. What it’d do is, it was warm, and it’d come out and go up, and then it had to go through a temperature inversion before it’d come back down someplace.
KEN: So, that’s the way it would spread.
SUMNER: And Huckabee finally, some way, found out that, and they sealed that. And basically, the odor, that real serious odor problem disappeared. Well, anyway, I use tell Ernie, I said, “There’s no sense that everybody else be blamed on this, just blame it on us and just let it go ahead.” But you see, nobody was ever taking us to court. And you can see why. Because you see, if we had made all those blunders that appears we did, why, [00:13:00] we’d have a liability exposure. But the state goofed, the city’s operator goofed, and then there was a crack up there that went there for years that nobody knew about it. And it was wasting gas. So, anyway, I just got the digression from when I was going through these. Of course, we talked about the major sewer system extensions. And then that era of Karcher Mall groundbreaking came about. Interesting sidelight, Van Moad about that the land out on the boulevard in the late ’20s was selling for 1,000 dollars an acre. The crash came and the first piece of farmland, so to speak, that sold for 1,000 dollars acre after that was when Harry Daum purchased Karcher Mall, 30 some acres, [00:14:00] 34 acres for 34,000, something like that. It’s an interesting sidelight.
KEN: That is.
SUMNER: Of course, the I-84 planning, and John Brandt had a lot to do with that, because it was originally planned to go down Highway 20. And if it had done that, we’d have been dead. And to the Real Estate Association, they proposed what they call the Ridge Route, to go through on the ridge and leave the good farmland, and so forth. And of course, the goal was to get it towards Nampa. But the state dropped down below the ridge, where it is, going from here to Meridian. And then, industrial corporations...
KEN: Now, what year did the I-84 come through, then?
SUMNER: Well, I can’t answer that. [00:15:00]
KEN: Late, mid-50s?
SUMNER: Oh no. The planning was in the mid-50s, the mapping and so forth. But the actual interstate construction north of Nampa was when Huckabee was city engineer.
KEN: So, ’60s.
SUMNER: And in fact, I was instrumental in getting them to go out and put a watermain through the interstate on 11th Avenue North extension so that we could eventually hopefully serve the state school and hospital. He didn’t put a big enough one in, in my opinion, he put an eight-inch in there, I think. (inaudible) and then he did the same thing on Nampa Boulevard, as I recall, they put that in, we got the sewer line through before. But I think that was from, like, [00:16:00] ’61 to ’65 in there, I think. And the Nampa Industrial Corporation finally got going and momentum, the Hehr Manufacturing, Fleetwood, Western Stockmen’s, that Northland Camps, what was the name of that outfit? I can’t remember now. They all came in. Back to an interesting sidelight, through the history of the Nampa Industrial Corporation, we’ve averaged one industry about every two years, that’s average. And our presidents generally serve about a two-year cycle. In the two years I was president, I had the misfortune that we brought in four industries. Two a year, instead of one every two years.
KEN: What two years were [00:17:00] they?
SUMNER: Oh, that would have probably been ’77 and ’78. In fact, we were going through such a growth...
KEN: Oh, the North American Plant Breeders is one of them?
SUMNER: Well, I can’t remember which, it was Zilog, and I think the seed company east of Fleetwood. I can’t say their name. And probably maybe John Ward Plumbing, maybe North American Plant Breeders, there was four of them came in there in that two-year period. Probably the biggest negative thing in my lifetime that I could have probably done something about if I had the wisdom that I do now, was that they tore the Dewey Palace down while [00:18:00] I was city engineer. Didn’t even realize what a disaster when we were standing by.
KEN: What are your recollections of the Dewey Palace, your earliest recollections? And then, as you were growing up, any recollections you have?
SUMNER: See, I really don’t have a whole lot of recollection of the Dewey Palace. Because of my farm connections. I wasn’t involved in the city, so to speak. But the one thing I can remember as the student Rotarian, when I was about a senior in high school, they met at the Dewey Palace, and I went there for a month and ate lunch with them. And, of course, was quite impressed with the [00:19:00] linen and the whole thing. Now my aunt, Doris Farrell, who lives in the apartments Bart Westberg built, what do they call them?
KEN: The Landmark Towers?
SUMNER: Yeah. She worked in the Dewey Palace for years as a waitress. And she could give you a whole lot of history about the Dewey Palace, and Nampa, as far as that goes, more than my mother, I think. And she’s still of good mind.
KEN: Yeah, we need to talk to her.
SUMNER: But I just didn’t have anything to do, I’ve never had occasion to be in the Dewey Palace, other than through the entryway and into the dining room. So, I don’t ever remember being on the second floor. But it’s unfortunate that somebody didn’t have wisdom back there and keep that from being destroyed. It could be one of the things, but [00:20:00] can’t look back, I guess. In those days, we were trying to get comprehensive planning going, but we didn’t have much success. But we finally planted the seed and eventually did get the comp plan through for Nampa. We did start something that I think you’d used on Midland Boulevard, for instance, the highway department was going to reconstruct 12th Avenue Road, and they were going to do everything but the sidewalks. And we wanted sidewalks but they wouldn’t fund them. So, we said, “Okay, let us create a local improvement district to dovetail with your project and we’ll build the sidewalks with the LID,” which we did. And now since then, they’ve expanded and used it as city’s matching share and so forth on curb and gutters. And that’s used in several communities, too, not only Nampa. [00:21:00] And the city was putting together a local improvement history of some kind out there in Gold Subdivision for sewer in 1956. It was a complete failure. And they had to go in and replace it. And in fact, I’m not sure we didn’t get involved in replacing it because they had arbitrarily made a drop of three feet in a manhole, they got out there and they couldn’t serve two basements. Oh, it was as disaster. But that started the first LID. Then we went through, almost got tarred and feathered at the Council Chamber when we created an LID for curb and gutter and sidewalks in conjunction with street construction, out in Kurtz’s addition. And then, we carried it all through the town, the Fairview addition, and just all over the old parts of town. [00:22:00] And that finally got the town kind of finished. Up until then, it was just dirt shoulders and grass, and people’s front yards, and so forth. Oh, another thing that we got involved with that has been spread all over Idaho. When we came to the city, they charged 50 dollars for a sewer hookup. And they set that back in the ’20s. Well, it’s ridiculous. And so, after that big LID 49, we were able to show what the cost for trunk lines were, and what the cost for lateral were, and from that we were able to project those two elements of the sewer extension. And I don’t even remember what the numbers were now, but it was quite a bit more than 50 dollars. [00:23:00] Each one of them was in the neighborhood of 150 or 200. An interesting sidelight, George Schellenberger was city clerk, and we gave all this stuff to George, the council approved it and everything, and then he would issue the permits and collect them. But he didn’t tell his clerical staff. And pretty soon the sewer contractor found out if they went in while George was off to lunch, they could get it for 50 dollars.(laughs) If they got it while he was there, it was 150 for lateral and 225 for trunk line or something like that, or 375 dollars. And that went on for almost a year before it was caught. And so, the permit was taken out and all the records, but the dollar amounts were wrong. But it just typical of those things that falls through the crack in administration. And then at that era, we started the off-street parking down on Front Street, and we funded that with parking meter revenue. [00:24:00] And we’d run...
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