2005: The Year in Review
PART 2

July
• The City of Weiser wins a grant of $23,500 through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help pay for a study assessing the feasibility of starting a business incubator program in town.
• Crews from the Weiser Rural Fire Department and the Payette Fire Department knock down a 20-acre blaze above the irrigation ditch at Hill and Cahill roads before it can reach any houses. At its peak, the fire threatened three residences. According to Payette’s fire chief, the wildfire start-ed when a young person was burning a sheep carcass.
• Christina Dunn and Jamie Dunn, a Midvale mother and her adult daughter, are a writing team producing published novels in the romantic fiction genre.
• Weiser Memorial Hospital finalizes its option to buy 18 acres on the west side of East Sixth Street south of Jon-Lin Foods. The hospital plans to use only part of the land for a new health care facility. The other major occupant of the site will be a Bi-Mart store, the first ever to be located in Idaho.
• Weiser’s Kendal Neill is crowned Miss Western Idaho 2006 and Carly Campo of Fruitland wins the Miss Washington County title at a pageant in Weiser attended by more than 400 people. First runner-up for the Miss Western Idaho title is Sarah Huston, and second runner-up is Victoria Arriero. Huston and Arriero are both from Weiser.
• A wildfire approximately seven miles north of Weiser consumes more than 3,400 acres in the Monroe and Jenkins creek drainages. Homes are threatened, but firefighters from departments in Weiser, Fruitland, Payette, Ontario, New Plymouth and Midvale, and from the Payette National Forest succeed in saving all structures. The only casualties are four Idaho Power poles.
• Weiserite Austyn Grothaus, age 9, hits a hole-in-one on hole number eight at Rolling Hills Golf Course.
• Weiser High School Principal Kevin Knight is leaving to accept a principal position in Colville, Wash. The Weiser School District names Wil Overgaard, a former WHS principal, to step back into his old WHS post on a one-year, interim basis.
• Channel catfish are dying by the thousands at Brownlee Reservoir. Biologists with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game identify the bacteria motile Aeromonas as the cause.
• A massive fire sparked by lightning breaks out in Hells Canyon about 20 miles north of Weiser, and firefighting crews work successfully to spare Mountain Man Lodge from its wrath. Dubbed the “Snake One Fire,” the blaze consumes more than 25,000 acres. Weiser High School serves as the base camp for firefight-ing crews during the fire fight. At its peak, the effort involves more than 700 personnel.

August
• 4-H producers of the top-award-ed animals at this year’s Washington County Fair include Rylee Potter, who raised the Grand Champion steer, Elizabeth Harrison, who raised the Grand Champion sheep, and Rachel Sharp, who raised the Grand Champion swine.
• The Weiser City Council approves Mayor Steve Patterson’s plan to include a series of advisory questions on the ballot for the city election in November. Voters will be asked whether they favor a proposed consolidation of Weiser’s city and rural fire departments, and whether they like the ideas of forming a cemetery district and a recreation district.
• The Weiser community is saddened by the news that a plane crash in western Oregon has claimed the life of Kevin Roberts, 25, a 1998 Weiser High School graduate. His survivors include a wife and two young child-ren in Redmond, Ore., and his parents still residing in Weiser.
• The Weiser Architectural Preservation Committee, with help from several community volunteers, carefully removes the large and heavy stained glass window from the facade of the town’s historic Knights of Pythias lodge. It’s only the first step in a painstaking project to restore the window, an undertaking expected to take one to two years to complete.
• Weiser Middle School Principal Larry Goto and Assistant Principal Bob Johnson pay off on an agreement they had with last year’s students. The kids, who met the challenge Goto and Johnson set of achieving state-mandated Annual Yearly Progress on the Idaho Standards Achievement Test, take turns wield-ing an electric razor as it is pushed diligently over the scalps of the two men.
• Much of Weiser is without electrical service for nearly an entire day as city crews scramble to track down the source of the problem and fix it.
• Washington County commissioners decide to continue county funding of two separate economic development programs, at least for now.

September
• Southwest District Health announces that Washington County recently had its first confirmed human case of West Nile virus. The woman who was infected was hospitalized earlier but is now reported to be recovering at home.
• A Weiser bank account is established for local residents to make donations to Gulf Coast hurricane relief. Various groups in the community begin holding fund-raisers to aid the cause.
• The City of Weiser finally receives what it considers an acceptable offer for the City Fire Department’s 2002 Hughes engine. On a 4-2 vote, the Weiser City Council approves the engine’s sale to a Tacoma, Wash., equipment dealer for $190,000.
• The Weiser City Council approves Weiser Police Chief Greg Moon’s request for funding to hire two more officers, a plan which will allow the department to quit pulling its detective from investigative duties to fill in on patrol. The city had sought a grant to help pay for the force beef-up, but the grant was denied.
• Weiser Mayor Steve Patterson tries to rekindle interest in constructing the Galloway Dam. More people speak against the project than in favor of it at a town hall meeting, however, so the proposal is again scrapped.
• Terry Steward, a trucker from Weiser who has been driving for a U.S. firm in Iraq, is wounded when insurgents ambush his convoy.
• Off-duty Washington County Sheriff’s Deputy Kirt Moore is glad he brought his .45 Colt Ruger with him while bow-hunting atop Hitt Mountain. He uses it to drop a cougar that’s charging him. The big cat mistook the camouflaged man for an elk.
• Beth Johnson resigns as executive director of the Washington County Economic Development Commission after only six months in the post.
• The Weiser Recreation Department announces it has canceled the annual Halloween party for kids, but within a couple of weeks Mayor Steve Patterson has reversed the decision. He and City Councilor Perry Plischke each donate $100 to the cause.
• Weiser’s Sally Baker is honored as a 2005 Community Star by Intermountain Community Bank. Baker has been leading a campaign to increase local awareness of what appears to be a worsening problem in the community with methamphetamine.

October
• The Weiser Chamber of Commerce announces this year’s honorees in its annual Community Awards program: volunteer Dottie Emert, educator Sally Baker, business person Darrell Henrichs, the Weiser Elks Lodge, Weiser Memorial Hospital, and Haun Packing.
• Bill Shanahan and Jackie DeCroo have a late-night visitor at their Cove Road home — a young cougar cub that someone apparently dropped off on their porch. It’s a cold night, so they bring the helpless kitten in and provide it care until Idaho Fish and Game can pick it up.
• Elected homecoming queen and king for 2005 at Weiser High School are seniors Elise Overgaard and Alex Hansen.
• The Weiser Police Department initiates a new program, “Kids and Cops,” at Pioneer Elementary School. Patrolman Riley Hall will meet the school’s first-graders at least once per month. He’ll continue to befriend this same group of students as they proceed through later grades.
• Washington County commissioners decide to end the county’s financial participation in Washington/Adams Visions for Entrepreneurship, a two-county economic development pro-gram the commissioners feel has been duplicating services offered through the Washington County Economic Development Commission, a much older entity.
• The Weiser School District dedicates the new gym and classroom center at Weiser High School. The facility cost $2.8 million. The dis-trict’s voters approved a bond in 2004 to fund the project.

November
• Elected to seats on the Weiser City Council are Virgil Leedy and incumbents Perry Plischke and Doug Dick. Others on the city ballot are John Carr (who falls only three votes short of election), David Trigueiro, John Jensen, Don Miller, and Bill Myers. On the advisory side of the ballot, Weiser voters by wide margins express interest in consolidating the Weiser city and rural fire departments, and in creating a cemetery district. “Passing” by lesser margins are a proposal to include the ambulance district in the fire departments’ consolidation, and creation of a recreation district.
• A federal court in Boise awards former Weiser Ambulance District paramedic Heather Goff $300,000 in her successful suit against Wash-ington County and Ambulance District Supervisor Steve Patterson, who is alleged to have committed battery against the plaintiff. Violations of federal and state human and civil rights acts are alleged in the suit, which focuses largely on workplace hostility Goff says was leveled against her following the settlement of a wage discrimination claim she had filed.
• The 2005 Weiser Wolverines football team, Weiser High’s best gridiron squad in years, defeats Fruitland 24-7 in the State Division 3A semifinal match to win a trip to Pocatello to face Shelly. At Holt Arena, Shelly’s offense mounts a game-winning drive in the final minute and a half to take the championship.
• Weiser Wastewater Treatment Plant Supervisor Brad Hansen has finished poring through the paper trail documenting the plant’s engineering history and concludes the allowable levels for contaminants entering the plant have been set far too low. The levels are spelled out in a federal permit and are based on data and recommendations Weiser itself supplies to regulators.
• The Washington County Commission, following a recommendation from the Washington County Economic Development Commission’s own directors, opts to pull the plug on county funding for the EDC, which has simply been having too much trouble keeping a qualified economic development professional at its helm the past two years.
• For the first time in the 17 years they’ve been holding it, organizers of the Community Thanksgiving Dinner have no leftovers to offer anyone when the meal ends. Well over 300 diners attended, a record crowd.

December
• A sledding accident near Cambridge claims the life of 17-year-old Indian Valley resident Nicholas Bauer, a student at Cambridge High School.
• This year’s Festival of Trees sets a fund-raising record for its sponsor, the Weiser Memorial Hospital Foundation. The three-day event nets $18,060, better than doubling the previous record for the annual festival.
• Weiser High School varsity senior running back Bryce Svedin is honored as the state’s Player of the Year in Division 3A.
• Weiser resident David Gettle is the top-ranked triathlete in the Pacific Northwest region, which includes the states of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Alaska.
• The Weiser community rallies to the aid of the Milton Lukehart family after fire sweeps through most of the indoors of the family’s East Main Street home. Donations of materials and labor make possible the home’s repair just in time for Christmas.
• The Albertson Foundation awards Weiser Memorial Hospital a grant of $100,000 for the hospital’s building campaign.
• Days of rain immediately follow a major snowstorm in the year’s final week. The Weiser River crests at nearly 12 feet at Weiser, approximately 2½ feet above flood stage. Thankfully, damage in the area is minimal even though the low-lying properties south of town are under water.
 

--WEISER SIGNAL AMERICAN
1/4/06 (July-Sept. items)
1/9/06 (Oct.-Dec. items)