Victor Urban Renewal Buys a Fire Engine

VICTOR — A state law passed in 2025 gave Teton County Fire & Rescue the power to strip Victor's newest urban renewal district of its share of fire taxes and to block the district the city's urban renewal agency wants to create next. The fire district agreed not to use it.

In return the two bodies spent a year negotiating, and the Victor Urban Renewal Agency is now preparing to reimburse the fire district $270,000 toward a new engine for its Victor station. The board votes on the first $50,000 when it adopts its budget September 21.

The agency runs on tax increment financing. As property values rise inside its districts, it keeps a share of the taxes those values generate, including the share that would otherwise go to the fire levy. It has two districts. Downtown, formed in 2015, still owes the city about $151,000 for a waterline project. North, formed in 2024, had collected nothing when the law passed. A third, on the south end of town, is being drafted now; the agency projects it would generate $6,730,593 in its first phase.

Then the Legislature passed House Bill 436, which the governor signed on April 4, 2025. It let fire and ambulance districts pull out of urban renewal financing, and it required their consent before a city could start a new district. A district can only withdraw from a plan whose debts are smaller than its own share of the revenue.

"Because the North District had no indebtedness, unlike the Downtown District, the fire district could have pulled out of the North District essentially decimating it," Troy Butzlaff, the agency's executive director, told the Victor City Council on August 26. "Most of the revenue that we would have collected would have been transferred back to the fire district. And ultimately, the fire district would have had a veto vote on whether or not they wanted to be part of the South District."

"So we could have just simply said nothing and basically allowed this to happen," he said, "but I decided I wasn't going to let that happen to the Urban Renewal District. And so I reached out to the fire chief."

The agency, the fire district and the City of Victor signed a three-page memorandum of understanding, obtained from the city under the Idaho Public Records Act. Its Article III is titled Covenant of Forbearance. For the length of the agreement, the fire district promises not to adopt a resolution of intent to withdraw, not to start the withdrawal process, and not "to pursue opting out of any planned or to be enacted revenue allocation area." The document says that article is "legally binding and enforceable."

Then-Mayor Will Frohlich signed for the city on August 13, 2025, four months after the governor signed it. Fire commissioner Erin Borbet signed for the district on November 25. Board chairman Ian Everard signed for the agency on December 1. The agreement runs twelve months from the last signature.

It set up a joint working group of no more than two people from each body, meeting at least monthly, to evaluate alternatives. The agreement lists four: payments in lieu of taxes, agency-funded capital improvements, cost-sharing with the city or county, and combinations of those. The engine is a capital improvement.

"We're the only example of it in the state of Idaho," Butzlaff told the council, and he said he and Maltaverne would present it at an American Planning Association conference in Dillon, Montana. A Redevelopment Association of Idaho memorandum circulated to the agency's board in March names two cases, Eagle Fire District against the Eagle urban renewal agency and North Ada Fire District against Garden City's, and reports that after the law passed, many fire districts sought withdrawal and agencies with debts on their books refused them.

The fire district's levy rate has fallen by about 61 percent since 2015, from .001592143 to .000621823, and the single largest drop came in 2022, when House Bill 389 recalculated how Idaho sets levy rates and cut the district's by 37 percent in one year. Engine 2, Chief Mike Maltaverne told the Victor council in August, is "a 25-year-old vehicle that's at the end of its service life." "Due to some state laws that have been put in place for budget growth," he said, "we're falling behind in vehicle purchases, and so Engine 2 has basically been a victim of that."

Abigail Germaine of Elam & Burke, the Boise firm that advises the agency, wrote in February that it could pay for fire district infrastructure but not for operations, and that a fire station would take a public vote if the agency covered most of the cost. Any attempt to work around the limits, she warned twice, "will be met with heightened scrutiny." On a fire truck she left more room. The agency, she wrote, "may be able to justify a percentage portion of the cost of a fire truck, or other personal property, that will be used within the boundaries of the Agency district."

The two districts cover 27 percent of Victor's acreage, and Butzlaff set the agency's share to match. The district budgeted $1 million for the engine, its equipment and its tools, so 27 percent is $270,000, paid off over four years. If the South district forms, the share rises to 44 percent of the same engine, or $440,000.

"The fire engine actually is gonna be about $800,000, not $1 million," Butzlaff told his board on August 3, passing on a figure the chief had given him after the schedule was built. Maltaverne said the district paid $800,000 for its last engine and the manufacturer is trying to hold that price for a second one, with a quote expected within two weeks. He called ordering engines a year or two apart at the same price "completely unheard of." At $800,000 the agency's share would be about $216,000. The district's own fleet inventory, prepared in May, lists the replacement at $1,014,000.

"The terms of the reimbursement agreement have not yet been negotiated," the agency wrote on August 31 in response to a records request; "therefore, no responsive record currently exists." Butzlaff told his board the chief "is willing to go ahead and make a recommendation to his board to essentially advance the funds out of capital reserves to buy the fire truck in the here and now."

The covenant that keeps the fire district from opposing a new revenue allocation area expires around December 1. Butzlaff told the council the agency hopes to have the South district formed "by the end of the calendar year, maybe give or take a little bit," which would fall after the protection lapses. All three parties can extend it in writing, or replace it with a binding agreement.

What to watch: The board appropriates the $50,000 when it adopts its budget, and Maltaverne said the engine is on the agenda for the same meeting. Both put it on September 21, though the city's meetings page still listed September 14 as of September 1. "We have to approve before October 1st," he told the board on August 3.

How a Fire Engine Kept Victor's Urban Renewal Program Alive

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