Boise Mayor Lauren McLean faces a challenger to her right. Does he have a chance?

With six months to go until the November general election in Boise, incumbent Mayor Lauren McLean is facing a challenger to her right as she seeks a second term in office.

Mike Masterson, a former police chief backed by a former mayor, is lodging a run against McLean with a campaign taking aim at her management of public safety.

Masterson served as chief of the Boise Police Department from 2005 to 2015. In an interview with the Idaho Statesman, he outlined a campaign constructed in opposition to McLean, taking aim at what he called “crisis, waste and drift” under her administration. His criticisms included complaints about transparency, police department management and allowing more housing density in Boise’s neighborhoods.

City elections are officially nonpartisan, and Masterson is running as an independent.

McLean, who served for several years on the City Council before becoming the first woman elected to be Boise mayor, has focused on affordable housing and transitioning the city to clean energy since taking office in January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. She declined to be interviewed for this article.

When asked about Masterson entering the race, McLean’s campaign manager, Melanie Folwell, told the Statesman by text that McLean is committed to “making sure that folks have access to the ballot, that they’re engaged in the civic process.”

“It’s core to her values and consistent with her life’s work,” Folwell said. “This election is no different, and of course anyone and everyone is free to run for mayor of their city. That’s democracy.”

While experts say McLean is expected to benefit from her name recognition as the incumbent and a powerful donor base, the city is also in the midst of implementing a new zoning ordinance that has gotten pushback from some parts of the city, and some still have questions about her management of the police department and police oversight office.

Masterson criticizes police department management

In his interview with the Statesman, Masterson rifled through a series of complaints about the department, including the resignation at McLean’s request of former Chief Ryan Lee last fall and the large number of vacancies in the police department. Boise had 33 vacancies among 333 authorized positions for sworn officers in March, according to the city.

“My community, when I retired, I felt was headed in the right direction,” Masterson said. “And now, I’m not so convinced that that has happened in the last three years.”

Masterson also indicated he thought McLean should not have hired Lee in the first place, and that she had not properly explained the circumstances that led to his dismissal. Masterson served as interim chief before Lee was hired.

Turmoil at the police department may have contributed to McLean’s decision late last month to select a veteran of the Boise Police Department, with wide appeal among the rank and file, as the new police chief.

While the mayor had previously announced she would hire a recruiting firm and begin an extended search for a new leader after Lee left, she ended up choosing Ron Winegar, who was interim chief for six months, and did not conduct a wider search. Winegar was also a finalist for the job in 2020, when McLean hired Lee.

“I think that picking the interim chief to be the permanent chief might be a really good strategic move, in terms of her being a candidate for office, (and) not wanting to keep that question about what’s going on at the police department open,” Boise State political science professor Stephanie Witt told the Statesman. Witt noted that a national search could mean the selection of a new chief would have been delayed until close to — or even after — the election.

An investigation into potential racism at the department, spurred by revelations of the racist views of a retired captain, has been on hold this spring after a Washington, D.C., law firm spent most of the money it was awarded to conduct the investigation. Steptoe and Johnson, the Washington, D.C. law firm investigating, is scheduled to present its findings to the City Council on Tuesday, according to the city.

“Appointing somebody who is also a longtime Boise Police Department person kind of cuts the wind out of the sails of the former chief running for mayor,” Witt said.

Masterson criticized McLean’s process for hiring for the position and said the community should be more involved when chiefs are selected.

He also blamed McLean for what he called a lack of transparency, noting the frequently cited personnel exemption that city lawyers use to not disclose records to media and the public, as well as the city’s policy of not disclosing where city officials travel on municipal business until after the fact.

“Secrecy is the enemy of good government,” he said, adding that “people forget” that 20 years ago Boise Mayor Brent Coles resigned amid a controversy over his misuse of public funds.

McLean, Masterson at odds over density plans

A hallmark of McLean’s administration has been a focus on housing.

For the first time in more than 60 years, the city is proposing to make changes that would offer incentives to developers to build slightly larger apartment units in residential neighborhoods. The proposal would allow smaller lot sizes and encourages denser, more pedestrian-oriented development by making it easier to approve certain projects more in line with the city’s plans.

Boise Planning Director Tim Keane — McLean’s hire — has championed the changes as a necessary correction to make the city more walkable, friendly to public transit and less reliant on cars. To do that, development needs to grow differently than it has in the past and allow for more types of housing across the city, he has said.

McLean has also pushed for partnerships with private developers to build designated affordable housing and permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness.

In his interview with the Statesman, Masterson criticized the city’s plan to overhaul its zoning code, which is scheduled to go before the City Council next month. While he said there are “a lot of good things incorporated in that upzoning,” he thinks it “goes too far.”

Masterson said he liked the push for more density along transit corridors that the new rules would encourage but adds that the changes would have “disparate impacts” on certain neighborhoods, and would not affect neighborhoods governed by homeowners associations. He also said the mayor’s aims for more widespread public transit use are unrealistic.

“What’s being proposed, in terms of automatically doing things for the ease of doing it, we’re depriving our citizens of the right to be notified and the right to due process in … terms of what goes into our neighborhoods,” Masterson said.

Planning Department spokesperson Lindsay Moser previously told the Statesman that the zoning code rewrite — which has had many public meetings and a citizen advisory committee during the three years it has been in the works — treats different parts of the cities “equitably.” Some of the allowed higher densities are along major roads and larger neighborhood roads that appear throughout the city, which she said means “no neighborhood is excluded or targeted.”

Masterson said the city should spend more time talking to neighborhood associations about proposed changes, and should do things “neighborhood by neighborhood.” He praised Harris Ranch, a planned area in Southeast Boise that collects its own taxes for infrastructure, and said the city should focus on finding and approving another similar planned community.

“We’ve got a lot of land that is vacant that is south of the interstate,” Masterson said.

Climate goals too ‘aggressive,’ Masterson says

McLean has set goals of having city government use 100% clean electricity this year and achieve carbon neutrality by 2035. She wants the entire city to be carbon neutral by 2050.

The mayor’s plans come as scientists increasingly warn that the world will likely cross a temperature increase mark in the next decade, beyond which more catastrophic shifts become more likely. To avoid hitting that threshold, drastic cuts to fossil fuels are needed in the coming years, according to United Nations scientists.

In his interview with the Statesman, Masterson said McLean’s climate goals are too strenuous, and that the city should slow down its efforts to address the threat.

“I think we (should) continue to work towards those goals but at a much more moderate than aggressive level,” Masterson said. “We’re not going to push people to electric vehicles in the next five years.”

As an example, Masterson said he plans for his next car to be a hybrid, but not electric.

President Joe Biden’s administration has set a goal of having 50% of all automobile sales be electric by 2030.

Uphill battle beating an incumbent

Masterson announced his candidacy for mayor in March and has the backing of prominent Boise politicos who are now out of office. Maryanne Jordan, a former Democratic state senator and Boise City Council president, is his campaign treasurer, and former Mayor Dave Bieter told the Statesman he is supporting Masterson. Prominent law enforcement figures, former Republican Attorney General David Leroy and former Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney have also donated to his campaign.

Masterson’s campaign is set up to pull more right-leaning voters away from McLean, which local political analysts say is a difficult prospect in Idaho’s Democratic capital. McLean has raised more than $232,000, while Masterson has raised $23,000.

Boise State University political science professor Jeffrey Lyons told the Statesman that name recognition matters a lot in a mayor’s race, and that McLean is well-situated because she has a record to run on with one term in office, but hasn’t yet been around enough for voters to grow fatigued of her.

“In this sort of race, you have to assume that the mayor has a pretty considerable incumbency advantage,” Lyons said. He noted that very few Boise precincts went for Republican Donald Trump in the 2020 election and said he isn’t convinced controversies at the police department will be objectionable to voters — or even on their minds — enough to sway them.

“My guess is that’s not going to be on the top of most people’s minds,” he said.

Lyons was less sure about how the zoning code rewrite could affect the race, both because it’s a complicated issue and because many of the changes would not happen for years to come.

If the City Council approves the code changes in June, it is possible the new law will not be effective until after the election. Lyons said it would be more likely to affect a political race in five or 10 years.

Witt said that opposition to zoning changes can come from both sides of the political aisle.

“It’s a tough sell to say to people, ‘This may result in some changes to areas you have known and are fond of but it will provide more housing,’” she said. “(Masterson) has got the easier thing I think of playing to people’s fears that their house won’t be worth as much or their neighborhood is going to change, by being the person who is opposed to the upzoning.”

Lyons said that if the former chief is able to spend 60%-70% of what McLean does, that would indicate he has been able to gain strong name recognition. The presence of Republican-leaning voters in Boise means McLean “needs to run a pretty serious campaign,” Lyons added, but she also benefits from a list of accomplishments and a long list of donors.

“She’s in the spot you kind of want to be in, I think,” he said.