Mayor McLean has selected 2 people to fill Boise City Council seats. See who she picked

Mayor Lauren McLean has appointed two new members to the Boise City Council to fill vacancies.

Colin Nash, an attorney and member of the Idaho House, will fill an at-large seat, according to a news release.

Latonia Haney Keith, an administrator at The College of Idaho and the board chair of Boise’s urban renewal agency, the Capital City Development Corp., will fill the District 3 seat, which covers the North End and Northwest Boise, the release said. She will be the first Black woman to serve on the council, the release added.

“After spending time with several of the candidates, and at a time when our highest priority is the availability and affordability of homes for Boiseans, I selected Latonia Keith and Colin Nash for their deep professional experience with housing policy, their readiness to hit the ground running, and importantly, their ability to secure the support of the City Council,” McLean said in the release.

The council plans to hold a meeting at noon on Thursday to take up the appointments. Members will vote on whether to OK McLean’s selections.

Who is Haney Keith?

Haney Keith worked for law firms in Chicago and taught as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University’s law school before moving to Boise, according to her résumé. In Chicago she led a pro bono law practice at the firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP.

After moving to Boise, she started a consulting business and became interim dean of Concordia University School of Law before it closed in 2020. She now serves as vice president of high impact practices at College of Idaho and was an adjunct professor at the University of Idaho College of Law in 2020, according to her résumé.

At Concordia, she also started a nonprofit law firm to teach students how to represent “underserved populations,” according to her application for the council seat. She became a CCDC commissioner in 2020.

In recent years, she has worked on community-based research projects about Idaho’s history of redlining — the practice of withholding services from neighborhoods with large minority populations — and racially restrictive covenants, according to her application. The research team has built a map of neighborhoods with racial covenants and plans to include overlap data about proximity to services like fresh food, parks, environmental hazards and medical facilities.

She told the Idaho Statesman by text that she is honored to have been selected and looks forward to “extending my public service during this bridge moment.”

Who is Nash?

Nash, a Democrat, has represented West Boise in the Idaho Legislature since 2020, and he serves on appropriations, environmental and judiciary committees.

He is an attorney with Intermountain Legal Group in Meridian and lives in Winstead Park.

In his application for the vacant seat, Nash said he wants to focus on affordable housing, “protecting critical municipal services through fiscally prudent budgeting” and managing relationships between local and state government.

In a phone interview, Nash said he plans to focus on the city’s zoning code rewrite, which will come before council in the coming months. The zoning code hasn’t been rewritten since the 1960s.

“Our needs as a community are changing rapidly, and they are a lot different than what our needs as a community were in the 1960s,” he said.

He added that he plans to run for the District 2 seat in November, and doesn’t intend to seek reelection to the Legislature.

Why were there vacancies?

Nash and Haney Keith will fill seats until the end of the year. A new council will be in place in 2024 after November’s city elections.

Boise is in the process of transitioning to six geographic districts for council seats, which is why there now is a mix of at-large and district seats.

The at-large vacancy was the result of Elaine Clegg’s recent decision to step down to lead Valley Regional Transit, the local public transit agency.

The vacancy in District 3 came to be after Lisa Sánchez, a renter, inadvertently lost her seat when she moved out of her district at the start of the year. She was one of the 54 people who applied to fill the vacancies, and was one of three finalists for her old seat.

Sánchez, who was elected with 57% of the vote in 2021, has indicated that she plans to run again in November.

Council members react to appointments

In interviews with the Statesman, council members indicated that Sánchez may not have had enough votes to get appointed.

“I’m not sure that the mayor felt like she had the confidence that council would vote and approve Lisa into that position,” Council Member Jimmy Hallyburton said. “I think that she believed that the council would see Latonia as a better candidate to actually serve the needs of the community.”

Hallyburton said he trusts McLean’s decision-making and likely would have supported whichever candidate she brought to fill the vacancy. He added that both Nash and Haney Keith are “incredible candidates” with “a history of commitment in the community.”

“I can understand why the mayor saw those talents and skills in each of these people,” he said. “I think that she’s got two really incredible people that she put forward.”

A spokesperson for McLean, Maria Weeg, declined to comment further on why the mayor had not awarded Sánchez the seat she won in the last election.

Council President Holli Woodings told the Statesman that it would have been difficult for her to support Sánchez returning, and said that she would look forward to bringing the new members up to speed on the zoning code rewrite.

“I think it’s difficult when a former member of council is blaming our city staff for something that (the former member) did,” she said. “It would be really difficult to welcome that person back to then work with our staff.”

Council Member Luci Willits told the Statesman that she would not have voted to appoint Sánchez — and told McLean that — primarily because she thought it might set a bad precedent for the new district system.

Willits said that while Sánchez’s loss of her seat was accidental, she doesn’t want other council members in the future to think that they could leave their district temporarily and get their seat back.

“If there becomes an expectation that you regain your seat, then people can start playing games that I don’t think are healthy for our system,” she said.

She also said Sánchez had voted to approve the plan that created the district system, and should have known the boundary.

“You should know your district if you are going to be a representative on the City Council,” she said.

Reservations about their fellow elected City Council member

Council Member Patrick Bageant told the Statesman that in conversation with McLean before applications for the vacancies were solicited, he stressed that he felt the council needed candidates who could “hit the ground running” for the length of their appointment. But he also said he would have had “real reservations” about voting to confirm Sánchez to the seat she once held.

He said those reservations included “honesty and integrity issues” surrounding her campaign finance expenditures as well as “false and misleading statements and sometimes lies” related to her efforts to regain her council seat.

After a review, the Ada County Elections Office found Sánchez’s expenses complied with Idaho law.

In letters from an attorney, Wendy Olson, Sánchez had demanded that she be “immediately” reinstated to her seat, arguing that she did not actually lose it when she briefly moved out of her district. The letters had also accused city staff members of not helping her verify that her new address would be within her district.

“I do not feel that I can in good conscience say this person will fulfill their oath and execute the duties of their office faithfully and legally,” Bageant said.

Council Member Elaine Clegg, who plans to resign tomorrow, told the Statesman that the mayor’s selections are “qualified, high-caliber people” and said that she has not been “particularly impressed” with Sánchez’s actions since she lost her seat.

“I think a different tone would have, frankly, meant a different outcome,” she said.

Sánchez did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a tweet on Wednesday evening, she asked the council to decline Haney Keith’s nomination “to honor the will of District 3 voters.”