Bobby Faulkner

If you look up the name of a city on Wikipedia it will show you a map of the state indicating the county where the city is located and a small outline of the city map. Most cities are irregulary shaped blob, sometimes with little bits sticking out here and there. A map of Twin Falls shows two tiny blobs connected to the city by a thin line. The thin lines are highways and the tiny blob is a little bitty place a mile or more from the city. How do those little blobs out there become part of the city? Well, I can tell you about one of them.

Back in the day - when I was a kid in what was called grade school (up to junior high) there were a couple of lumber companies in Twin Falls. In those days a town of any size - a handful of thousands - would have a lumber company and a good hardware store. One of the lumber companies was owned by an old fellow who was one of the upper class that was on the way out due to not having any offspring or the offspring not hanging around. The handful of Jewish families pretty much disappeared that way as the kids grew up and went to college and didn't come back, preferring the bigger cities. Old man Faulkner wasn't Jewish though, he had just one kid and that kid was a homosexual who also preferred the city life. Anyway the old man was about retired but owned a piece of one of the banks and was chairman of the board there for years. Then he died but that was later, meanwhile the lumber company didn't change with the times and the other one got most of the business.

The other lumber company was owned by a younger man, not one of the old money people. He had a pretty big operation by then and was into construction as well, had a ready-mix operation. Sometimes in the 1970s he built a housing project about a mile a a half out of town. It was on a narrow two-lane road where a number of people got killed during the time I lived there but that doesn't have anything to do with the housing project. Anyway he built about forty houses on a little spot, had one access from the dangerous highway and three dead-end streets with houses on both sides. Each house had about a quarter acre and not having a city sewer system handy he put septic tanks on each quarter acre lot.

The minimum acreage for a septic tank was an acre and then it had to pass a perc test, but somehow or other... well, this digression may explain it.

One pretty rich dude, part of a family of pretty wealthy entrepreneurs, owned a good bit of land on the south side of town. South side in Twin Falls was a pretty good place (the northwest part was the bad part) and this land was all empty. He had it cleared and leveled and put in some streets, I used to drive through there while they were building it, Cindy Street and Melanie Lane and Crystal Drive, named after the girls in the family. The streets were a pretty simple matter of grading and packing and having the local asphalt company lay down a sheet of asphalt. He got the houses built and sold and the city assumed responsibility for the streets.

Couple of years went by and the streets were in pretty bad shape. People who lived there were pretty unhappy, especially the ones on the last street. I believe it was Alicia street. Where the street was was once a ditch, a pretty big ditch. Had a bridge over it where the highway crossed it, about ten feet deep and twenty wide. It was generally dry except during heavy rains since it was there for drainage. The developer filled in the ditch and raised it enough to build on. Like the streets that had potholes after the first winter that last two rows of houses had problems once the ditch began to settle. The houses were all built on concrete slabs so there wasn't any jacking up and adding blocks - the floor just sank into the ground. These were your working-class subdivision houses, financed through local banks or one of the federal loan programs. So you had people who could barely afford a house had bought one that was sinking into the ground.

Now the folks that ran the place looked around at each other and talked about how to fix it. Mr. Bridges was still something of a prominent citizen as they were called and had a big family that was enmeshed into local society between business deals and marriages and his financial situation wasn't what it once had been, which probably had something to do with the big scam he had pulled. But they couldn't let him to to prison or even be sued into bankruptcy. What to do? Make it someone else's problem, in this case the taxpayers.

So the city council jawed about it at meetings while the streets fell apart. Finally they decided to hire a consultant to tell them what to do, had a fellow from Memphis come over and study the situation. A few weeks or so later - the Twin Falls Weekly reporting on each meeting - a final report was issued. To quote the consultant - Normally in cases such as this I find that someone has been paying off the inspector, however that is not the case here since you don't have an inspector.

The newspaper reported that too, but as someone once infamously said, what difference does it make? The streets had to be fixed and if the perpetrator wasn't going to be held accountable the taxpayers would have to cover it. When was it ever not so? The houses were another matter, some were torn down and rebuilt as the ground had been settling for a few years and wasn't going to get much worse. Others were patched up and sold.

For what it's worth the Bridges family is considerably less prominent than it once was. One of the kids was my age, we graduated from high school together. Pretty good kid, M section but fairly bright. I figured him to be pretty normal but one day his wife caught him in flagrante delicto with a male dance teacher. He was set to take over his father's lucrative insurance agency (one of the big national franchises) and pretty much went into seclusion and wasn't seen much thereafter. I like to think it was shame, not because I wish him any ill but I would like to think that once in a while one of them is actually ashamed. I suppose embarrassment will have to suffice.

OK, where were we? Oh yeah, the other housing project with the sewage problem. Old Bobby Faulkner societally in the same boat as the Bridges clan but they weren't gone yet. So to keep things calm the city council again came to the rescue. This time it wasn't just a matter of spending money though. The development was outside the city limits and they couldn't just fix it, unless the place became a part of the city. As I observed you had to drive a mile and something out of the city to get there and the only human habitation besides the housing project as a few houses along one side of the highway. So an annexation plan was drawn up to put that section of highway and a couple hundred yards on either side into the city. That would take care of the problem, right?

Not quite. The city sewer system was already ancient and about overloaded. How about a new sewage treatment plant? Yeah, that's the ticket. Purchase some land behind the housing project and build a nice new facility. Get grants from the state (which would get most or all of it from the federal government) and tell the citizens it isn't coming out of their pocket. To be fair very little of it was. Then another fellow who had done something to Mr. Faulkner decides he needs to get in on it. He sold about a dozen lots along the same highway another mile and a half further out and they needed sewage service. Annexation plan gets revised and extended, take in another mile or so of highway and a little strip of houses. Only problem was getting the sewer line to the treatment facility across about a mile of farmland. A nice old fellow, friend of Dad's had a place on the highway across from the new houses, they needed an easement across his property to get the line to and under the highway to the houses. He gave it to them, he was like that, being peaceful inasmuch as possible, but Dad said he was pretty disgusted with the whole thing.

Anyhow, that's why a map of Twin Falls looks the way it does.