Two stories about Bellevue's public land ran in the Idaho Mountain Express this year, and they pull in opposite directions. One says the city's most-used natural space just got bigger. The other says the city wants to lock down how people are allowed to use it. Read together, they say more about daily life in Bellevue than either story tells on its own.
A Preserve That Keeps Growing, One Small Parcel at a Time
Howard Preserve runs along the Big Wood River within walking distance of downtown. The Idaho Mountain Express describes it as a primary city asset at 36 acres with three miles of trails, drawing thousands of visitors a year according to the Friends of the Howard Preserve.
That acreage didn't arrive all at once. The Wood River Land Trust traces the preserve back to the Howard family, who stewarded the land starting in 1972 before a conservation easement locked in 12.5 acres of floodplain for public use. Everything since has come in small pieces.
| Year | Addition | Size | How it happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founding easement | Howard family land | 12.5 acres | Family stewardship formalized with the Land Trust and the city |
| 2012 | Harris Property, southern boundary | 1.38 acres | Direct acquisition |
| 2017 | Halverson and Gardner lots | 1.38 acres | $174,600 grant from Blaine County's Land, Water & Wildlife Program |
| 2026 | Southern boundary parcel | 1.34 acres | Land purchase funded by the Wood River Land Trust |
Line up the last three rows and a pattern shows up that no single press release mentions. Every addition since 2012 has landed within a hundredth of an acre of the one before it. This isn't a preserve that grows in leaps. It grows in grant cycles, roughly an acre and a third at a time, whenever a landowner is ready to sell and county funding lines up. The 1.34-acre expansion reported this month isn't an anomaly. It's the third time in fourteen years the preserve has grown by almost exactly this much.
The Reservation the City Wants to End
Growth is only half the story. In February 2026, city staff opened a revised management plan for how the preserve gets used, not just how much of it exists. City code currently lets groups of up to 25 gather there without triggering a permit, which is how the 2019 Haunted Forest Halloween event, which drew several hundred visitors, became possible in the first place.
That flexibility may be going away. City Clerk Amy Phelps summarized where those conversations landed in a memo to the council:
"Conversations with representatives of the Friends of the Howard Preserve, the Wood River Land Trust, and the Bellevue Parks Committee indicate a general consensus that reservations at the Howard Preserve should be discontinued entirely."
For a resident planning a family reunion or a neighborhood gathering at the preserve, that sentence matters more than the acreage count. The preserve is getting bigger and, at the same time, harder to book for anything organized.
Memorial Park Has Its Own Unfinished Argument
Memorial Park sits on 3rd Street between Cedar and Elm, with a basketball and tennis court and a play structure for kids. It's also, per the City of Bellevue, the site of the town's annual Labor Day Celebration, which falls in early September.
Last fall, the council took up a proposal to change how that court space gets used. Mayor Christina Giordani recommended putting an $85,000 grant toward restoring the basketball courts and restriping one for three new pickleball courts. The recommendation followed a survey of 131 Bellevue residents and visitors. Adults favored amphitheater upgrades and pickleball. Kids, surveyed separately, asked for splash pads and a zipline.
The council conversation didn't stay tidy. Councilman Tom Bergin raised a real complication: pickleball courts in Boise have been shut down over lawsuits filed by neighbors over noise. Councilwoman Jessica Obenauf offered a workaround, suggesting volleyball courts instead. The council agreed to at least consider soundproofing as part of the fence repairs, but no vote followed. Giordani said she'd bring the project back for further discussion at an undetermined date.
That was roughly ten months ago. Nothing in this month's council coverage suggests it has returned to the agenda. If you've been waiting to hear whether Memorial Park gets its pickleball courts, the honest answer is that the city hasn't decided, and there's no sign it's decided to decide either.
What's Actually Open Right Now
Whatever happens with reservations and pickleball, the trails are usable today. The Howard Preserve Figure Eight is rated Green difficulty, runs about 2,306 feet, and barely changes elevation, gaining and losing about 8 feet over its full loop, which makes it an easy after-work walk rather than a workout. It starts from the parking area on Martin Lane.
The Access Trail that leads to it is flat, wide, and doubles as a destination on its own. It leads to a footbridge and a beach that's described as kid and dog friendly, with handicapped parking close to the bridge for anyone who needs it. Dogs are welcome throughout the preserve, though the Land Trust asks that they stay under voice control and that owners clean up after them to protect water quality in the river.
The Table Bellevue Keeps Setting
Bellevue's food scene doesn't get the attention Ketchum's does, but it's not thin. Cutthroat Club runs dinner Tuesday through Sunday starting at 5 p.m., with the bar opening at 4, and adds lunch service Friday through Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Reservations go through the restaurant directly at cutthroat-club.com.
TUNDRA Restaurant has built a following well beyond Bellevue's city limits. One Yelp reviewer summed it up as "the best restaurant in Wood River Valley and one of the top in Idaho," which is a big claim for a restaurant in a town of this size, but it's the kind of thing you hear more than once if you ask around. South Valley Pizzeria has its own local following, with regulars pointing to the wood river supreme and the Thai chicken pizza as the two to order. And La Cabañita Mex #2 has drawn comparisons to a similarly named restaurant up the road in Ketchum, which reviewers describe as a sister location.
None of this required a chamber of commerce press release to notice. It's just what's actually open, and what people are actually ordering, this month.
The Same Argument, Twice
Put the preserve and the park next to each other and the coincidence stops looking like a coincidence. In both cases, the city is expanding what it owns or offers while simultaneously debating how tightly to control who gets to use it and how. Howard Preserve keeps growing acre by acre while the reservation policy tightens. Memorial Park's court space sits ready for an upgrade that keeps stalling on the same question Boise already answered the hard way: what happens when a shared amenity generates noise complaints from the people who live next to it.
That tension, not any single ribbon-cutting, is what defines Bellevue's public life this year. It's a small city working out, in public meetings and grant applications, how much shared space it can add before shared space starts creating friction of its own.
If you're watching Bellevue for reasons beyond a Saturday walk, whether you're weighing a purchase near the preserve, thinking about how a property close to Main Street sits relative to projects like this, or trying to understand how these local decisions ripple into property values, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this market closely. Jordan Jadallah works Bellevue and the rest of Blaine County daily, and can walk you through what these changes mean for a specific address. Schedule a free consultation to talk through it.
