The Wrong Answer for Eagle

Electing Brad Pike would be a step backwards

Four years ago, conservative citizens of Eagle saw that their city was being run by leftists so they took action. A slate of candidates — Jason Pierce, Charlie Baun, and Brad Pike — won the mayor’s office and two council seats, ensuring conservative governance of Eagle for the next four years.

Source: Brad Pike on LinkedIn

The left did not take that defeat lightly. Former mayor Stan Ridgeway organized a nonprofit called SOS Eagle along with several other prominent Eagle Democrats to attack every decision made by the mayor and council. They created a PAC late last year to gather signatures to recall Mayor Pierce and council members Baun, Pike, Melissa Gindlesperger, and Helen Russell. Though it failed, it gave them an ongoing platform to continue their attacks.

All of that was prologue to the 2023 campaigns. Ridgeway gave former council candidate Marc Degl’Innocenti’s mayoral campaign its first donation while Christopher Hadden, the would-be vote splitter from 2019, filed to run for city council. Councilman Pike, perhaps listening to the loud and angry voices coming from SOS Eagle, saw his chance and filed to run for mayor himself.

Stan Ridgeway —former mayor, cofounder of SOS Eagle, and early donor to the Degl’Innocenti campaign —also filed to run. If one spoiler wasn’t enough in 2019, maybe two would do the trick in 2023. If that was the plan, it worked — the mayoral race headed to a runoff on December 5 after no candidate received more than 50% of the vote.

I endorsed Jason Pierce for reelection earlier this year, and my position has not changed. I believe he has a deep understanding of how to maintain conservative principles in a growing city and it is imperative that we stay the course. That said, I also believe that a Pike administration would undo some of the last four years of that very progress.

Despite facing a recall attempt just one year ago, Pike turned around and made every complaint against him into the platform of his mayoral campaign. While that message has resonated with a very outspoken group of citizens on Facebook and Nextdoor, it has forced him into essentially running against himself.

You see, like many city governments, all major decisions in Eagle are made by the council. While the mayor chairs city council meetings, he does not vote unless there is a tie. Every action taken by the City of Eagle over the last four years was approved by the council, including Brad Pike. While the mayor can initiate discussions on various issues, ultimately his job is to carry out the will of the council.

The Pike campaign has completely ignored that, telling potential voters that as mayor he is going to reverse or undo many of the decisions that he took part in as a member of the council. It seems that he is counting on voter ignorance of the way city government works, which I would consider unbecoming of a conservative candidate for office.

Yes, I believe that Brad Pike is a conservative at heart, and I have long respected him. But I believe this mayoral campaign has been extremely cynical, playing off the complaints of a loud minority of residents that mischaracterize important issues. It’s been very disappointing to watch.

Pike’s strategy all along was to make it to the runoff and then attempt to win with support from Stan Ridgeway’s Democratic voters. Indeed, within hours of the final results being published Pike was endorsed by Crystal Ivie, the far-left Democrat who ran against Ted Hill for Legislature last year:

One of the largest and most active left-wing PACs in Idaho, Conservation Voters for Idaho, which supports progressive candidates such as Boise Mayor Lauren McLean, has also thrown in with Pike:

On at least two occasions, high density apartment developers have donated the maximum $1,000 to the Pike campaign, only for those donations to be returned and scrubbed from the Sunshine website. Good for him for standing on his principles, but it raises the question of why companies like that would seek to donate to him in the first place.

It makes you wonder what Democrats, leftist PACs, and developers see in Brad Pike, or more likely, what they don’t like about Jason Pierce.

The centerpiece of the Pike campaign has been public safety. Brad Pike himself is a former firefighter and current commissioner of the Eagle Fire District, and he quickly gained support from the Eagle Firefighters Union. His desire to add ten more police officers seems to have won him the support of two law enforcement associations, Code 3 to 1 and the Fraternal Order of Police. Yet I maintain that this desire is not based on a real need for additional personnel, rather it is in response to an imagined threat of increased crime that simply doesn’t exist.

The City of Eagle contracts with the Ada County Sheriff’s Office for police protection. Ada County deputies are permanently assigned as Eagle police officers for the duration of the contract. This benefits us in two ways: first, it keeps costs to the taxpayer low since we don’t need to duplicate ACSO infrastructure, but second, we have access to the resources of the entire sheriff’s office if necessary.

The contract with ACSO was up for renewal this year and Mayor Pierce was negotiating with Sheriff Matt Clifford, who had recommended two additional officers to cover Avimor, which the city council voted to annex earlier this year. As part of the negotiation, Eagle Police Chief Ryan Wilkie wrote a letter to Mayor Pierce and the council laying out his perspective. Brad Pike caused the letter to be released to the public and it was shared on social media as evidence that Pierce was undercutting public safety. However, Pike neglected to release Pierce’s reply the next day, and the other three council members authored a joint statement lamenting that Pike had chosen to politicize police negotiations.

In the end the contract was ratified by the council in October, adding the two officers that the ASCO had requested. That did not stop Pike from making even that ratification political, complaining that they were adding more deputies without finding enough funding, essentially taking a position opposite his own arguments that we need ten more officers.

In any case, the damage was done. Many low-info voters took it as a truism that voting for Pike was the only way to maintain public safety in Eagle.

Councilman Charlie Baun posted a five part series on Nextdoor refuting much of Pike’s rhetoric. I reposted it on this platform with his permission, because it goes into a lot of detail about how things have worked within the city council these past four years.

Pike has also attacked Mayor Pierce as being in the pocket of “developers and special interests”. He doesn’t define what those “special interests” are, exactly, but the word itself is scary:

Notice my own name on that screenshot. I put my money where my mouth is, giving to the Pierce campaign because I believe he is the best choice for Eagle and he is under tremendous attack by the left and their pawns. As of the last update to the Sunshine website, 135 donors have given to Jason Pierce for this campaign, compared to 48 for Brad Pike. While Pike clearly has the advantage in the echo chamber of Nextdoor and private Facebook groups, Pierce has clearly won the support of more Eagle citizens and small businesses.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. Brad Pike made a conscious and cynical choice to adopt the positions of the very people who spent four years attacking him and use those positions for political advancement. I also believe that Stan Ridgeway has been orchestrating much of this in the background since the moment he was defeated by Jason Pierce in 2019.

If elected, Pike would likely advocate for increased high-density development, higher taxes, and less of an emphasis on what makes Eagle unique in Idaho. His tenure on the city council of Hollister, California is instructive. While in power there he and his colleagues ran up a $3 million deficit, then pushed a 1% sales tax hike that had already been rejected by voters. Pike said it was necessary for public safety — sound familiar? He then approved a 10% raise for city staff that took effect during the Great Recession when regular citizens were struggling. While on the Hollister city council, Brad Pike also supported high density development above and beyond that city’s comprehensive plan.

Brad Pike has made common cause with the same people who tried to recall him a year ago, he is courting support from far-left Democrats, and his entire campaign is based on voters not understanding the different roles of mayor and council in city government. I do not believe that Brad Pike has the depth of knowledge and experience to run the City of Eagle, and I fear he will find himself quickly overwhelmed should he prove victorious.

No matter what happens, our conservative city council will do their best to keep us on track, but we have been tremendously blessed to have someone of Jason Pierce’s caliber in the driver’s seat these past four years. I hope Eagle voters make the right choice on December 5 and give him another four to keep us moving in the right direction.