New Pocatello mayor lays out strategies to benefit the community ‘as a whole’
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth story in our Looking Ahead series featuring candid interviews with east Idaho’s new mayors. Read our previous stories with Idaho Falls Mayor Lisa Burtenshaw here, Ammon Mayor Brian Powell here and Blackfoot Mayor Scott Stufflebeam here.
POCATELLO – Pocatello has a new mayor, and he’s looking to run a new City Hall too.
Mark Dahlquist was sworn in on Jan. 8. While he’s already made some changes to the status quo in the past two weeks, the new mayor plans to keep working to improve all of Pocatello in the long term.
“Looking at all (the city’s) corridors, some will take longer. But hey, it all starts with a vision and a long-term plan,” Dahlquist told EastIdahoNews.com.
Dahlquist became mayor after winning two different elections. First, the 2025 general election, where he netted 40% of the vote, and then in the December mayoral run-off election, where he earned 62%.
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He said leading Pocatello was something he’s been thinking about for years. Dahlquist estimates that he first aspired to become mayor around 20 years ago.
Dahlquist was in a much different position in his life at that time. At that point, he was working at Farmers Insurance, but was “antsy (and) itching for a change.” By 2007, Dahlquist stepped away from his career in insurance to become the executive director of NeighborWorks Pocatello, a nonprofit entity that develops affordable homes.
While he made the career change because he saw it as “as an entity that really helped uplift Pocatello neighborhoods,” he hadn’t yet developed a passion for housing like he has today. But over time, that changed.
“When you have the families come in and the first-time home buyers, and you give them the key, and they’re just so super grateful, and they say, ‘You’ve changed my life.’ … More than anything, seeing the people first hand that were impacted by having a new home, it evolved,” Dahlquist said.
Now that Dahlquist has started what he hopes will be his “last career,” he plans to bring that passion to the city.
Economic development
Although there are factors the city can’t control, like interest rates or the cost of construction, Dahlquist thinks there’s more that can be done at the local level to help developers.
As a developer himself, Dahlquist always felt like there should be someone at the city serving in a liaison role to help guide developers through the approval process.
“My experience was always that the city employees were very knowledgeable, but there’s a lot of different silos that we get into, and it would have really helped us with development if we would have had to someone just guiding (us) because there (are) many, many steps,” Dahlquist said.
At a Jan. 16 Pocatello/Chubbuck Chamber of Commerce speaking event, Dahlquist spoke about his goal to “make Pocatello shine and compete.”
He said there’s a lot of long-term work to be done to improve Pocatello, but short-term steps can improve the city’s curb appeal.
He told EastIdahoNews.com that a good place to start is beautifying the water retention ponds along the Clark Street interchange.
“I’ll start out (there) … and if you talk to the planning department, there’s some good concept plans out there that are water-wise,” Dahlquist told EastIdahoNews.com.
And even more than just aesthetic improvements, this is a part of a long-term strategy to visually tie that corridor to downtown Pocatello, the heart of the city.
“Going down Clark Street, wouldn’t it be great if that road had the same look and feel as the streetscape in historic downtown? … Just for example, that’s a vision that I have. Make a really great, clean corridor,” Dahlquist said in his chamber speech.
Another place Dahlquist said could be improved in the short term is New Day Parkway. He noted the landscaping disappears when people cross the city boundary and enter Pocatello.
“You go down New Day Parkway, and it’s nicely landscaped. You go to the Pocatello side, it’s pretty rugged,” Dahlquist said.
He sees this as the beginning.
“Looking at all (the city’s) corridors, some will take longer. But hey, it all starts with a vision and a long-term plan,” Dahlquist said.
Increasing the housing supply
Dahlquist made improving housing affordability central to his mayoral campaign. Now that he’s in office, he plans to make that a reality.
“When I talk housing, it’s not just owner-occupied, but we have a serious shortage of affordable rental housing in the community,” Dahlquist said.
To meet this demand, Dahlquist wants to modernize the city’s zoning to make infill development of multi-unit housing more realistic for developers.
Dahlquist also favors more zoning that allows mixed commercial and residential uses in areas of the city currently zoned exclusively for commercial use.
“That’s a lot more flexible, where you could allow housing,” Dahlquist said.
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He used the Park Meadows Senior Apartments as an example. Before it was developed by NeighborWorks, it was vacant land zoned for commercial purposes.
“We were almost not able to put that development together because it was zoned commercial,” Dahlquist said.
According to Dahlquist, there’s more vacant or underused land like that within the city, and he wants the city to create an inventory of it.
“We have to do a look … at how areas of town are zoned, if we really are serious about housing,” Dahlquist said. “A developer doesn’t want to come in and speculate, and buy land and make an offer, not knowing if their housing development is going to work.”
Open-book city hall
Dahlquist also aims to increase transparency in the city, and while he’s already taken some steps, he said there’s still more work to be done.
Something Dahlquist has already implemented is moving the “Items from the Audience” agenda item from the end of City Council meetings to the beginning, allowing people to make comments to the council without having to stay for the entire meeting. This was first done at the Jan. 15 meeting.
And although he hasn’t implemented this yet, he expressed a desire in his chamber speech to move the Treasurer’s Report off the consent agenda, because “we need to have a little bit more detail there, and speak of that a little bit more in the public.”
The mayor has also started conversations with Rich Morgan, the city’s new chief financial officer, about creating budget dashboards that are easier for the public to understand.
“The multi-million dollar budget that Pocatello has, it’s pretty confusing, but if we can have a one- or two-page document that really tells us month-by-month where we’re at, that would be a good thing,” Dahlquist said in his speech.
Visible outcomes as a measure of success
By the end of this mayoral term, Dahlquist said he won’t have accomplished his long-term vision yet, but he aims for people to notice visible improvements to the city.
In four years, he wants people to see the city beautified, more housing options built with more under construction and a more vibrant business community. He also wants people have have the tools to have a better understanding of the city’s government functions.
Dahlquist hopes that at that time, people will be able to reflect and say, “During those last four years, some good, prudent decisions were made for the city, and … really for the population as a whole, and they didn’t benefit just a few people.”