Pocatello City Council President Jim Johnston is championing a long-shot plan he’s convinced would result in big municipal savings, thereby easing a weighty tax burden on many Bannock County residents.
Nonetheless, Johnston acknowledges a lot of people won’t like the idea he’s espousing — especially if they live in Pocatello’s northern neighbor, Chubbuck.
Johnston is in the early stages of researching the merits of merging Pocatello and Chubbuck to avoid duplicating services and to improve efficiency. He hopes to have the issue of combining the cities on next spring’s election ballot. “There’s quite a group who feel we could accomplish a lot if we went to the very highest source of spending within our Bannock County, and that would be the two cities,” said Johnston, who plans to make merging the cities an issue in his upcoming bid for re-election.