Maverik wants to build a convenience store and fuel station at Cole Road and Fairview Avenue in Boise, reviving a project that has sat dormant since the company's last application quietly fell apart years ago. The site is the former home of Cole Elementary School, and this time the proposal lands in a city with a freshly rewritten zoning code that could reshape what gets built there.
According to Boise Dev, The Land Group has submitted early planning documents to the City of Boise on Maverik's behalf, outlining a 5,637-square-foot convenience store, 31 parking stalls and 10 double-sided fuel pumps. The filing is still a pre-application, meaning the details could shift once city staff weigh in, and The Land Group needs to work with the city before the project can move forward at all.
The corner has a long, stalled history. Maverik bought the property from the Boise School District in 2014, years after the district closed Cole Elementary in 2008 and demolished the building in 2009. The company has held onto the land ever since, even as its development plans repeatedly stalled.
A Decade of False Starts
Maverik first tried to develop the site in 2018, with a preliminary plat and rezoning application covering 7.85 acres and seeking to rezone 6.566 acres from A-1 to C-2D at the southwest corner of Cole and Fairview, according to filings with the City of Boise Planning and Development Services. That earlier site plan, as the station's report described, showed a large convenience store with pumps along Fairview Avenue, parking for nearly 300 cars, and as many as ten additional buildings beyond the gas station itself. Maverik withdrew that 2018 application before it went anywhere.
The following year, Maverik submitted a modified, less-specific plan for a rezone and land division. Around the same time, a broader 2019 redevelopment proposal for the surrounding parcel sought to split it into three parts, though the project's sponsor told the Idaho Statesman at the time that “Users and uses haven't been identified yet.” Plans for a health clinic moved forward on surrounding land in 2019, and a pocket neighborhood followed in 2020. That broader vision, per the Cole School site redevelopment project tracked by Boise Dev, eventually included a Primary Health clinic along Cole, a car wash along Fairview, a future retail site, and a pocket neighborhood of 39 cottage-style homes. Through all of it, Maverik said it would eventually build on its own parcel, maintaining ownership even as the project sat shelved.
New Zoning Rules Could Reshape the Design
Since Maverik's 2018 and 2019 proposals, the City of Boise has adopted a new zoning code, which took effect in April 2026 and placed fresh limits on gas station design and placement. The Cole-Fairview parcel now carries MX-3 zoning, and under the City of Boise's Mixed-Use Active standards, no surface parking or vehicle-oriented ancillary facilities, such as service stations, may be located between a building and any adjacent street. That means fuel canopies cannot sit between the street and the convenience store building without a variance or rezoning.
The same MX-3 standards also require that at least 60 percent of approved ground-floor street frontage in areas under common ownership be occupied by active uses, according to the city's zoning code. Separately, the city's allowed-use table notes that a use marked “C” or “C*” requires a Conditional Use Permit, reviewed through a public hearing where it can be approved, approved with conditions, or denied, per the City of Boise's allowed-use guidance. None of that evidence establishes what approval path this specific proposal will take, only the rules it will have to navigate.
A Notoriously Rough Stretch of Road
Fairview Avenue near this intersection has its own track record of trouble. The city recorded 350 crashes over five years on the Fairview stretch between Cole and Curtis roads, and Idaho Transportation Department data show 11 serious injuries in that same study area between 2020 and 2024, the Idaho Statesman reported. Boise has since landed a $1 million federal grant to study traffic safety along that corridor.
For now, the Maverik proposal remains in its earliest planning stage, with no finalized site plan or city decision on the record. Whether the project clears Boise's updated zoning hurdles, and what the final design looks like, will depend on the back-and-forth between The Land Group and city planners in the months ahead.
