This Idaho mayor race features incumbent, business owner and ‘America’s Got Talent’ star
Can a new-to-Idaho circus performer who won fame on a national talent show unseat an incumbent Boise-area mayor?
Cristin Sandu, a former acrobat who owns a trucking company called ISTICX and a photography studio in Kuna, is less than half the age of Kuna Mayor Joe Stear, who’s running for reelection to a third term. Sandu has lived in the Boise suburb for two years. Stear grew up in the town, seeing residential developers flip flat fields into subdivisions.
Long before, the area was filled with volcanic activity. The town is known for its namesake lava caves about five miles south, called the Kuna Caves. Its high school teams are the Kavemen. It’s a popular bedroom community. Over the last 20 years, Kuna’s population has quadrupled.
Three candidates are now running for mayor in Tuesday’s election. The third is Bobby Rossadillo, president of the Kuna Chamber of Commerce and owner of Kuna Healthcare and MedSpa.
All of the candidates have focused their campaigns on issues including growth, infrastructure and property taxes.
Joe Stear
Before his first stint as mayor, Stear, 64, ran a welding shop in town for about 40 years. He also spent nearly two decades as a volunteer firefighter and commissioner for the Kuna Rural Fire District. Later, he served a four-year term on the Kuna City Council.
He said now is a pivotal time for the city. How to grapple with the impact of population growth on local schools and infrastructure are among his top priorities. He said he also wants to expand Kuna’s commercial tax base to ease the burden of property taxes on homeowners.
Kuna had 15,210 residents in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Now, population estimates place the town at over 27,000 people.
“The growth has put a strain on classroom space that has greatly affected the learning environment,” he said.
During his tenure, the city purchased its formerly rented city hall building and built a new police station using impact fees paid by builders.
Stear also wants to continue expanding park facilities. He noted that the Boys and Girls Club of Ada County broke ground in June on a 27,500-square-foot building that will provide a space for children to go after school. He said there’s still a need for a recreation center, but he doesn’t want to ask voters to pay for bonds to finance it until commercial development increases enough to ease the property-tax burden on homeowners.
“We’re just at a point where the growing pains are such that we don’t have a lot of money to spend to get a lot of things done without increasing property taxes,” he said.
Under Stear, the city secured a deal with Meta, the social media giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, to bring a big data center to the city’s planned industrial park. He previously said the project will give Kuna a giant boost in industrial development that he hopes will help attract other companies to the city.
“Industrial is the way we’re going to create a better balance,” he said.
Cristin Sandu
Sandu, 29, was born in Moldova and moved to the U.S. around 2006 after his mother died.
He grew up in Las Vegas, following in his father’s footsteps by working in the entertainment industry as a circus performer and acrobat, and later as an event producer, orchestrating halftime shows for big-time hosts like the NBA and MTV Music Awards, as well as smaller corporate and special events.
He said he’s planned events for Justin Bieber, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, rapper 50 Cent and other celebrities.
While performing, he attended the University of Reno in northern Nevada, where he became treasurer of a young Republicans club. During his extracurricular work at the college, he said he got the chance to all of the Republican presidential nominees, including former President Donald Trump.
Sandu was featured in Season 7 of “America’s Got Talent” in 2012, where he performed a balancing act. He said exposure from the show boosted his performing career. In his audition tape, he built a wobbly stack of hollow cylinders, climbed the stack and then balanced on top of it.
But the pandemic brought the entertainment industry to a halt in 2020. So Sandu moved to Idaho. He met his wife at a coffee shop at the Village at Meridian, and they welcomed their first child earlier this year.
He told the Statesman by phone that he came to Kuna for its small-town feel, which he wants to preserve. He said wants to control the pace of new developments and build a more vibrant and friendly community. That includes creating new youth programs and after-school activities, and connecting residents with local businesses.
He agreed with Stear that the town’s property tax burden is disproportionately borne by residents.
“The past two years since I’ve been here, this town had expanded tremendously,” he said. “But we haven’t seen any major infrastructure changes.”
To combat rapid population growth, he said as mayor he would pursue grants to update the town’s infrastructure.
Sandu wasn’t as optimistic as Stear about the Meta’s technology plant. He said that while construction of the building will create labor opportunities, once the construction is finished, “it’s going to create a vacuum.” The Idaho Department of Commerce said in 2022 that the data center will bring 1,200 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs.
“We all know how a data center is run,” Sandu said. “It’ll be people working mostly remotely out of California. I think the whole ‘creating jobs’ aspect is a big deception.”
Bobby Rossadillo
Rossadillo moved to Kuna from Arizona in 2018. He told BoiseDev that he hopes to address the impacts of rapid population growth on the town’s infrastructure and schools.
The Statesman scheduled two phone interviews with Rossadillo for this story, but when the Statesman called him at the arranged times, he did not answer. Further emails and phone calls requesting to meet with Rossadillo did not receive a response.
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