You’ve probably made the drive between Boise and McCall at least once.
The 100-or-so miles have distinct zones. If you’re heading north, you’ve got to trek through the Boise area. Then, the hike up to Avimor. Down to Horseshoe Bend. The DocuSign Fan Club sign. The canyon. Round Valley. Long Valley. Finally… McCall!
Wait. The DocuSign Fan Club sign?
OK, perhaps that’s not the most memorable part of the drive. But as the road stretches out and you see the blue and white Adopt a Highway sign, this one stands out – or at least it did for one BoiseDev reader.
In search of a Fan Club
What, exactly, is the DocuSign Fan Club? We couldn’t find it on Google. There’s no record of it from the Idaho Secretary of State. The reader who wrote in said the Idaho Transportation Department didn’t reply (more on that in a moment).
So we turned to trusty section 74-107 of Idaho State Code. The Idaho Public Records Act. And we submitted a public records request, as we often do.
“Records Requested: Emails, communications, or other documents mentioning ‘Docusign fan club’ from 1/1/2018 to today’s date.”
After a few days, hundreds of records hit our inbox. As we sifted through them, we found what we were looking for:
DocuSign Fan Club. C/o Jason Strain.
A little more work, and we found Jason.
Mystery solved
“So… why are you cleaning highways and what is the DocuSign Fan Club,” we asked.
“I’m from the Boise area and we moved away for ten years and moved back, and I worked at DocuSign. We moved back when the remote world opened up,” Strain said.
He noticed that there were a bunch of Boise DocuSign-ers. Ten or so.
“I didn’t want to come back and just consume, but reinvest in the state. I’m working as a remote tech worker, so I want to do something to tether my employer to this state.”
DocuSign – which was founded by Boise native Tom Gonser – prides itself on getting rid of paper and instead moving documents digitally.
“Their whole (idea) is reducing carbon footprint and reducing paper,” Strain said. “The fun naming scheme of doing DocuSign Fan Club – I wanted to use it to rally some people, whether it was co-workers or friends or family to join us.”
Adopt a Highway a ‘small thing to do’
The Adopt a Highway program stemmed from the 1990 Idaho Centennial Celebration, which spawned the Idaho is Too Great to Litter campaign under then-Governor Cecil Andrus.
The agency says it has about 1,000 groups who pick up trash along the side of highways, saving about $750,000 each year. The agency estimates more than 3.3 million pounds of trash has been picked up between volunteers and inmate labor. About half of Idaho’s highways have adoptive trash picker-uppers.
If you or your group would like to adopt a stretch of highway, you can apply online.
Strain says, even though his group’s time taking care of that stretch of road is up, it’s a worthwhile effort.
“I love the program and it was well run and they make it easy,” he said. “It’s a small thing to do and we all use those roads.”
It turns out, buried in the records ITD turned over to BoiseDev, that the agency did respond to our original question-asker, an email that went missing along the way. And we then missed the email letting us know the question had been answered. But fortunately, a few missed emails meant we could tell you this story. Let us know what other questions you have by dropping us a line, here.
