A New Police Chief and Other Updates

This week in Moscow, the City Council receives a bunch of reports and updates, and we go through some tips to help with property tax exemptions!

Read the full transcript of the video below:

How’s it going, y’all? Aiden Anderson here with the Moscow Minutes. It was a week of updates and reports for the Moscow city council and a week of examining property tax exemptions for the Latah county commissioners. Let me unpack some of it for you!

But first, an announcement. Mayor Art Bettge has officially appointed Moscow City Police Captain Anthony Dahlinger to the role of Moscow Police Chief. Dahlinger’s appointment took place near the start of the city meeting this past week. He’ll be in the role of chief in earnest starting May 1st, at which point current Moscow Police Chief James Fry will retire, and presumably continue his campaign for Latah County Sheriff. Congratulations Captain! We hope your leadership proves trustworthy and beneficial to the City of Moscow and its citizens.

As I said, the city was largely a mix of reports and updates. To begin, Casey Holocomb, the chair of the Fair and Affordable housing commission, delivered her annual report on the commission’s past year of activities, including various outreach and educational events, the creation of some brochures detailing the rights and responsibilities of tenants and landlords, and partnering with the U of I legal aid clinic to help students in need of information related to housing. On that note, Holocomb did mention that the commission has vacancy available for student members, so if you’re a student and are looking for a way to participate in our city’s various governing processes, this is an opportunity worth looking into.

Next up, there’s a chance you got one of these fliers in the mail this past week. The group responsible for them approached the council to publicly deliver the announcement which the flier depicts: an update on the Idaho Transportation Department’s efforts to both inform the public and receive public input on a possible highway project in the US-95 Palouse region. Three meetings in Potlatch, Moscow, and Troy respectively will be taking place between Tuesday and Thursday of next week, with an online public comment period lasting until the end of Friday. Again, these are all opportunities for public input on governmental goings on, so if you have the wherewithal, consider checking out one of those meetings.

Following that, Moscow Fire Chief Brian Nickerson gave a report on the Moscow Volunteer Fire Department’s past year of calls and activities, highlighting the fact that this past year was the third highest for the volume of calls they received, and that at the rate that this current year is going, they may soon surpass their current record. Nickerson also broke down the calls into various categories and detailed various improvements which the department has made to their record system and recruitment efforts.

Finally, the only action item the council dealt with at this meeting. Bill Belknap went through the intentions behind the new City of Moscow communications plan. Originally, the city had planned to create a new staff role in the form of a communications manager to facilitate more robust communications both internally between city staff, and externally between the city, local media, and presumably the citizens. That being said, money at the city  is pretty tight right now, and so they changed their plan to leverage existing staff and systems to make their communications more robust all the same

Belknap highlighted several features of the new plan, including the creation of a communications specialist position, department liaisons to facilitate sharing info between city departments, a calendar to prepare and program specific campaigns, and an “updated city web presence”. I don’t know about you, but our city’s website doesn’t strike me as the easiest to navigate when you’re first approaching it, so hopefully this new communications plan with its “updated city web presence” can help with that. All that to say, the city voted 5-1 to approve the communications plan, so we should be seeing the rollout of that in the coming months.

Alright, this video has been pretty heavy on city news, but I want to talk about some county stuff briefly as well. Tax deadlines are coming up very soon, and one of the jobs of the county commissioners is to examine property tax exemption requests made by various entities every year. Usually, these are a pretty straightforward, if not tedious, affair. If you’ve filled out the paperwork correctly, if everything seems to be in order, chances are that you’ll get the exemption. But this isn’t always the case.

When the state of a given tax exemption request is unclear, the commissioners typically hold off from making a decision until the county legal team has a chance to review everything. This past week featured nine exemption requests with four being continued for legal review after discussion. Seeing as I sit through a fairly large number of these every year about this time, there are a couple things I’d like to mention about them.

The more complicated your setup as regards property, the higher your chances of having to go back and forth with the county a bit before getting your exemption approved, or at least processed. I imagine most of us do not want to spend more time interacting with the government on our taxes than we already do. Clarity in the initial paperwork, and simplicity as regards your property, can go a long way towards making your tax exemption processing as efficient and painless as possible.

Another thing to note is the fact that Latah County has a rather high percentage of tax exempt property compared to other counties, including churches, nonprofits, and the University of Idaho. The mayor of Moscow said at his state of the city address that nearly a billion dollars of revenue is left off the tax rolls due to these exemptions, likening the situation at the city level to running the city on “half a lung of finance”.

This situation puts a certain degree of pressure upon the commissioners when it comes to their scrutiny over new property tax exemption requests. Without trying to assign motives to anyone, I can easily imagine that if you’re already somewhat strapped for tax money, and new tax exemption requests come in, you may find yourself wanting to be particularly scrupulous when it comes to those requests. Not saying that that’s what’s happening in Latah County right now, but it’s not an incredible situation. If you are the person in charge of filling out the paperwork for a new tax exemption, it’s not unwise to make sure that it’s complete to the letter.

That’s all I got for you this week. Don’t forget about those highway project meetings that are taking place next week. As always, we’ll have the relevant links posted with this video, and if you have any questions, please reach out. I’m Aiden Anderson with the Moscow Minutes. See you next time!