Latah County’s Mailing Woes

Latah County is certainly trying to handle a lot right now. After the jail conversation and trying to manage this year’s election comes a new challenge: the mail! We dive into the county’s conversation about this latest issue and review their other actions this week as well!

Read the full transcript of the video below:

If you thought the county jail situation was a hassle, wait till you find out what’s been going on this past week.

How’s it going y’all? Aiden Anderson here with the Moscow Minutes. It’s been a while since we’ve had a Latah County-exclusive video, but the Moscow city council canceled their meeting this week, so here we are. There’s a decent amount of stuff to get into here, so let’s go right ahead and get started.

The commissioners began their day with a couple of executive sessions and a regular monthly meeting with the county clerk before getting into their list of action items for the day. I should note that for the action items portion of the meeting, Commission Chair Tom Lamar was absent, and so Commissioner Kathy Lafortune stepped in as acting chair.

Since the commissioners did not have a particularly full week last week, there was a pretty hefty pile of action items to go through. First on the list, a housing agreement with the Ada County Jail for the housing of Bryan Kohberger. The contract lists a housing fee of $94 per day, and is back-dated to start this past October 1st, which marks the start of Ada County’s fiscal year. Latah County has already been operating as though this contract was already in place, but this meeting saw the finalizing of the paperwork.

Next up, the approval of phase two of the Window Restoration project going on at the McConnell Mansion. The county owns the building, so the commissioners must officially sign off on the next phase of the project. That being said, they have no obligation to put any money towards the project, and the McConnell Mansion is working to fundraise the money on its own.

Moving forward, the commissioners dealt with several taxpayer adjustments, all of which were cancellations. This means the canceling of supposed outstanding unpaid taxes on a number of properties for a variety of reasons. For three of them, this was due to the loss of the structures in question in the Texas Ridge Fire that took place over the summer. For one, it was due to an internal error which missed a change in ownership that had taken place, therefore attributing the taxes incorrectly to the wrong people.

The historic downtown of Bovill is being recommended to be added to the National Historic Registry, and the commissioners signed a Local Government Letter of Agreement to certify their support for it. They also certified a contract which exists between the fairgrounds and the University of Idaho, which adds some federal language that frames what sorts of events can be hosted there if the event provider is the University.

Specifically, the language prohibits dealing with companies backed by the People’s Republic of China, anti-Israel activity, and activity related to abortion information or promotion. This language is apparently legally required, perhaps due to the nature of the U of I as a state university and the fairgrounds as a government owned property, both of which must comply with state and federal regulations around their activities depending on current legislation.

A decent chunk of the meeting’s agenda had to do with board reappointments. When voluntary county board positions expire, the county reaches out to those board members asking about their interest in being reappointed before moving on to seek new candidates. In this case, a number of board members said yes to the reappointment request, and those were all approved at this meeting. The commissioners reappointed 4 folks to the Arts and Culture Committee, 5 folks to the Snowmobile Advisory Board, and 1 person to the Parks and Recreation Board.

Things really got interesting when the commissioners moved on to their next meeting. Tom Lamar joined his fellow commissioners along with the rest of the county department heads and elected officials for a regular monthly meeting of county leadership. The main topic at the front of everyone’s minds? The mail.

Latah County has a number of mailboxes for its various departments, and they’ve been dealing with a bunch of problems lately. The head of facilities was in charge of letting the local US Post Office know about some recent address changes that had taken place throughout the county, related to a number of county departments changing locations and moving buildings. The head of facilities explained how he had delivered the address changes, along with the new addresses to which the mail should be forwarded, to the local postmaster, and that he had previously gone through the new addresses with other county officials to make sure the changes being sent to the post office were accurate.

So how’s it going now? In short, not well at all.

County Treasurer BJ Swanson was the first to express frustration, giving the example of some actual tax payments that had been returned to sender because the post office failed to forward the mail appropriately. The head of disaster service expressed concern over seeing no new mail at all since the change, and the head of facilities assented to these concerns, calling the post office the “biggest pain of an agency that I’ve ever had to work with in my life.”

These mail issues are apparently not new to the county, as the head of solid waste explained that her department regularly sees its own mail forwarded to other county departments instead. This led the opening up of the discussion to the whole of the county’s dealings with the post office. The head of Parks and Rec suggested that the seemingly endless problems of the current mailing situations ought to be circumvented altogether by some sort of new system.

Commissioner Lamar asserted that the county ought to collect evidence of the missed deliveries to be presented to the postmaster at some point in order to address the issues. Beyond that, county leadership put out the suggestions of putting out a press release regarding the mailing problems, and canceling the current forwards at the post office in order to simplify the immediate problem. The county then held a brief review of recent department updates before moving on to an executive session for attorney client communication, risk management, and potential litigation.

So, what does this mailing issue presently mean for the citizens of Latah County? It’s somewhat hard to tell, given that each department is experiencing different issues with their mail, with some of it never arriving, some of it going to other departments, and some of it arriving just as they expect it to. It’s probably more of a concern if you have more urgent business with the county, like those returned tax payments which the treasurer mentioned. In that case, it may be better to go in person to the county department in question to ensure that your business isn’t getting caught in a mailing mixup. That being said, if the county is able to make progress in addressing these difficulties, it seems that they plan on keeping us in the loop. Hopefully we will have clarity soon on this issue.

That’s all I got for you this week. Next week, a number of local government offices will be closed due to the holiday. From all of us at Moscow Report, enjoy the festivities, while we keep you posted on the latest local-goings on! 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!