How Has the City Been Spending its Money?
The city of Moscow received its annual financial report this week, so how does it measure up? We take a look at the details discussed this week, as well as some brief updates from the county.
Who wants to know how the city’s been spending its money? Now, who wants to read through 139 pages of city financial information?
How’s it going y’all? Aiden Anderson here with the Moscow Minutes. If it wasn’t already clear, the major highlight for this week was the presentation of the city of Moscow’s annual comprehensive financial report for FY2024. There’s a lot of details to cover there, but let’s back up and look at the rest of the week first.
With Commission Chair Tom Lamar absent this week, Commissioners Jason Stooks and Tony Johnson led the proceedings at the Latah County courthouse. It proved to be a lighter week on the action item side of things, with a highlight being a new retail alcohol beverage license for the Eastside Village Movie Theater in Moscow. There were a couple hiccups with this item, in that Idaho State Code prohibits a bar from being within a certain distance of certain types of business and organizations like schools and churches. The movie theater is in a mall building, and unfortunately it shares building space with and thus close proximity to Real Life Church.
Now, none of this is a problem if the theater gets the appropriate exceptions made by the city of Moscow, but the theater did not have those exceptions at this meeting. So the commissioners tabled the approval of the alcohol license until the theater has met all state code requirements. Odds are it will come up again at another meeting, and before long movie-goers will be able to enjoy drinks of all kinds while watching their favorite summer blockbusters — if they aren’t already sneaking in their own drinks themselves.
It’s always a good time at the Moscow city council meeting when Jenny Kostroff gets to present. As the director of the Heart of the Arts LLC, she presented on the 1912 Center’s past year of activities, including their many events and programs, as well as a brief history of the 1912 Center as a whole. Jenny further mentioned that the building has contracted with Knit Architects to create a schematic plan for the soon-to-be remodeled third floor. She is also working on a newsletter to help keep folks updated on all the activities that they have going on.
Now we come to the big ticket item of the week. Nick Nicholson of Presnell Gage LLC presented the city of Moscow’s annual comprehensive financial report for FY024. Presnell Gage, as the city auditors, conducts one of these reports for the city every year. It’s the city’s responsibility to deliver the appropriate financial documents with detail and accuracy, and to prepare and present the financial statements themselves. The auditor’s responsibility is to represent the state of the city’s finances fairly, analyze their internal control structures and compliance with standards, and express any further opinions necessary.
The city can submit the results of this report annually to receive an award for financial reporting, and this can help the city get better rates on different bonds. The city has received this award for the past 21 years, and it wouldn’t be surprising for them to receive it again this year.
While Nick didn’t go into extreme detail with the presentation he gave on Monday, he did cover significant ground. He walked through the different categories of expenditures which the city has, identifying trends over the years and making comments on the quality of the city’s financial reporting.
Presnell Gage recommends that an entity like the city of Moscow should have enough money available in its general fund such that it could run with normal operations and expenses for a minimum of 60 days without new revenue coming in. As it stands, the city of Moscow has enough money in its general fund, such that it can run for five months without new money coming in, which the auditors think is healthy.
The auditors further noted that, as of the end of FY2024, the city’s government-wide net position increased by $13,702,592, which is a 7.7% increase from the total position previously. This increase is largely due to the city intentionally saving funds for the long-term in order to invest in upcoming capital projects. The only question in my mind from this would be where specifically the city is cutting costs in order to save this much money for capital projects? Or, if they’ve not been cutting costs, how have they been able to save this much?
Questions aside, that’s the bulk of the information that was covered directly in the Monday meeting. Nick answered some questions about fraud detection from Councilor Drew Davis before the council approved the report unanimously.
And now for the report itself.
My goal in this video is not to go through the report line by line, but to help you all better understand how to go through one of these yourself. Looking at the table of contents at the start, you can see that the document is broken into several distinct sections. First up, an introductory section that goes over the general economic state of the city, its leadership, and its organization. Next up is the actual report created by Presnell Gage, beginning with a summary of the city’s internal financial reporting process, and then moving to the financial statements themselves.


The financial statements are first presented in broad, government-wide terms, like the total net position of the city as well as a total summary of the city’s financial activities in the past fiscal year. This is followed by the breakdown of these positions and activities by fund type, including the major, non-major, enterprise, and special revenue funds.
We then get about 30 pages of the city’s accounting policies in detail followed by some supplementary info to help the auditors make sense of trends over time. The individual city funds are then broken down in detail by the auditors in the next section, looking at each fund’s revenues, expenses, and cash flows. This is followed by a statistical section, which relays key information related to ongoing city operations that is relevant to city spending patterns and funding. This would include information on key sources of tax revenue, city government employees, and the city’s capital assets.

To conclude the report, the auditors go through a section on compliance with existing government financial reporting standards, including a section related to risk and questionable expenditures. This section is actually quite brief, as the auditors see the City of Moscow as a low-risk entity, with no expenditures which were labeled as questionable in this report.


Financial spreadsheets might be a bit dull, but it’s stuff like this that makes up the bulk of the city council’s most critical decisions, including the formation of the annual budget. If you want your voice as a citizen to matter when it comes to these financial discussions, you ought to make sure you’re familiar with the source material, like the city’s spending habits. For my part, I hope to make these materials more accessible to you all, so that you have a better sense of where we’re headed and what you can do as a citizen.
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!