New Faces, New Budgets, and the East City Park Stage

We have a lot to unpack from this week — so much so that we actually divided the work! First, our newest reporter takes us through this past week’s meetings, and then we get a peek at the Latah County Budget for the coming year!

Read the full transcript of the video below:

Talent: How’s it going y’all? Aiden Anderson with the — hello?

Yes? Wait, they only just announced it?! What do you mean the public hearing is next week, I haven’t even had a chance to look at the budget spreadsheets! This is—

Ok, fine. I’ll go do it now. But there’s not enough time; who’s gonna do the regular report?

Izzy: How’s it going y’all? I’m Izzy Humphreys, here with the Moscow Minutes. I’m a new face here with the Moscow Report, and we’re gonna kick things off with the Moscow City Council meeting.

The meeting began with a public comment from Cody Barr, owner of the Refuge Cigar Lounge which opened this past year in town. While he’s been enjoying his time running the business, a city ordinance which regulates smoking in bars has proven to disrupt how his cigar lounge would normally operate, and so he spoke about making an amendment to that ordinance. 

Following that, the council heard the yearly report from the Sustainable Environment Commission. Steve McGeehan, the chair, spoke on a number of activities the commission has been involved in over the past year, including a number of educational events, conservation programs, managing a pesticide-free park, and helping with the Mayor’s Earth Day awards.

Now, I’m new to town, but it seems like this next item has been on the council’s mind for some time. Cody Riddle of city staff, talked about the latest on the East City Park stage project. At this point, it seems that the architects working on the project have finished collecting public feedback on the current design plans for a new stage, which will be in a slightly different location than the old stage, and make for a different park footprint. 

Ned Warnick, one of the architects, spoke to the details of the design with the council, and explained that the total cost for the project, including construction, would be just under $800,000. Presently, the design acts as a visual extension of the park bathroom building, with similar materials being in mind for its construction. For those who appreciate clean, straight lines, this design could definitely have some appeal.

But such appeal was not universal, as we saw during the city’s deliberation. Hailey Lewis in particular described the current design as “soulless,” opting for something that was more thoughtful and organic, and expressed concerns with a number of elements of the design, including the load in/load out area. Julia Parker responded with assurances that public art installations associated with the stage would help make the final building look more appealing than the design portrayed it. Ultimately, all the council had to do was accept the report and provide feedback. Having provided feedback, they then accepted the report.

You might remember the street banner policy discussion from last week. The council ended that meeting by sending the policy back to staff to make some revisions, particularly around the section which allowed for “community sponsored events”. This change would restrict the use of the street banners to government-only. With that change having been made to the policy, the city council approved it unanimously. 

Switching over to the county for a second, the county commissioners hosted their monthly meeting with the department heads and elected officials. I’ve got a few highlights from that meeting. First up, the head of fairgrounds announced that we are 20 days out from the Latah County Fair, and that the submission dates for the animal contests have been changed to the Monday and Tuesday of that week.

Next, the head of planning and building reminded everyone that a public hearing is coming up soon as regards county fee increases and contract changes mandated by changes in state law. That hearing will take place in conjunction with the budget hearing, as the two are somewhat connected.

Last, the county clerk reminded everyone about the aforementioned upcoming county budget hearing taking place on Tuesday, August 26th, as well as the fact that the candidate filing period for this year’s local elections has opened up. If you’re interested in running for city council, mayor, or school board, you have about a week left to file to make your campaign official.

Now, about that county budget…

Talent: Finally. How’s it going y’all. Aiden Anderson here, at long last. A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of breaking down the Moscow city budget for fiscal year 2026, and now we’re gonna try to do the same thing with Latah County. Let’s get into it!

Like the City of Moscow, Latah County also has to come up with a yearly budget, host a number of workshops on it, and approve a final version at a public hearing. In this case, the public hearing for the county FY2026 budget is on August 26th at the county courthouse. 

Latah County generally presents the budget in the form of the budget spreadsheets, straight up. This is different from the city of Moscow, which puts together a rather detailed packet with explanations, graphs, and the like. 

Fortunately, the county budget is also much smaller than the city’s, and so we have fewer pieces of paper to go through for this one. In fact, the county has been so kind as to feature a comprehensive summary of the budget details on their public hearing announcement for the budget, which means we have most of our information in one place. Let’s take a look!

In FY2025, the total budget for Latah County was $32,728,519. Going into FY2026, they are looking at a proposed budget total of $43,029,717. That’s an increase of about $10,301,198, or of about 31%.

Now, what’s interesting about that increase is this. If you look at the budget numbers, you’ll notice that in each of these most recent fiscal years, the budget total each year has gone up by roughly $4 million each year. From roughly $24 million to roughly $28 million in FY2024, and from roughly $28 million to roughly $32 million in FY2025. This means that the county budget has been increasing by a similar amount each year, with FY2026 being a significant exception.

The county receives a significant portion of its funds each year from the state, and the way those funds are paid out is determined at that level. The state also makes some determinations as to how the county can levy taxes and what those monies can be used for, so in a lot of ways the county is simply responding and adapting to state orders, rather than functioning as a more independent entity.

With that, let’s take a look at some details for this year and compare it to previous years. The budget worksheets are split into categories by project and service and those categories are in turn summarized in terms of county employee salaries, benefits, and additional expenses such as maintenance, travel, or materials. These three categories are themselves totaled for the county in a separate row. We’ll start there.

In FY2025, county salaries totaled $11,600,117. In FY2026, county salaries are proposed to be totaled at $11,542,507. For county employee benefits, FY2025 had them at $4,914,176, while FY2026 has them set at $4,935,441. Finally, the “other expenses” category in FY2025 totaled $16,364,226, while FY2026 has their proposed total be $26,558,769.

If we just take a look at the proposed budget for this coming fiscal year, we can see that county salaries comprise about 27% of the budget, with benefits and other expenses comprising about 11% and 62%. The third category being the largest makes sense, as it’s the category that would be composed of all county operations that aren’t directly related to staff.

The county’s budget spreadsheets contain all the data for each county department’s finances broken down line-by-line. I’d encourage you to take a look at those yourself, but for the purposes of this video, I’m just gonna share a few details from the summary.

The largest categories when it comes to budget totals for this coming fiscal year are Current Expenses, Justice, and Solid Waste Collections. These are the only categories in the county budget which break over a million dollars.

The current expenses category pertains to all of the internal operations of the county’s departments in total, with many of the costs pertaining directly to personnel and their activities. The total proposed this year for this category is $9,185,250.

The Justice category, or course, pertains to the operations of our county’s court system and law enforcement. With a good number of the staff in this section being lawyers, it shouldn’t be surprising that the majority of the expenses for justice stem from salaries. It is the largest category of the big three this year, with a proposed budget total of $11,200,085. This is over a quarter of the county budget as a whole. 

Finally, the smallest of the big three, Solid Waste Collections. The total proposed for this coming year is $2,416,491. Now, it may seem odd that Solid Waste Collection ranks among the most expensive categories for the county. When you look at the budget worksheets, you can see that the county has experienced steep increases in operations costs, reimbursement requirements, and program expenses. 

In the bottom corner of the budget announcement page, you can see a summary of how the county is planning to pay for the budget it’s set. If we put the expense summary from FY2025 next to the summary from FY2026, we can clearly see some of the differences going into this coming year.

Cash balance forward in FY2026 has increased by $559,018, while property tax replacement has actually decreased by $5,350. Grant revenues are looking to increase by over $14.6 million, and county interest has decreased by $15k.

Connected to all these budget documents is the County Fee Resolution. Like with the City, the public hearing for the fee resolution will be held at the same time as the public hearing for the budget, but will likely be voted on separately. The document highlights the proposed changes to fees for county services as they appear in normal county documentation.

So what does all of this mean? And where does that extra $10 million come from?

Firstly, the transition of the Latah County Jail into a temporary holding facility makes some impact to the county budget for Justice in the short term. As for future plans for the jail, the jury (no pun intended) is still out on the matter. That said, it’s likely that any particular funding pertaining to projects like a jail will appear under the county’s grant funds rather than the justice fund. Also, a project of that scale and expense will probably come with a good deal of notice from the county, so the best we can do is simply to wait and see.

The jail’s not the only factor. The county has been working on a broadband fiber project in the region for some time, and this year, the federal grant for that project appears in the budget totals at over $14.5 million. Now, that money is sequestered away for the fiber project alone, but when combined with the other pieces of the budget, it makes this year’s budget look substantially larger than previous years.

State pressures and inflation have significantly more power to constrain the county’s spending, because the county has less funds available to it, and must respond more directly to changes in state policy. In their meetings, this means that the commissioners have more recently emphasized their desire to use county funds to maintain employee salaries at market viability when they can, a desire that could get set against the desire to expand county projects and infrastructure. 

Alright, we’ve come to the end.

Hopefully this helps you start to work through the county documents yourself. It’s rarely the case that folks even get eyes on the county budget before the hearing takes place, and as citizens of this county, we should probably change that. 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!