Paradise Creek, the Yearly Audit, and Acting-Mayor Drew

What timing! With Drew Davis as acting-Mayor, the city council considered a program this week that would focus on maintenance to Paradise Creek — just after the weekend of flooding. Check out their discussion on this item and more in this week’s report.

Read the full transcript of the video below:

How’s it going, y’all? Aiden Anderson here with the Moscow Minutes. With Mayor Hailey Lewis absent, Counselor Drew Davis led the Monday night meeting as acting mayor. Let’s take a look at what they discussed.

Dennis Wilson, the chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission kicked off the meeting with a presentation on the commission’s past year of activities. These activities have included the adoption of new Area of Impact requirements for the city, ongoing amendments to city code regarding duplexes, hearing updates on local housing trusts, and tracking local construction trends.

Following that, Janet Zarate, representing the Idaho Department of Transportation (ITD), talked about upcoming public meeting opportunities to talk about the Highway 95 Palouse Region Study Report. There’s a lot of road work that ITD has planned for this area in the future, and so on March 26th, there is a meeting being held at the Best Western here in Moscow to allow for public information and input on the subject. For those that can’t make it, an online meeting of sorts will also be made available between March 19th and April 9th — which is to say, it’s available now.

If you’re interested at all in city finances, you should pay attention to this next item. Nick Nicholson of Presnell Gage presented to the council the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. Presnell Gage functions as Moscow’s auditor, and every year, they go through the city’s financial documents to put together an audit. The city documents, manages, and provides internal controls for its financial expenditures, and the auditor reviews these documents and expresses opinions.

Nicholson went through some highlights of the audit at the Monday night meeting. The city has a total of $221 million available across all funds, though not all of it can be spent because it is tied up in assets, such as real property. The operating expenditures for FY2025 were $44.75 million, versus $44.29 million the previous year. These funds and expenditures were broken down further by department, and Nicholson repeatedly mentioned that spending patterns this past year pretty closely matched those of the previous audit. The audit was then accepted unanimously by the Moscow city council.

Now, none of the information presented at the meeting on Monday was new information. The city creates expenditure reports at the end of every month, and both those reports and the audit itself are available on the city website. If you’re interested in diving further into those details, I’d recommend checking those out.

Fire Chief Brian Nickerson introduced the next item, which was a Memorandum of Understanding with Latah County for a mass emergency notification system. The county’s disaster services department has been working on an emergency alert system for the county for sometime. The system they’ve settled on is used in a number of surrounding states, and functions similarly to an amber alert on your cell phone, though it is restricted for use in a specific region via geofencing. The MOU is such that both the city and county would equally fund the system, and therefore both benefit from its use, and the council voted unanimously to approve it.

The timing of the last item was a bit serendipitous. In the wake of the record flooding event this past week, Tyler Palmer of city staff presented the maintenance program plan for Paradise Creek. Tyler explained that the city has been looking at the possibility of a hazard mitigation plan for the creek since the flooding event in 2012, with the creek functioning as a crucial means to move storm water through the city. While nothing came of that initial investigation, a new plan has since been put together.

This plan, as Tyler explained, divides the creek into sections throughout the city, and it establishes routines for maintenance and inspections, policies for dealing with beavers, site access planning, and ongoing stewardship education for the public. Types of maintenance likely to take place with the creek include debris and erosion mitigation, culvert inspection, and sediment analysis.

Tyler estimated that the total cost for the plan would be about $5.52 million, with some costs being variable depending on the differing needs of different sections of creek. Funding for the program would be phased between 2027 and 2041, and would be provided through the city’s regular annual budget process. Tyler then addressed questions from council about private and public land interactions, possible cooperation with Whitman county, and initial survey times, before the plan was approved unanimously. While the city has thus adopted the plan, it has not yet adopted funding for the plan directly. That will be a separate item to come before the council in a future meeting.

The Latah County commissioners received an update on the DIGB2 fiber project this week. As the presenters explained, the project is currently in phase 2, with plans currently being developed for phase 3.  They also held their regular monthly meeting with the department heads and elected officials.

This week’s highlights included solutions to budgeting expenses for copiers and similar items, the head of ITS announcing her retirement, an update from the Clerk on the end of the campaign filing period, and a brief report from Commissioner Johnson on his visit to the Asotin County jail facility. There is also a discussion beginning with Zion’s Bank about the possibility of an event center out at the county fairgrounds, and feasibility of such a building is soon to be discussed with Moscow city leadership. I’m sure we’ll hear more on this item as it develops.

That’s all I got for you this week. One quick update on elections. As the campaign filing period is all but complete, you can now go to voteidaho.gov and see all the candidates that will be running this year for federal, state, and local office. Now is the time to start educating yourself about the candidates: who they are, what they’re running for, and what they hope to achieve in office. The primaries will be here sooner than you think, and we’ll keep you posted on all of it!

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!