Jail Feedback and Downtown Parties

With the summer nearly here, the Moscow City Council considered changes to its open container policy in the downtown entertainment district. Also, we got an update on the Latah County Jail!

Read the full transcript of the video below:

How’s it going y’all? Aiden Anderson here with the Moscow Minutes. The weather’s warming up, early voting has begun, and both the county and the city had some interesting meetings this week. Let’s get into it!

The city meeting began with a proclamation for public service recognition week, and was followed by the approval of five appointments to various city commissions. City commissions can be a great way to get involved with your community so I would encourage you to check the city’s website for possible vacancies, or at the very least, attend the commission meetings yourself.

There were only two major items on the agenda. The first was a public hearing regarding changes to processing fees for Moscow’s rec programs. As Bill Belknap explained, the city accepts credit cards and the like as a form of payment for various city programs, including rec programs, but until recently they were required to cover the cost of processing those transactions by the rec program software vendor, CivicRec. 

The city is now in a position to change their payment processor, which means they can pass the processing cost to the customers using those payment methods. For rec programs, these fees would be 2.5% of the cost with a $2 minimum for transactions in general, and 3.5% of the cost with no minimum for concession purchases. And, of course, if people don’t want to pay these fees, they can simply pay using cash or check.

The introduction of new fees like this generally require a public hearing, which is how this item was presented at the meeting. The council asked questions regarding accurate communications with the public, including the fact that none of these fees go to the city, but instead go to the payment processor. With no public testimony, the public hearing was closed, and the council voted unanimously to approve the fee change.

The next item was all about alcohol. Bill Belknap again presented a proposed amendment to the city’s entertainment district open container exemption to include liquor. The city has designated a portion of the downtown area as an entertainment district. This district has an exemption to normal city code about having open containers of alcohol in the public right of way during certain events taking place throughout the year. In the past, this exemption only covered beer and wine, but now the Moscow Chamber of Commerce, and in particular the downtown business alliance, is interested in having the exemption cover liquor as well.

The argument from the chamber was that things have been going reasonably well with the exemption as it currently stands, and over-serving and other such problems have not been impactful at the events where beer and wine has been present. It would seem then that allowing liquor, such as cocktails or whiskey tastings, would be in line with existing policy and bring in more interest to these events. 

It’s important to note that no actual decision was made on the subject at this meeting. The council asked a lot of questions about liability and precautions as well as different event scenarios for serving liquor downtown. Ultimately, they voted to direct staff to draft language to amend the open container exemption. This means that staff will now go draft the actual amendment to city code, which will then be voted on at a later council meeting.

Early voting is in full swing down at the Latah County fairgrounds, but the big thing for the county this week was an update on the jail situation. The county commissioners, alongside a number of county residents, as well as city officials from Moscow, met to hear an update from Clearwater Financial, a consultant firm the county is working with when it comes to this topic.

Clearwater Financial focused their presentation on the Latah County Jail survey, and the results they’ve received so far. We recorded the whole presentation, so you can go check that out on our website, but the long and short of it is this: while the survey respondents have had some concerns about transparency, the abruptness of the jail closure, and about whether jail funding will compete with public school funding, they are still largely in favor of building a new jail facility rather than renovating the existing one. As far as funding is concerned, a local option tax, if it were available, was preferred over a general bond.

The commissioners, sheriff’s deputies, and Clearwater reps answered questions about the update and clarified steps going forward. Ultimately, the next thing is to look at cost estimates for proposed jail plans with a company that has previously worked on jails in Grangeville and in Asotin County in Washington. Since the survey has only received just over a thousand responses, citizens of the county are still encouraged to take it. The next update on the jail should be coming next month.

That’s all I got for you this week. If you’re in Latah County, you have between now and the end of Friday next week to vote early, so if you haven’t yet, get down to the fairgrounds and vote! 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. We’ll see you next time!