Latah County Primary Winners, and Updates for the Start of the Summer

While the winners of the local primary elections celebrate their victories, the city eyes new sculptures and licenses and the county examines new technology for their assessor. All this 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. I would be remiss to begin this week’s report without a word of congratulations to the winners of our local primaries!

When it comes to contested races on the Democrat side, Robin Weldy won the nomination for state senate, and Trish Carter-Goodheart and Kathy Dawes won the nominations for the state representative seats. And on the Republican side, Dan Foreman won the nomination for state senate, and Colton Bennett and Brandon Mitchell won the nominations for state representative, with Mitchell running uncontested.

Once again, a big congrats to the winners, and best of luck in the November race. And if you voted in this year’s primary or helped work the polls this year, well done. Thanks for being engaged and staying involved!

Alright, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The city meeting this week began with a proclamation for Memorial Day, which was quickly followed by a report on public art. Megan Cherry gave an overview of the city’s new temporary art installations for 2026, including new sculptures at the Transit Center, new vinyl wraps for city signal boxes, and storm drain murals. As the weather warms up, an afternoon walk would be a great opportunity to see any of these around town.

Next up, Amanda Argona announced that the city has received a grant in the amount of $7,000 from Blue Cross of Idaho for two different programs run by the Moscow Farmers Market. These programs are the Power of Produce and the Bicycle Benefit program. The former encourages healthy eating for kids and the latter incentivizes biking to market with tokens that can be redeemed by market vendors.

As Amanda explained, the grant should help the city to continue and enhance these programs. The action on the table was to accept the grant funding, and the city council did so unanimously.

If you’ve been downtown in Moscow at all recently, you’ve probably seen those little electric scooters around. Those scooters came to Moscow as part of a license agreement with the company SPIN about a year ago. As Tyler Palmer of city staff explained, SPIN is now interested in renewing their license agreement with the city.

The agreement has thus far allowed SPIN to provide electric scooters, as well as to have a local operator present that maintains the scooters, redistributes them if they pile up somewhere, and answers complaints. The use of alternative transport like the scooters is in line with Moscow’s Climate Action Plan, and indeed, complaints about the scooters have been minimal.

The action before council was simply to renew the license agreement with SPIN. After fielding some questions about liability and comparisons between Moscow and other municipalities which use scooters, the council voted unanimously to renew the license. You’ll be seeing those scooters zipping around town for another year.

The county commissioners dealt with two major presentations this week. The first was a presentation from the Idaho North Central Public Health District regarding their annual budget for FY2027. Now, the health district is a separate entity from the county, and thus has separate finances, but one of our commissioners sits on the district board and helps make decisions. As such, this budget presentation was brief, keeping the commissioners in the loop ahead of a public hearing for the budget.

The second presentation came during the county’s monthly meeting with their department heads and elected officials. A representative from Eagleview gave a demonstration of their aerial imagery tech which is used by over half of our country. Eagleview is a purveyor of aerial imagery technology, which is used to help measure distance between objects and structures and can be used by the county assessor to help better evaluate property.

The Eagleview representative walked through several examples of how the image capture process works, including examples of measurements from images, integration with existing county parcel data, and use cases such as code enforcement and making accurate assessments of parcels that are harder to reach in person.  With a growing county population and increased labor demands, the assessor’s office is interested in enhancing their work, possibly with the use of this technology.

That’s all I have for you this week. Just a quick reminder that a City Council workshop will be taking place next week. If you want to see the city council think through and discuss issues in real time, I highly encourage you to attend in person. 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!