“A Tiramisu of Beautiful Things”: The Moscow City Council Hears a CUP Appeal

A full house at City Hall? A CUP hearing gone awry? What’s going on? Find out 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. The Moscow city council had a full audience during this week’s meeting, and if you wanna find out why, keep on watching!

First, let’s take a look at a couple items from the county. The commissioners had brief discussion about a small change to be made to their agreement with Clearwater Financial, the consulting firm which they’re working with on the Latah County Jail situation. This change would allow Clearwater to host public educational information about the jail project on their website platform, but since the paperwork was not available to sign, the commissioners continued the item for a future meeting.

The commissioners have also begun hearing budget requests from the various county departments. During these meetings, the county department heads will explain what they are expecting in terms of financial needs for their department going into the next fiscal year. Those requests will be compiled into the budget documents, and discussed and decided upon during upcoming county budget workshops. If you care about government finances, those will be good meetings to pay attention to.

And now for the city meeting.

With a full audience comes a full public comment section. After proclamations for Pollinator Week and Juneteenth, the mayor opened the floor to public comment with some instructions as to protocol and expectations. A few folks spoke about affordable housing concerns, including former city councilor Julia Parker. John Slagboom talked about the East City Park stage and encouraged the council to pursue fiscal responsibility with this and other related projects. Hayley Noble, the director of the Latah County Historical Society, highlighted the various America 250 projects and exhibits the organization is working on ahead of July 4th.

Next up, Sarah Tucker, the head of the Transportation Commission, gave a brief presentation on the commission’s past year of activities, including changes to the city’s multi-modal transportation plan, and a brief explanation of right of way vacations.

And now, the moment that most people in the room were waiting for, Mike Ray of city staff introduced the item, which was an appeal to the Board of Adjustment decision on a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) for 513 S. Main Street. A couple months back, Rusty Olps, while in the process of purchasing the building, applied for a CUP in order to use the building for music, dance, and fitness classes. He also, at some point, mentioned the possibility of a church being a tenant of the building in the future.

At the Board of Adjustment hearing for the CUP on April 27th, the board heard significant public testimony, with over 40 people speaking at that meeting in opposition to the project. The board evaluated the CUP request based on seven criteria found in their code, and voted 4-2 to deny the CUP based on the second of these criteria, which requires that the building’s use be “in harmony” with the surrounding neighborhood and businesses. Rusty then appealed the board’s decision, resulting in the CUP coming before council.

At the appeal hearing, Rusty gave some prepared remarks about the board’s decision, believing that the board used unsubstantiated evidence for their denial of his CUP, and also remarked on the nature of the opposition, which he characterized as an anomaly in his years of managing property in Moscow. Staff then turned things over to council for deliberation.

The council’s discussion was quite involved, and there was a lot of back and forth between the mayor, councilors, and staff. You can watch the whole meeting for the whole discussion, but right now I’m going to do my best to sum up each councilor’s position.

Sandra Kelly overall said very little, but she opened the discussion by asking that the council consider sending the CUP back to the Board of Adjustment to provide better reasoning for their decision. Evan Holmes held the position that the city should consider a more direct approach in shaping and maintaining the identity of downtown, including looking at the “worst case scenario” with each CUP to prevent putting other uses for downtown spaces in jeopardy.

Scott Sumner and Bryce Blankenship both took issue with the board’s use of harmony as a justification for denying the CUP, with both of them highlighting the ambiguity inherent in the word, and with Scott viewing its use as justification for denial as arbitrary, particularly when the rest of the application appeared to be sound. 

Sage McCetich began his remarks by seeking clarifying definitions from staff as well as trying to determine the nature of some of the comments received in opposition to the CUP regarding retail space. Drew Davis echoed similar thoughts to Scott, with a principled stance that the government should not be involved in making this particular decision in this way.

As the discussion continued, it became clear through city staff that remanding the CUP back to the Board of Adjustment was not an option, as Rusty had not produced any new evidence for the board to consider. As such, the council could only work with what they had so far received from the board and from Rusty to either reverse or sustain the board’s decision. This resulted in essentially two views on the subject: either the board did not provide enough evidence to sustain their decision, or they did. The latter position was primarily argued by Evan, and the former position was primarily argued by Drew, Sage, and Scott.

Eventually, something very interesting happened. Drew made a motion to reverse the board’s decision in full, which was seconded by Sage. Evan then made a motion to amend this motion, to include a condition to the CUP that would enable it to expire upon a change of ownership.

While this motion to amend was seconded by Sage, he explained that he was using it as an opportunity to criticize the amendment for lacking substantive reasoning to apply it, arguing that a lack of substantive reasoning was part of why this whole appeal was happening in the first place. The motion to amend thus failed 5-1, with Evan Holmes dissenting. The council then turned to their original motion, and voted to reverse the board’s decision 4-2, with Evan and Sandra dissenting. Rusty Olps’ CUP was thus granted.

The last item of the meeting was a bit more straightforward. Police Chief Anthony Dahlinger presented a Memorandum of Understanding and Reimbursement Agreement between the Moscow Police Department and the FBI Gem State Crimes Against Children Task Force. The chief explained that this new agreement allows the city police to formalize their ongoing inter-agency collaboration efforts when it comes to these types of crimes. Without much discussion, this item was approved unanimously by the Moscow City Council.

That’s all I got for you this week. In looking back on this meeting, I would encourage you to watch the discussion in full, since actual debates between council members on these kinds of decisions are fairly uncommon. Also, over the course of this meeting, Mayor Lewis does a fair bit of explaining city meeting protocol, which is helpful to know if you are at all interested in participating in local politics.

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!