New Lower Latah County Budget!

You heard right! The proposed budget for Latah County for FY2027 is lower than last year’s budget. We dive into some of the details in this report. Don’t miss the public hearing on Tuesday!

Read the full transcript of the video below:

Last week we wrapped up with one government budget. Now, let’s take a look at another!

How’s it going, y’all? Aiden Anderson here with the Moscow Minutes. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of breaking down the Moscow city budget for fiscal year 2027, and now we’re gonna try to do the same thing with Latah County. 

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 FY2027 budget is on September 1st at the county courthouse. 

The public hearing announcement for the budget features a comprehensive summary of the budget’s details, which means we have most of our information in one place. Let’s take a look!

In FY2026, the total budget for Latah County was $43,029,717. Going into FY2027, they are looking at a proposed budget total of $38,054,363. That’s a decrease of about $4,975,354, or about 12% smaller.

This is very interesting, since you don’t typically see government budgets as a whole decrease. Speaking personally, this is the first time that I’ve seen a budget decrease since I started following local politics here in Latah County. 

According to the county clerk, Julie Fry, who helps construct a plan for the budget each year, working to make the budget totals correspond with inflation pre-COVID has been a significant motivation in the reductions this year.

To quote the clerk in a memo sent to the commissioners and department heads: “This year’s budget was evaluated differently than in prior years. Rather than comparing only the previous year’s budget to the current year’s requests, I analyzed seven years of operating expenditures by comparing the FY2020 budget to FY2027 department requests for the County’s property tax supported funds. Capital projects and grant-funded activities, including the Broadband Capital Projects Grant, were excluded so the analysis would focus on recurring operating expenditures supported by property tax revenues. To establish a benchmark, l adjusted the FY2020 operating budget using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to estimate what would be required in FY2027 to maintain the same level of services.”

During the budget workshops, the clerk spoke of reducing the cost of county operations, because she viewed the idea of funding them by using county reserves as unsustainable in the long term. Her recommendations involved proposing potential amounts for each department to consider reducing in their own budget in order to meet the proposed reduction goals.

The department heads were tasked with determining where to make those cuts, though these cuts were slated to not impact employee salaries or benefits. The commissioners also discussed whether or not to take the statutory property tax increase of 3%, and ultimately decided instead on a 2% increase. 

The clerk briefly mentioned the broadband project in her memo. The county has been working on a broadband fiber project in the region for some time. The money for that project comes from a federal grant, so it does not have the same impact on local taxes the way that other capital projects might. This year, the federal grant for that project appears in the budget totals as $10 million on the bottom row. You take that money away, since it is sequestered for the broadband project alone, and you end up with a county budget of about $28 million.

Those are some of the reasons for the reductions this year. Now, 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 FY2026, county salaries totaled $11,542,570. In FY2027, county salaries are proposed to be totaled at $11,535,153. For county employee benefits, FY2026 had them at $4,928,441, while FY2027 has them set at $5,133,340. Finally, the “other expenses” category. In FY2026, they totaled $26,520,269, while FY2027 has their proposed total be $21,385,870. So in short, some decreases in salaries and “other expenses” alongside a slight increase in employee benefits spending.

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 Justice, Current Expenses, and Solid Waste Collections, which is on par from previous years.

The Justice category, of course, pertains to the operations of our county’s court system and law enforcement. It is the largest category of the big three this year, with a proposed budget total of $11,303,712. This is over a quarter of the county budget as a whole. 

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  .

Finally, the smallest of the big three, Solid Waste Collections. The total proposed for this coming year is $2,506,158. This is comparable to previous years, though it should be noted that over time the county has experienced steep increases in operations costs, reimbursement requirements, and program expenses in this category, which is why it’s one of the big three. 

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 FY2026 next to the summary from FY2027, we can clearly see some of the differences going into this coming year.

Cash balance forward in FY2027 has decreased by $1,224,712, while property tax replacement has increased by $142,255. Grant revenues are looking to decrease by over $4.5 million, and county interest has increased by $30k.

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.

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!