Latah County Passes Its Budget

With a public hearing and presentation, the Latah County Commissioners approved their proposed budget for FY2027 on Tuesday. Let’s take a look at how the meeting went down!

How’s it going y’all? Aiden Anderson here with the Moscow Minutes. We’ve at last wrapped up the budget season here in Latah County with the passing of the Latah County budget for FY2027 this past Tuesday. 

At the meeting itself, Commissioner Tom Lamar opened the proceedings by explaining the public hearing process. Next county clerk Julie Fry walked the audience through the budget details, while the members of the audience followed along using paper copies of her presentation provided by the county.

Clerk Fry began with a series of graphs recounting the past 10 years of Latah County finances divided into different categories, such as revenues, fund balances, and expenses. In short, an explanation of how the county got financially to where it is today. If you’ve been following the budget conversation here at Moscow Report, you’ll know that we put together a summary of the proposed county budget for the coming year last week. If you want to hear about all those details, please go check out that video.

One goal that Clerk Fry mentioned with this year’s budget is to increase the county’s reserve funds for use in future capital projects, as well as for better financial security in some future emergency scenario. The particular goal in this case is 5-6 month’s worth of reserves to keep the county running. As this graph shows, the county’s general fund is looking to achieve that goal, while the county’s justice fund still has a little ways yet to go.

As far as property taxes go, the county is looking at an average tax bill of $262.04  per $100,000 of taxable property value, which is $16.44 less than last year. 

When it comes to county employees, the county is planning on giving each of them a 90 cent raise going into this next fiscal year, while elected officials’ salaries are being adjusted via compa-ratio, looking at salaries at market price. There is also a 12% increase planned for health insurance premiums, an additional stipend for on-call IT staff and detectives, and a continuation of a benefit provided by AllyHealth.

Clerk Fry also described several of the county’s planned capital projects for the coming fiscal year, which included updates to the county’s video conferencing systems, elevator upgrades, vehicles for the Sheriff, Weeds, and Probation departments, and a design for a future Fairgrounds capital project.

The commissioners then turned to the audience to receive public comment, and this year, there was no public comment to be heard at the meeting. The commissioners deliberated briefly, and then voted unanimously to approve the budget

There were two more items on which to vote, following the budget. Next the commissioners voted to adopt the 2026 Dollar Certification for the budget request to the board of county commissioners L-2, certifying the intended revenue for the year as well as where those funds would be apportioned in the budget. Lastly, the commissioners voted to reserve a forgone amount for the FY2027 budget. Because the commissioners aren’t taking the full 3% increase in property taxes this year, the remaining percentage can be adopted as a forgone amount to be appropriated at a future date, while not impacting taxes now. That amount which was forgone is $144,896.

To cap off the meeting, Commissioner Johnson thanked the employees for their work on the budget, and with that, this year’s budget season for Latah County was concluded. I will say  it was quite interesting to see a government budget go down this year compared to previous years, and it will be further interesting to see if the budget process adopted this year continues in the future. 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!