If your boss was holding a public meeting about whether you should be laid off, would you want to know?
On Veteran’s Day, Spokane City Council staffers weren’t given the option after they were kicked out of just such a meeting — an open, public one — by council members who preferred to discuss firing them behind their backs.
Nicolette Ocheltree, manager of the Housing and Homelessness Initiative, has attended nearly every weekly city council meeting since she started a few years ago, including the Monday committee meetings and Thursday study sessions. The special study session last week was a rare occasion when a meeting didn’t touch on topics of housing and homelessness, in which she’s expected to be on hand to provide expertise and recommendations for.
Within minutes of sitting down with her laptop in the city council briefing chambers, Council Member Zack Zappone asked for Ocheltree and other staff members, including council Communications Director Lisa Gardner and Council President Betsy Wilkerson’s legislative assistant Mark Carlos, to be removed from the room. After discussion in the halls, Wilkerson and Council Member Kitty Klitzke supported Zappone and Wilkerson asked staff to leave.
The staffers took a tense elevator ride up to City Hall’s seventh floor with Wilkerson, and at the top, Ocheltree clocked off and turned in her employee badge for the day — since they wouldn’t allow her to attend the meeting as part of her job, she’d take the day off and go as a private citizen.
Ocheltree returned to the meeting, personal phone and notebook in hand, so she could record the meeting for her fellow staff members.
Though the council website states that “All study sessions will be streamed live on CityCable5 and Facebook,” and the meeting was held in the briefing chambers equipped for live video streaming and recording, the body had chosen to not record the meeting, making it “open to the public in person only.”
Ocheltree thinks the inaccessibility of the meeting was intentional.
“When you have this meeting that is held in a specific room that's a little bit less accessible on a day when most people might think that City Hall is closed, and you have it where it’s not going to be live-streamed on CityCable5 or on Facebook — all these other ways where people can access it in the future — it seems dirty,” she said. “Even if it’s not illegal, it’s dirty.”
Since council staffers couldn’t go as staff and would have no way to access information about the meeting after the fact on their personal time, Ocheltree’s audio was the only record when a few of the council members started to discuss cutting staff positions.
Meeting minutes for the November 11 meeting are still unavailable as of the time of publication.
Since then, the council has held two more budget meetings in rooms with no live-streaming or recording capabilities and noticed as in-person attendance only.
Bad for morale
Because the meeting had been scheduled on a holiday, Council Member Paul Dillon was running a few minutes late.
“By the time I got there it felt really tense,” Dillon said. “ I showed up at 11:08, and I was told that staff had been told to leave the room, and I was just in shock because this is a public meeting, and that seemed very inappropriate.”
He noticed that while other staff members at the same director level, like council director Giacobbe Byrd, council budget director Kate Fairborn and policy director Christopher Wright had been allowed to stay, communications director (and NAACP President) Lisa Gardner was asked to leave alongside other staff, like initiative manager Ocheltree and legislative assistants.
“I could tell that it was kind of humiliating when there was other staff that were there,” Dillon said.
Gardner’s exclusion shocked Ocheltree, too.
“ If I were Lisa, I would've been really pissed,” Ocheltree said. “She's literally a director, just like [Fairburn] is. Just like [Byrd] is. And yet, she was kicked out with the rest.”
True to form as a public relations professional, Gardner kept comments to the media more measured, writing in a statement to RANGE:
“As a City Employee, specifically in the council office, and as someone who deeply values transparency, equity, and public accountability, I stand in solidarity with staff who have raised concerns about fairness and consistency in our workplace.
While I cannot discuss specifics, all public institutions have a responsibility to uphold clear communication, equal treatment, and respect for both employees and the community we serve.
Overall, my goal is to ensure that decisions affecting staff are handled with integrity and fairness, whether in a public or private meeting. I support any efforts that move us closer to a fair, respectful, and accountable work environment for everyone.”
A week later, Dillon is still unsure why his fellow council members decided to kick council staff out of a public meeting. In his time on council, he said he’s never seen the body forbid staff attendance at a publicly noticed open meeting.
“ I'm concerned about the fact that it happened,” Dillon said. “I think it hit morale pretty hard at a time of a lot of tense budget discussions.”
Budget implications
With a projected budget deficit of $13 million in part due to a struggling economy, departments across the city are being asked to tighten their belts. The City Council office is no exception.
The biennium budget modifications proposed by Mayor Lisa Brown — which have to be approved by the council — suggest slashing about $370,000 from the council’s budget.
“Our City employees go above and beyond to make our city the best place to call home. Unfortunately, this mid-biennial modification reflects the personnel reductions necessary to close the deficit,” Brown wrote in a statement on the budget proposal. “There is no sugarcoating it, the personnel reductions proposed in this mid-biennial modification may have service-level impacts.”
Brown said in an interview with RANGE that while she suggested the cuts, it came out of conversations with the council’s budget workgroup.
Because council members’ salaries are set by the Salary Review Commission and their office expenses are otherwise very low, personnel costs seem like one of the only places where reductions could be made to Brown’s satisfaction. And with a nonunionized staff and the council’s recently passed ordinance that makes it easier to fire employees, meeting Brown’s projections could be as simple as Wilkerson deciding to terminate staff members and not rehire the positions.
But despite facing criticism of staff bloat and redundancies from mostly conservative politicians — like District 3 council candidate Christopher Savage who called for Gardner’s and Wright’s terminations — the council office is relatively lean. Each council member has a legislative assistant, and there are eight shared staffers: Byrd, Fairburn, Gardner, Ocheltree, Wright, Manager of Equity and Inclusion Alex Gibilisco, Manager of Intergovernmental Affairs Erik Poulsen and Manager of Neighborhood Connectivity Initiatives Abigail Martin.
Zappone criticized Savage’s proposal to fix the city’s budget through council staff reduction, but his issue may have been that Savage didn’t want to cut the same employees as Zappone: in Ocheltree’s recording of the meeting, Zappone can be heard proposing multiple cuts. In one suggestion, he described Poulsen’s position as functioning as a “middleperson” in governmental lobbying.
Other arguments in favor of cutting staff cited criticism from members of the public and former council members that the staffing structure is insufficient, and current political alignment with the mayor’s office leads to less need for a separate staff.
Zappone also stressed the importance of the city council feeling “the same pain” that the rest of the city staff are and even proposed making additional cuts.
Dillon and the two conservative council members, Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle, can be heard pushing back on cutting full-time employees. Their arguments for keeping full-time staff included:
- A budget modification in the middle of the biennium shouldn’t rely on structural cuts to plug holes that should have been planned for when the budget originally passed.
- Any staff cuts would disproportionately impact conservative council members, who would not align with the mayor and who need to rely on council staff for accurate information and legislative help. They would also weaken the legislative branch of city government, handing more power to the executive branch.
- The mayor asking for this deep of cuts felt unfair. “If we are going to be eliminating positions on our side, why is the mayor's office not joining us in that space?” Bingle said. (While the mayor’s office has proposed a staffing restructure that eliminates positions, none of the employees within the mayor’s office are being laid off.)
In an interview with RANGE, Dillon said he was “perplexed” by the narrative that the council staff has become bloated.
“Yes, it’s grown over time, but so has the demand for services, and I believe the justification for that growth is in the policies that we've passed,” Dillon said. “It’s important that we have two strong branches of government.”
He also pointed to council budget cuts in 2022 and 2024 as signs of good faith. Most recently, the council cut Sustainability Initiatives Manager position after then-council staffer Kelly Thomas moved out of the role and into the mayor’s office.
“It’s not like this is some wildly out of control budget,” Dillon said. “ In reality, it’s very minuscule in contrast with the full General Fund. I mean, we're talking $2.6, $2.8 million out of a $535 million General Fund.”
Cathcart is pressing the city to look closely for non-personnel cuts, like a travel embargo, or 10% non-personnel cost reductions across the board. He also said he was willing to make cuts, but not if Brown is unwilling to make similar cuts to the executive branch staff; her staffing plan was budget-neutral, meaning that while some positions were cut, others were added, resulting in no reductions or additions.
“ Any cuts we make to the Council office are, in my view at this point, going to be used to essentially grow further on the other side of the house in places where I don't believe we should be growing at this point in time,” Cathcart said.
Dillon stressed the importance of the staff, sending RANGE an email after our interview listing each of the shared staff members who had been excluded from the meeting and their recent contributions to the council’s work:
- “Nicolette Ocheltree: Ban The Address, Rental Registry Update, Fentanyl Emergency Resolution, Rental Notification, Shelter Funding, Heart Ordinance Funding
- Alex Gibilisco: Language Access, offensive public property removal, Public Benefit for Public Dollars, Safe and Welcome in Spokane.
- Abigail Martin: every traffic calming project as well as numerous incoming constituents concerns regarding transportation
- Lisa Gardner: communication prep and coordination, strategy, press releases.
- Erik Poulsen: state and federal legislative agenda as well as agency coordination.”
“As a part time councilmember with another job, these roles are invaluable to being a successful councilmember,” Dillon wrote.
Job-relevant
As budget discussions about cutting staff positions continue — scheduled in rooms with no live-streaming capabilities and noticed as in-person attendance only — council staff are being kept in the dark.
After the meeting on Tuesday, November 11, Wilkerson sent an email to council staff asking them not to use staff time to attend meetings through budget season and beyond, unless they’re explicitly asked to be there.
“It’s important that we use our resources wisely,” Wilkerson wrote. “And as we all know, time is one of our most important resources.”
The problem with this, Ocheltree said, is that while she can spend personal time as a private citizen watching the recorded meetings, she has no way of knowing what’s happening at the meetings that aren’t.
“The fact that those meetings aren't recorded, so I could go back and watch them later since I'm not allowed to be in those, is incredibly frustrating,” Ocheltree said. “I shouldn't have to take the day off in order to know what my government is doing.”
The staff has gotten resourceful; for another of these unrecorded budget discussions on Thursday, November 13, one of the legislative assistants took the day off to record the meeting.
The council held another one of these meetings in the morning of Thursday, November 20. It was scheduled for an events room in the library, with no remote attendance option and the meeting notice stated “discussion will be limited to the appropriate officials and staff.”
To make sure that the staff stayed informed, Ocheltree went to extreme lengths for this meeting: she found a private investigator to record it.
Editor's Note: We have updated the story to clarify that though Zappone was the first and strongest proponent of asking for staff to leave, Wilkerson made the final call, and to correct typos.
