Everything, at Spokane City Council, All at Once

A lot is going on at Spokane City Council tonight. (Photo illustration by Erin Sellers)

Welcome to CIVICS, where we break down the week’s municipal meetings throughout the Inland Northwest, so you can get involved and speak out about the issues you care about.

Buckle up, folks, because we’ve got a week full of important items, starting with a lengthy Spokane City Council meeting. Some things that stick out to us this week include:

Continuing the call for volunteers to help run warming shelters for the unhoused.
Picking a new council president substitute and committee assignments in Spokane City Council. Plus, a new city council member will be appointed.
Possible changes to Spokane City Council’s Open Forum that may make it less open
Second Israel/Palestine resolution up for a vote at Spokane City Council
A new logo for Spokane Valley (™) and a budget workshop
How big will Spokane get in the next 20 years?

Important meetings this week:

Continued call for volunteers

Yes, we’re copy-and-pasting from last week’s CIVICS, but there is a continued community need for volunteers and donations to help our unhoused neighbors survive the winter.

Jewels Helping Hands (JHH) is calling for volunteers to help run the warming shelters operating out of churches, with the highest need being for folks who can volunteer overnight. According to an email sent out by JHH, volunteer duties would include assisting the JHH staff with “keeping and maintaining a quiet, restful space for those who will be staying there, sometimes helping hand out meals or snacks, monitoring restrooms, basic clean up, etc.” Anyone who is interested can sign up to volunteer here.

Compassionate Addiction Treatment Spokane, which is still operating the overnight Cannon Shelter, is searching for folks who can volunteer for a minimum of two hours at a time. Anyone able to help can sign up here. They are also calling for donations of clean blankets and pillows, hand/foot warmers and single serving snacks.

Spokane Valley Community Budget Workshop

Spokane Valley Council Member Al Merkel is hosting a workshop on the city’s budget. He is inviting “diverse political opinion, whether from the left or the right,” and wants to discuss potential cuts and public safety funding, as well as answer hard questions. Though this workshop is not an officially sanctioned city event and is hosted by Merkel in his individual capacity, he will be reporting back citizen feedback to other council members.

Wednesday, January 24 from 6 - 8 pm
Spokane Valley Public Library
22 N Herald Rd
Spokane Valley, WA 99206

Spokane City Council

Staffing changes in the mayor’s office

New Mayor Lisa Brown is seeking to add the position of deputy city administrator to her office, a role that previously didn’t exist. Brown announced she intends to fill the role with Maggie Yates, who recently ran against Al French for a county commissioner position in 2022. But before Yates can be appointed, city council has to approve a Special Budget Ordinance to move funds around to cover Yates’ $125,000 proposed salary. Because the position didn’t previously exist, there was no line item for it in the 2024 budget, but the ordinance, filed by interim city administrator Garrett Jones, states that no new funds are needed, and instead, can be reallocated from “Mayor’s Office salary savings” and a line item in the current budget listed under emergency management and simply labeled “Spokane County.”

Though no new funds are needed, we anticipate there may be some debate around this item, especially as the optics around city budget and emergency spending have been a hot button item.

Committee assignments and council pro-tempore

The legislative agenda for tonight is pretty stacked, beginning with a vote on committee and board assignments for the members of city council. This particular item was originally planned for a vote at the top of the year, but after Council President Betsy Wilkerson’s first list sparked some council and community complaints, she pushed it back a few weeks to sort things out. There has been a little bit of movement on the proposed list, namely with Council Member Jonathan Bingle moving back onto the Spokane Employees' Retirement System (SERS) board — an assignment Bingle said other council members found dry, but he enjoyed.

Nothing has changed on the Spokane Transit Authority Board and Spokane Regional Transportation Council assignments, which left Bingle and fellow district one council member Michael Cathcart off the list, despite large transportation projects slated for their district, a move both of them criticized.

One piece of the assignment list still seems up in the air: who will serve as council president pro-tempore, functioning as council president in the event of Wilkerson’s absence. On the first version of the list and in one of the versions in the agenda, Council Member Zack Zappone is slated to fill that role. Cathcart filed an amendment that would have him stepping into the role instead of Zappone. He held the title for 2023, and according to statistics he ran on council member voting records and posted on his official social media, he hasn’t missed a single council vote in his career, compared to 40 votes missed by Zappone over the 2022-23 term.

(Infographic created and posted by CM Cathcart, showing a calculation of veteran council member voting records from 2020-2023.)

Both Wilkerson and Zappone missed more votes than Bingle and Cathcart — although it is worth noting Wilkerson joined Cathcart in the zero-missed-votes-club for the 2020-2021 term — and Zappone was one skipped vote away from missing as many votes as Wilkerson and Bingle combined. We’re curious if these voting records will have any impact on the pro-tempore decision, considering the primary function of the role is to run meetings in absence of the president.

How open will Open Forum be?

Perhaps the biggest ticket item on tonight’s agenda is the vote on council rules for the 2024 session, which includes an updated ruleset for how the Open Forum section of the meeting functions. Under the 2023 rules, up to 15 people, with priority given to anyone who hasn’t spoken that month, could speak for up to two minutes each before the legislative agenda on matters related to the “affairs of the City.” The rules also stated that no one could speak on “items on that week’s current agenda or the next week’s advance agenda.”

At the top of 2024, Wilkerson’s plan was to designate one meeting a month for Open Forum, with slots for 40 speakers, effectively cutting down the amount of people who could speak per month. This plan drew criticism from activists and fellow city council members alike, with complaints about limiting free speech and making it more difficult for the public to access their elected officials. Wilkerson, who told RANGE in a December interview that one of her intentions as council president was to “move slow to engage with community,” delayed the vote to continue to hear feedback on what Open Forum should look like.

The newest version of the Open Forum rules published in the agenda backpedaled on the once-a-month proposal, keeping it at every meeting and expanding it from 15 speakers to 20. However, Open Forum would shift from the beginning of the meeting to the end, a move Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR) said, “places an undue time burden for citizens and reduces access for a lot of people.”

Other key changes in the current proposal include disallowing speakers from using visual aids, presentations or other media during their time and preventing council attendees from standing during meetings — standing has been used as a method of protest to show support, while standing and turning around has been used to show opposition.

The council rules also include a new stipulation under the “adjournment of meetings,” section that states that any council member may make a motion to adjourn the meeting “In the event noise, disturbance, indecorum, or other circumstances disrupt council proceedings so as to render the orderly conduct of such meeting unfeasible, or if the removal of the individual(s) causing the disruption will not restore order.”

In the past few months, after the city council passed a resolution in support of Israel on October 9, the Open Forum time had been mostly dominated by speakers protesting that decision. The protesters said the original resolution was “racist,” “ignored historical context” and “supported genocide.” They repeatedly asked council to show support to Palestinians in Spokane, stood silently in support of speakers in their group, turned their backs to speakers in support of the pro-Israel resolution and held demonstrations before and after the meetings, including scattering photos of some of the murdered Palestinians in the city hall lobby.

For a few weeks in October, former Council President Lori Kinnear chose to interpret the council rule requiring open forum speakers to address the council president, not other council members, as meaning speakers couldn’t use the names of council members at all. This interpretation showed up only after the council passed the Israel resolution, and was used mostly to interrupt speakers who used Bingle or Cathcart’s last names, as they criticized the introduction of the resolution. Things came to a head at a meeting on November 6, when Kinnear repeatedly interrupted activist Justice Forral, who used their time to read from a transcript of a prior meeting. Forral kept speaking, and Kinnear gavelled the meeting. All the council members adjourned to a separate area, and activists held their own city council meeting of sorts, with an unlimited open forum.

Activists like Forral used their Open Forum time at the last city council meeting to claim that proposed changes, like the new decorum rules, were a direct response to their sustained protest efforts against the pro-Israel resolution. In a December interview, Forral told RANGE that they felt decorum rules put too much pressure on speakers.

“It’s important to show passion,” Forral said. “A lot of times in our culture, passion is dismissed and we have to care about things as logically as possible. We have to present them in a perfect little box, emotionless and without any kind of lived experience.”

Along with the rules attached in the agenda, there are also two proposed amendments to the rules, submitted by freshman Council Member Kitty Klitzke. One of them would expand the amount of time folks have to sign up for open forum, allowing them to start signing up the Friday prior to the Monday legislative session, and the other would tweak the language around the way speakers are selected, stating speakers would be chosen at random, with priority given to people who hadn’t used Open Forum that month.

The council rules are slated for a vote tonight, which means folks interested in voicing opinions on this item aren’t limited to the 15 open forum spots, and should instead sign up to testify on the legislative agenda item.

New City Council Member

As council tries to finalize their rules and structure for 2024 by the end of January, they’ll also be deciding who will join them to fill the District 2 seat left vacant when Wilkerson moved into the Council President role. The 17 people who applied for the position were whittled down to five finalists last week. After last week’s study session was devoted to publicly interviewing the five candidates, city council is ready to announce a decision. The agenda currently has a blank in place of the name, but an amendment will be submitted at some point today with the name of the person the council chose to appoint, potentially during the 3:30 pm Briefing Session.

Resolution to pro-Israel resolution saga?

After months of protests and ongoing discussion between community groups, religious leaders and city council members, Spokane City Council will be voting on a new resolution “expressing City's desire to be an inclusive, respectful, and just city and to stand up against hate, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.” The resolution is the result of those ongoing conversations, which council members described as “difficult but necessary.” The wording of the new resolution was selected carefully, seeking to strike a delicate balance. It can be read in its entirety starting on page 367 of the legislative agenda.

It likely will not please everyone on the council or in the community — it doesn’t use the words “genocide” or “ceasefire,” which community activists asked for and council member Paul Dillon has publicly used, and the language calling for “sustained peace” may get too close to a ceasefire call for Bingle, who sponsored the initial pro-Israel resolution — but chances are it will pass tonight.

For more reporting on the months-long conversation around Spokane City Council’s response to the conflict read our reporting here, and for an in-depth look at the new resolution, check out Nate Sanford’s piece for the Inlander here.

Don’t forget the levies

Though it has the potential to be overlooked in the shuffle of tonight’s big legislative items, Spokane City Council will be holding votes to express their public support of the library operations levy, as well as the education levy and the bond to “replace, modernize and improve aging school facilities.” All three of these levies and bonds will be on the ballot for the special election in February, which is fast approaching.

Reviving the monument ordinance

We covered this in CIVICS a couple weeks ago as it was on a Study Session agenda, but Dillon’s revived ordinance developing a process “establishing review of community concerns regarding institutional statements, names or monuments on property owned by the City of Spokane,” is ready to see its first read tonight. The language is almost identical to the version that was passed by city council last year and vetoed by former mayor Nadine Woodward, stalling a community-driven process to remove the racist statue of John R. Monaghan located in downtown Spokane. Since this is just a first read, no vote on the ordinance will be held tonight.

Agenda here
Monday, January 22 at 6 pm
City Council Chambers – Lower Level of City Hall
808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd.
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Public Infrastructure, Environment, and Sustainability Committee

CANCELED and rescheduled for January 29

Agenda here
Council Chambers in the Lower Level of City Hall.
808 W Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane, WA 99201
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Spokane City Council Study Sessions

Agenda here when available.
Thursday, January 25 at 11 am
City Council Chambers – Lower Level of City Hall
808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd.
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Board of Spokane County Commissioners Briefing Session

Agenda here
Tuesday, January 23 at 9 am
Public Works Building Lower Level, Commissioners’ Hearing Room
1026 W. Broadway Ave, Spokane, WA 99260
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Board of Spokane County Commissioners Legislative Session

Avista Stadium gets state funding

The commissioners are expected to accept a $5.8 million award from the state Department of Commerce to make improvements to Avista Stadium, including new batting cages, improvements to the gym, new lighting, a full replacement of the field, an enlargement of the dugout and an archaeological review before construction starts.

Agenda here
Tuesday, January 23 at 2 pm
Public Works Building Lower Level, Commissioners’ Hearing Room
1026 W. Broadway Ave, Spokane, WA 99260
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Spokane Valley City Council

New logo for Spokane Valley (™)

The city council will get a presentation on the new recommended city logo, which is described as “friendly, warm and welcoming.” The city has been trying to rebrand since at least 2016, but staff turnover, limited staff time and the COVID-19 pandemic seriously hindered the process. Now that the city communications team has gone from one to two employees, they’re refocusing their efforts in a strategic citywide communications plan.

There won’t be a vote on the logo this week, just a discussion before staff goes for community input. See the new logo here.

Agenda here
Tuesday, January 23 at 6 pm
City Hall
10210 E Sprague Ave
Spokane Valley, WA 99206
Virtual attendance here.

Mead School District Board of Directors (Work Session)

Levy Action Plan Discussion

That’s all the information that’s available on the agenda for this meeting. Voters will decide at the February 13 special election if they want a 3-year replacement levy for educational programs and operations.

The school district is also hosting one last town hall information session on the levy Tuesday, January 23 at 6 pm at Mountainside Middle School and on Zoom.

Agenda here
Monday, January 22 at 6 p.m.
Union Event Center
12509 N. Market St. Bldg. D, Mead, WA 99021
Watch via Zoom here.

Central Valley School District Board of Directors

Agenda here
Monday, January 22 at 6:30 p.m.
Learning and Teaching Center (district office)
Board Room at 2218 N Molter Rd, Liberty Lake
Watch via Zoom here.

Spokane School District Board of Directors

Agenda here
Wednesday, January 24 at 6 pm
Spokane Public Schools Administration Building
200 N. Bernard, Spokane, WA 99201
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Spokane Plan Commission

Centers, corridors and capacity: how big will Spokane get?

The commission will have workshops on two big land use items: the Centers and Corridors Update Study and the Land Capacity Analysis.

The first study will make regulatory recommendations for the periodic update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan in 2026, as well as develop options for making permanent code updates in the city’s interim Building Opportunity for All zoning ordinances.

In the second workshop, the commission will get a presentation on how the city’s planning department calculates population capacity and necessary growth for the next 20 years. They’ll also discuss population projections for Spokane County. According to the agenda packet, the county is expected to grow by more than 100,000 residents by 2046, with about a quarter of those expected to move to the city of Spokane.

Agenda here
Wednesday, January 24 at 2 pm
Council Briefing Center
808 W Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane, WA 99201
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Spokane Regional Health District Board

Special meetings

The Spokane Regional Health District (SRHD) Board has two special meetings this week. The first, which will be held January 22 at 2:00 pm, is primarily to plan for the appointment of new members. The SRHD board will be reviewing applications, selecting applicants to interview and selecting the questions that will be asked during interviews. There is currently a vacancy on the board for a representative of tribal communities, but it looks like the applications are actually to replace three positions:

the representative of public health, health care facilities or providers
the representative of public health consumers
and the representative of community stakeholders.

At the second special meeting, which is scheduled for January 25 at 8:30 am, the SRHD board will interview candidates and make the final representative selections. Both of these special meetings take place in the same location as the regular meetings.

Agenda here
Thursday, January 25 at 12:30 p.m.
Auditorium, First Floor
Spokane Regional Health District
1101 West College Avenue

Spokane Airport Board

Agenda here.
Thursday, January 25 at 9 am
Airport Event Center
9211 W. McFarlane Road, Spokane, WA 99224 The meeting is also live streamed here.