FIFA cash pours into Spokane

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.

Some things that stick out to us this week include:

The city is adjusting its budget to accommodate hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal and state funding to police the FIFA World Cup events Spokane will host.
Spokane City Council will consider a proposal to regulate street racing on city streets.
Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall will talk to the Public Safety & Community Health Committee about his department’s drone surveillance program, which is set to expand with the World Cup.
Spokane County is working with a very tight budget, and the county commission is urging elected officials to review their spending to ensure they’re working within their budgets for their departments, suggesting they may need to tighten their belts.
The county wants to spend $25,000 on a lie-detector test contract to interrogate children detained in the county’s juvenile court system. That technology has been challenged by researchers.

Important meetings this week:

Civics 101, a City Council primer

Council Member Sarah Dixit will host a how-to session explaining to regular folks the most effective ways to engage with the Spokane City Council. That will happen June 3 from 6 to 7:30 pm. Find more details here.

Spokane City Council

🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 peppers

World Cup funding from federal government

There’s lots of public money coming to Spokane to pay for operations around the World Cup events that our city will host in June and July. The grants from federal and state agencies include just over $1 million, $54,770 of which will be subawarded to Spokane Sports. Much of that money will be dedicated to police funding to monitor the events. One of the most important aspects of the events is that Spokane is hosting Team Egypt, which will practice on soccer fields at Gonzaga University. The matches will be hosted in Seattle, but Spokane is hosting satellite events. Spokane is adjusting its budget to reflect these funds.

🎵I wonder if you know, how they live in Tokyo🎵

We covered this a few weeks ago when it hit the Public Safety & Community Health Committee. Now it’s at the City Council for a vote. Here’s our previous write-up:

A new ordinance sponsored by Dillon and Cathcart that could curb street racing and excessive speeding by adding additional financial penalties is up for discussion today.

Under this ordinance, anyone caught racing another vehicle, racing against an agreed-upon time, or driving at “excessively high rates of speed or acceleration,” or doing things like drifting, sliding or rolling coal (defined by the ordinance as “emitting black smoke”) could be given a traffic infraction.The penalties for receiving a traffic infraction in violation of this new ordinance would be $500 the first time, $800 the second and $1,500 the third. Anyone who violates the law more than three times could then be charged with a gross misdemeanor.

An interesting facet of this ordinance is that it allows drivers to be cited based on video evidence. Basically, if a video of you racing up Division Street is posted online, it can be reviewed by the Spokane Police Department, who can then send you a traffic citation. If the driver is identifiable in the video evidence, they can be cited with street racing. But if the driver can’t be identified from the footage or other evidence, then the registered owner of the car can be cited with “unlawful vehicle use,” which has the same financial penalties as the citations for street racing.

The ordinance is designed to “increase safety for all users of public streets,” the agenda sheet states.

No more drive-thrus near bus stops, public hearing scheduled tonight

The city stopped the construction of new drive-thrus and service stations for the next year near busy bus stops and other transit facilities on April 13. It’s hosting a public hearing on that moratorium, which was sponsored by Klitzke and Zappone, at the June 1 City Council meeting.

Stevens St. and Third Ave. will be repaved

The council will likely award Shamrock Paving, Inc., of Spokane $2,774,000 to repave part of Third Avenue and Stevens Street.

Agenda here
Monday, June 1 at 6 pm
Council Chambers
808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Spokane City Council Study Sessions

Agenda here when available.
Thursday, June 4 at 11 am
Council Chambers
808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Public Safety & Community Health Committee

🌶️🌶️/5 peppers

Cops report metrics on drone program

Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall will deliver a presentation on the metrics of the department’s drone program, which deploys the flying machines to monitor criminal activity and public events. Drones became a permanent part of the force in the air support unit in 2018. And the department will likely procure $126,924 worth of new drones to fly over the FIFA World Cup events Spokane will host this month and next. Those machines will become a permanent part of the surveillance technology used by Spokane police.

Agenda here
Monday, June 1 at 12 pm
Council Chambers
808 W Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Board of Spokane County Commissioners Briefing Session

🌶️/5 peppers

Visit Spokane economic impact report

Rose Noble, the CEO of Visit Spokane, which promotes tourism in Spokane County, will present the organization’s economic impact report. Some relevant statistics from the report:

The number of visitors to Spokane County has gradually increased at rates between 1% and 2.9% since 2019 (with a remarkable outlier year with a 52.5% increase after COVID rules were relaxed in 2021).
Visitors spent $1.548 billion in Spokane County in 2025.
The vast majority of tourists in the county, 98.9%, were from the US.
Tourists sustained 17,000 jobs.

Agenda here
Tuesday, June 2 at 9 am
Commissioners’ Hearing Room
1026 W. Broadway Ave, Spokane
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Board of Spokane County Commissioners Legislative Session

🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 peppers

The county might need to tighten its belt

In a budget letter likely to be signed June 2, the BOCC worries about not having enough money to meet the county’s needs and instructs elected officials to double check their spending and budgets. Citing state law that requires the county to keep its spending within its means, the letter states:

“Given the County’s present budgetary constraints, we request that each elected official:

Review your current expenditure trajectory and confirm that operations can remain within the adopted 2026 appropriation.
Notify the Board immediately if projected spending indicates a risk of exceeding budget authority.
Suspend or delay discretionary expenditures where prudent to ensure compliance within RCW 36.40.
Engage early if a formal budget amendment may be necessary; no obligation should be incurred in anticipation of such an amendment unless and until the Board has acted.”

$25K for polygraphs for juvenile offenders

The commission is set to dedicate $25,000 to pay Inland Polygraph to administer truth tests, called polygraphs, a widely discredited technology, to children detained by county Juvenile Court Services. Polygraphs, also known as “lie-detector” tests, measure physiological responses to questions asked of people accused of crimes to determine whether they’re being truthful. Proponents of polygraphs say they gather data that accurately suggests whether a person is lying, but the American Psychological Association writes of them: “scientific evidence suggests that polygraph tests are not a reliable and valid way to detect deception, and their use in legal proceedings has long been restricted in many states.”

$1M in improvements to Crestline Road

The BOCC is set to award Liberty Northwest Construction a $1,009,170 contract to build sidewalks along Crestline Road between 57th and 63rd avenues. The agenda doesn’t mention any other bidders. Most of that money, $807,000, would come from state Transportation Improvement Board funding; the rest would come from the county’s Road Fund.

Agenda here
Tuesday, June 2 at 2 pm
Commissioners’ Hearing Room
1026 W. Broadway Ave, Spokane
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Spokane School District Board of Directors (special and regular meetings)

🌶️🌶️/5 peppers

Budgets & levies

The Spokane School District Board of Directors will hold three open session discussions during a special meeting before the regular meeting begins.

One of these discussions focuses on giving an update on the budget and the proposed 2028-2030 Educational Programs and Operations (EP&O) levy totaling $333 million. This levy is needed for SPS to continue with student programs that aren’t paid for through state or federal funds, according to a slideshow presentation attached to the agenda.

The second discussion will focus on reviewing the current (2025-2026) school year’s priority strategies and talk about the development of priority strategies for the upcoming school year (2026-2027). The third discussion zeroes in on the school board’s goals, which the board is responsible for creating every year.

At the regular meeting, a presentation will be given on the 2026-2027 drafted budget where community members will have the opportunity to provide public comment.

Policies on native education and immigration enforcement

The board will then discuss and take action on a few policies including the Native Education and Limiting Immigration Enforcement in Schools– the two new policies we highlighted a couple of weeks ago in CIVICS.

Agendas here
Wednesday, June 3 at 4:30 pm (special meeting) and 6 pm (regular meeting)
200 N. Bernard, Spokane
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Spokane Valley City Council (special meeting)

🌶️/5 peppers

Comprehensive Plan update

The council will review the third section of an update to the Comprehensive Plan, which governs how the city grows and is mandated by state law. This section will focus on the development of parks, transportation and capital facilities, which are properties the city owns.

Agenda here
Tuesday, June 2 at 5 pm
10210 E Sprague Ave, Spokane Valley
Virtual attendance here.

Liberty Lake City Council

🌶️🌶️/5 peppers

Transportation Improvement Plan update

The council will discuss the regular update to its Transportation ImprovementPlan, a six-year plan that articulates millions of dollars to be spent on road repaving, building of sidewalks and construction of new infrastructure to make cyclists and pedestrians safer. The budgeting also contains $300,000 in new traffic monitoring cameras across Liberty Lake.