This is us circling back in the new year

"Time is a flat circle," – especially when the new year rolls around. (Photo illustration by Valerie Osier)

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:

RANGE team retreat
Get your trash bins out early!
A (possible) new mayor for Spokane Valley
Possible drama in Liberty Lake’s commission appointments

Important meetings this week:

The RANGE team is back – sort of

Thank you to our readers and members who supported us as we took the holiday week to rest and reset in our personal lives! Now we’re taking this week to reset as a team with a retreat to focus on our mission, vision and goals for the year. We have a packed agenda where we’ll drill down on why we do what we do, plan for the year, set up systems to make us more efficient and even do the more boring (but important!) stuff, like writing official policies. This means that unless all hell breaks loose (please don’t) and we need to hop on breaking news, it’ll be a light week for articles from us.

The reason we can do things like this — and do it with the whole team — is because we’re worker-owned and member-funded. That means that everything we do, including our editorial and business strategies, are led by the people closest to the work and closest to our community. We can also do this because we’re supported by readers. Because we don’t need to hit a content quota to please advertisers, we can take more time to make sure we’re focused on what’s most important to you.

If you want to support this work, become a member for as low as $10/month!

And BECAUSE we care about what’s important to you, while we are reviewing our mission, vision and belief statements, we would love your feedback on them as well. So take a look, and let us know what you think by emailing team@rangemedia.co.

Trash time changes

As with every holiday week, curbside trash and recycling pickup will be a day late this week, with Friday’s pick ups on Saturday.

Also starting this week, trash collection will begin an hour earlier, at 6 a.m., so be sure to get your bins out on time!

Spokane Valley City Council

Spokane Valley will select a mayor

In sharp contrast to Spokane’s hotly contested mayoral race, Spokane Valley City Council selects the city’s mayor every two years from the elected members of the city council. The mayoral position is closer to our city council president. Beyond running the city council meetings, their responsibilities and powers are the same as their fellow council members. They also represent the city in a ceremonial capacity.

The city council will select both a mayor and a deputy mayor, who runs meetings in the event of the mayor’s absence, at tonight’s meeting.

Pam Haley, the current mayor of Spokane Valley who we’ve recently written about for her texting habits at the Spokane Transit Board and her long-delayed response to a hate crime in Spokane Valley, is still on the city council and could serve as mayor again, if selected. Per the agenda, there is no public comment opportunity for this process.

Agenda here
Tuesday, January 2 at 6 pm
CenterPlace Great Room
2426 N Discovery Place, Spokane Valley, WA 99216
Virtual attendance here.

Liberty Lake City Council

Appointments in the new year

The majority of the agenda for Liberty Lake City Council’s first meeting in the new year is a slate of mayoral appointments to the Planning Commission and the Community Engagement Commission. An interesting little wrinkle in the list of potential appointees is the appointment of Tom Sahlberg to a voting member position on the Planning Commission. Sahlberg was the appointed city council member who filled Mike Kennedy’s seat during Kennedy’s leave of absence. When Kennedy came back to his seat in mid-December, the timing led to the super-majority that allowed for the recent vote to establish more control over the Liberty Lake Library Board. Sahlberg had also previously filed an ethics complaint against fellow council member Chris Cargill, claiming Cargill’s pledge to vote to reject all mayoral appointees and library budget requests until the library ordinance had passed as a violation of the council member’s oath of office. That ethics complaint has since been dismissed, but Cargill also got his way: the library ordinance passed, though mayor Cris Kaminskas exercised her right not to sign it, a ceremonial gesture to show her lack of support for the legislation.

It’s unclear if this past drama will affect the appointment process to approve Sahlberg.