Mayor Lisa Brown had to learn about it in The Spokesman: a 2,200 square-foot dock for sunbathers and paddlers that may soon stretch far into the Spokane River just upstream of the Upper Spokane Falls Dam.
Because it’s so big and in such a visible part of the river, the project has massive implications for the future of development on the river, which is still healing from a century of abuse from various industries. Developers argue the dock would encourage public access to the river, but biologists and university professors argue it has the potential to harm the ecology of the river and instigate other developers to crowd the river with similar projects.
“We’re still in the fact-finding stage,” Brown told RANGE at a Parks Board meeting May 8.
Environmental advocates said they were similarly surprised.
This perceived secrecy, said Hilary Hahn, the environmental planner who’s filing permit applications for the dock and helping conceive of the structure, is only that: perceived. She insisted she and developer Jerry Dicker, who owns the Ruby River Hotel and its Osprey Restaurant & Bar, have been nothing but open with the public about the project. To illustrate this, she cited her frequent work with city planners and state agencies that have the authority to approve the necessary permits for the dock’s construction.
“It's had a lot of eyes on it to make sure that we're doing it right,” she told RANGE.
That list of agencies she’s had to file documents with is indeed long. Hahn, who leads the project for Facet NW, the contractor Dicker hired to design the dock, had to have a "conditional use permit” approved by the city of Spokane and state offices. Because the dock is so close to the Upper Spokane Falls Dam, she had to apply for approval from the US Army Corps of Engineers. She’ll have to acquire a lease from the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR). She had to file a checklist with the city noting that the project could affect sensitive species, including redband trout, which is listed by the state Department of Fish a Wildlife (DFW) as a “species of greatest conservation need” because their habitat is being destroyed.
Still, a growing chorus of people are worried about the proposal. They’ve expressed their concerns publicly in two letters to Brown — one from the Spokane Riverkeeper and another signed by nine professors and biologists — and a letter to the editor in The Spokesman by the Riverkeeper and Greg Gordon, an environmental studies professor at Gonzaga University. They said the dock should be subjected to a more rigorous process of public scrutiny and outlined their concerns. They worry:
- A dock this conspicuous would encourage other developers to embark on similar projects, which would proliferate and change the river — which is home to one of only two urban waterfalls in the US — in unacceptable ways.
- The project poses potential safety hazards, including a deceptively swift current that could swallow intoxicated restaurant patrons who might use the dock as a jumping off point for a swim. (Hahn said the dock will be open to paddleboarders and kayakers, not swimmers, and would not be open at all during the most dangerous river flows.)
- Avista, the power utility, worries a log may dislodge the dock, which would then be swept into the Upper Spokane Falls Dam, an essential piece of water infrastructure in the city. (Hahn said she would ensure the dock could not be dislodged when it comes time to engineer it.)
- City officials did not properly notify local neighborhoods about public meetings to discuss the project. (Spencer Gardner, director of the city’s Planning Department, admitted that mistake but said it should not hamper the application process, noting the city has an “expediency” obligation to developers.)
- The state DFW hasn’t done a species survey on this stretch of the river for a decade and a half.
- The city of Spokane issued a “finding of nonsignificance,” meaning there was no reason to do an expensive and onerous environmental impact study, even though redband trout have been observed spawning just feet from the dock site. Those fishes are listed by DFW as a “species of greatest conservation need” because their habitat is being destroyed, and fish biologists worry the dock will create a spawning environment for invasive fish that eat juvenile redbands. (Hahn said the dock would let enough light through to maintain the ecosystem underneath.)
In emails to some of the concerned folks, city officials have apologized for the notification oversight.
“The omission of neighborhood councils on the agency comment for project Z25-419SCUP was in error,” Gardner wrote in an April 14 email to Luke Tolley, the chair of the Administrative Committee of the city’s Neighborhood Community Assembly.
But they emphasized that the project will go forward regardless. They promised to do better in future projects. The only thing that might stop it, Gardner told RANGE, is if one of the neighborhood councils that was not notified of the public meeting demanded to restart the process.
Hahn, the Facet contractor, noted in an interview that the dock is a public asset that will improve access to the stretch of the Spokane River upstream of the Upper Spokane Falls Dam. Public access to the river is a central component to Spokane’s Shoreline Master Program, which governs how infrastructure is developed near water in the city.
Tamara Camper, a former environmental planner at Facet who said she did a high-water analysis for the site and attended an early meeting between those involved, said Ruby River Hotel owner Dicker initially did not want the dock to be public. He wanted to make the dock available only to patrons of his hotel and restaurant, and even fence off from the public and have it patrolled by contracted Spokane police officers, Camper said.
“He had zero interest and was very much pushing back about letting the public there,” Camper said. “He had a lot of complaints about homeless people. … He just wanted to have it for a venue for weddings and special events.”
Hahn confirmed that Dicker, who did not respond to a request for comment but has publicly excoriated the city for not being friendly enough to private developers, did not initially want the dock to be open to the public. But this was a nonstarter for city planners, who convinced Dicker to commit to letting the public on the dock.
“It's not unusual for a developer to come in with an idea,” said planning Director Gardner, who was not in the initial meetings. “But they're not experts in what our code requires. And so during those meetings, it is common to have a developer saying, ‘Well, here's kinda what I'm looking for,’ or ‘Here's what I wanna do.’ And then we can say, ‘Well, here's what our code is requiring you to do.’ That's our code working as intended.”
After Dicker realized he would have to open the dock to the public, Hahn said he let her take over planning for the dock.
“Once it kind of became this public dock, he really did let me run with it,” she said. She then started planning several public amenities, including a potential fish camera that would let dock users watch the creatures swimming underneath. “He was like, ‘OK, Hilary, I'll let you go for it.’"
There is no mention of the dock proposal on the website of his company GVD Commercial Properties, Inc., a prominent Spokane developer. At a February hearing to discuss the conditional use permit, Hahn said the hotel would make several parking spaces available to people who want to use the dock. They would carry their watercraft down a gangway to put into the river.
Big blue ribbon
This stretch of the Spokane River was abused for years by the paper, mining and rail industries that freely dumped chemicals into it and made it difficult for Spokanites to access it. The city rebuilt and cleaned the river through a painstaking process in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the run-up to Expo-74, the World’s Fair that made Spokane globally famous as the smallest city to ever host the event.
Now, the Centennial Trail, a 37-mile recreational trail connecting the city with the border of Idaho, snakes along the river just south of the hotel. Rain or shine, runners, cyclists, inline skaters and pedestrians use it for exercise and as an alternative to driving around downtown.
City Council Member Paul Dillon worries that once the dock is constructed — which most people engaged in the process see as an inevitability — other developers will see it and want to make their own dock. As those projects proliferate, the character of the river will change, they say.
“ I'm really concerned that this is a Trojan horse for more monetizing of the river,” Dillon said. “It seemed like this was one of the legs of the stool to something bigger.”
He’s also concerned with what he agreed was a secretive process to get the dock approved.
“I’m not happy with how this went down,” Dillon said.
But both he and Gardner said there really nothing they can do to slow the process down.
Brian Muegge, a river advocate and member of the governing board of the Spokane Riverkeeper, disagrees. He proposed some solutions to city officials, the City Council and Mayor Brown in a May 13 email, which RANGE has reviewed. He said an approval Dicker obtained from the Department of Natural Resources could be vacated because state agencies don’t know enough about the ecosystem at the dock site. He also said the city could consider requesting an environmental impact study since some neighborhood councils were not notified of the public meetings early in the process.
In an interview, Muegge, who earned his biology degree from Gonzaga University a few hundred yards upstream of the site in the 2010s, worried about the way the dock could affect redband trout in a sensitive stretch of the river.
“That section of the Spokane River is a gaining reach, meaning that the aquifer feeds the river, which means that it's colder, which salmonids, including interior redband trout, need.”
He also worried about public safety.
“You're a hotel,” he said. “You're gonna get people from out of town. You're gonna get people that are unfamiliar with our river, who have no bloody clue that it can get cold and quick and dangerous real quick.”
Greg Gordon, one of the authors of the letter to the editor in The Spokesman, noted that there is already a kayak takeout directly on the opposite bank. He questioned whether Spokanites even want the dock. On a deeper level, Gordon, an Environmental Studies professor at Gonzaga, lamented the ways in which developers and capitalists think about the natural world.
“I've been trying to figure out why this dock irritates me so much,” Gordon said. “Why does this thing just get under my skin? … I think what it speaks to is this attitude that the natural world exists solely for our amusement and our own edification and profits. And I think that's why this gets to me is this isn't something that's done for a community need.”
The state Department of Ecology will soon weigh in on the conditional use permit that was approved by an independent city hearing examiner on March 12. That’s the last hurdle before engineers will start designing the final construction plans and applying for final permits. Hahn said the project is very close to being in the bag.
“Once we get [Ecology’s] approval … then we're free to head into the building permit process,” she said.
Update: As we wrote this story, Ecology approved Dicker's permit to build the dock.
