Beat the buzzer, share your budget opinions with Spokane

OK, OK, the city isn't budgeting for elephants. (Art 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:

Latah Valley’s future will likely be studied, per a contract with a consulting firm in Spokane City Council’s consent agenda tonight, as the council votes on stalling more development in a different part of town — Beacon Hill.
Make your voice heard on Spokane city’s 2025-26 proposed budget at the public hearing during tonight’s council meeting.
Multilingual recruitment, new council rules and committee appointments, public records and a COPS contract extension are all up for discussion at this week’s Finance and Administration Committee meeting.
Spokane Valley City Council could pass a letter asking for more representation on a regional emergency board, following Spokane City’s lead.

Important meetings this week:

Spokane City Council

🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 peppers

What’s next for Latah Valley?

Earlier this year, the Spokane City Council voted to put a temporary pause on developments in the Latah Valley area as they evaluated how to build more infrastructure and improve safety in the area. A big question left unanswered was how exactly the city was going to pay for infrastructure improvements. In the consent agenda for tonight is a $200,000 contract with BERK Consulting to evaluate the Latah Subarea and Planning area and propose funding opportunities as the city prepares to update the Comprehensive Plan. The study will also evaluate existing and needed capital improvements, look at the potential to establish a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) District and assess future growth and necessary services.

Small elephants, big crime, part two

Ten small elephants worth of litter gets dumped on Spokane’s streets every single month. Tonight, the Spokane City Council will vote on an ordinance that would increase the penalties for littering:

A $50 fine for litter equal to or less than a cubic foot
A misdemeanor for litter bigger than a cubic foot but smaller than 10 cubic yards
A gross misdemeanor for dumping more than 10 cubic yards.

Last week, there was debate over whether this ordinance is continuing to penalize homelessness, because unhoused folks may not have access to a trash can or dumpster, and whether it would even be enforceable with an overstretched police department. However, council members pointed out that the ordinance was drafted in response to illegal dumping of home remodeling waste — pounds and pounds of old tile — and that it would likely only be used in the event that a lot of trash was dumped and there was some evidence of who did it.

If you have strong feelings about the punishment for littering, tonight is your last opportunity to testify before this is finally voted on.

Budget hearing

After last week’s hearing went long, filled with testimony from COPS volunteers (for more on this, jump to the next section in CIVICS), Spokane City Council is back for more: they’ll hold another public hearing on the mayor’s proposed 2025-26 budget proposal tonight. It’s another chance for you to make your voice heard on what should or shouldn’t get funded. One item we noticed: Brown intends to keep paying for police out of the Safe Streets Now fund, formerly known as the Traffic Safety fund, which was definitely controversial when Woodward did it.

Another development pause

Three years ago, council granted preliminary approval for the development of a plot of land on Beacon Hill, which would be subdivided into 35 lots for multi-family development, totalling 276 units. That preliminary approval, which means the developers need to meet certain requirements before the city will let them build, was extended until December 14, 2024, but a vote tonight could extend that preliminary approval period until December 14, 2025, to ensure all conditions of the approval are met and that “completion of infrastructure required to serve the development,” are addressed before permits are issued.

Agenda here
Monday, November 25 at 6 pm
City Council Chambers – Lower Level of City Hall
808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd.
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Finance and Administration Committee

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 peppers

Recruitment, reclutamiento, вербування

Today, the Finance and Administration Committee will discuss an ordinance that would require the city to start actively recruiting multilingual applicants. Spokane is actively working to have a Language Access program in place across all city departments no later than January 1, 2026, which would make multilingual job candidates even more valuable than they were before. The ordinance states that employees’ language skills will be “strategically leveraged by the City to meet the needs of the community.” And, the ordinance lays out the beginnings of a plan for how the city can recruit multilingual applicants: flyers, posters, direct outreach to relevant organizations and specifically promoting vacant positions to multilingual communities. This is just a committee discussion, but we’ll be following this ordinance, which is coming from Council Member Lili Navarrete’s office, as it progresses.

COPS contract extension

What the city should do about their soon-to-expire contract with the nonprofit Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS for short, has been the hot topic of the last week. If you’re looking for an in-depth explanation of the issue, listen to our most recent episode of the Pod here, but otherwise, here’s the gist: for decades, the city has contracted with COPS to provide community policing services like fingerprinting after car break-ins and victim advocate services. But that contract is about to expire, and the current city council and administration have expressed that they are not interested in approving another five-year, sole-source contract — which means who gets the contract isn’t decided by a competitive process and the city can only contract with COPS for these services, effectively shutting out any other organizations who may be able to provide more or better services.

At today’s committee meeting, council will discuss a resolution that would request Mayor Lisa Brown’s administration extend the contract with COPS for just four months, until the end of April, for $200,000, so services from COPS don’t shut off cold turkey at the end of 2024. That time could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of COPS’ services over the last few years and run a competitive procurement process to see if other organizations submit to provide community oriented policing services across the city.

New year, new rules

After the kerfuffle about their 2024 rules, we aren’t surprised, but Spokane City Council is prepping to start 2025 by discussing their Rules of Procedure for the new year starting now. Some of the proposed changes we noticed in the resolution draft that will be discussed today:

Currently, public testimony on legislative items can run up to three minutes long per speaker. A proposed change for 2025 would reduce that time to two minutes per item.
But, council is looking to add more opportunities for public testimony — another proposed change would require the council to take public testimony at their committee meetings, which they don’t currently do.
Clarifications on Open Forum rules that would allow (not require) council to take a short break before Open Forum, and state that randomization of Open Forum order only happens when more than 20 people sign up to testify. Another change would make it clear that council members should not respond to speakers unless it’s to state intent to address the matter in the future, or make a point of order.
A new paragraph was added to the Council Member Responsibility sections that clarifies what constitutes an unexcused absence, perhaps in response to Council Member Jonathan Bingle skipping a council meeting to speak against transgender kids’ participation in sports at a Mead School Board meeting and later receiving an unexcused absence letter from the council president.

If you love (or hate) these proposed changes, we’ll keep you posted on when they’re scheduled to come before council for a first reading and a vote.

Sorry, District 1…

A proposed list of board and committee assignments was included in the agenda for today’s committee, and there was one particularly notable exclusion we noticed: after months of sustained testimony from a few dedicated District 1 residents asking that Council President Betsy Wilkerson put one of their representatives on the Spokane Transit Authority (STA) board, council members Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart continue to be snubbed. The first draft of the proposed appointments keeps the STA representatives the same — Zack Zappone, Paul Dillon, Kitty Klitzke and Wilkerson herself. And, Bingle and Cathcart weren’t even thrown a bone with representation on Spokane Regional Transportation Council, the other transportation related board, whose seats will stay with Klitzke and Wilkerson.

Besides the transportation slight though, Bingle and Cathcart actually hold the most combined board and commission seats per district, with a total of 17 between the two of them. Klitzke and Zappone from District 3 hold 14 and Dillon and Navarrete hold 16. Wilkerson, who represents the whole city as president, holds 11 seats. Again, this list could change in the coming weeks, and it still needs Wilkerson to decide on committee chairs and her second-in-command, so we’ll keep you posted as this moves through the system.

Public records plan?

We couldn’t find any materials attached in the agenda, but a “Public Records Ordinance Discussion,” penned by Cathcart is scheduled for five minutes of conversation. After a recent piece from InvestigateWest by former Inlander City Hall reporter Daniel Walters about the absolutely abysmal speed of Spokane’s public records returns, maybe we could see some reforms or improvements coming?

Agenda here
Monday, November 25 at 1:15 pm
Council Chambers in the Lower Level of City Hall.
808 W Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane, WA 99201
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Mead School District Board of Directors

🫑/5 peppers

Agenda here
Monday, November 25 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

🫑/5 peppers

Agenda here
Monday, November 25 at 6 p.m.
Learning and Teaching Center (district office)
Board Room at 2218 N Molter Rd, Liberty Lake
Watch via Zoom here.

Spokane Housing Authority

🌶️/5 peppers

Interviews for resident commissioners

The SHA will interview two candidates for resident commissioner positions, Katy Zemke and Letetia Davis. Once those interviews are over, the commissioners will discuss the applicants during the meeting.

Construction contract amendment

The SHA will discuss a revision to a construction contract for a project to replace the Hufumi En apartment complex in the Perry District. The new building will contain more than double the affordable housing units for seniors from 41 to between 86 and 88 units and will cost about $30 million.

Agenda here
Monday, November 25 at 3:30 pm
Meeting Room 25 W. Nora Ave, Spokane, WA 99205
The meeting is also live streamed here.

Spokane Valley City Council

🌶️🌶️/5 peppers

UPDATE: SpoVal Representation on SREC board

Spokane Valley Mayor Pam Haley has drafted a letter to the Spokane County Board of Commissioners (BOCC) requesting that a representative of the city be added to the board of Spokane Regional Emergency Communications (SREC). SREC triages 911 calls and routes them to the appropriate responding agency. The city pays more than $1.3 million in fees to SREC for membership, according to Haley’s letter. It’s the second-largest amount any SREC member pays after the city of Spokane. The Spokane Valley City Council may vote on whether to send the letter at the legislative meeting.

Spokane Valley Police Chief Dave Ellis currently sits on the SREC board, but he is technically employed by the Spokane County Sheriff, which is in charge of law enforcement for the city and is not an employee of Spokane Valley. Haley writes in the letter that the city wants to be represented by someone who is directly involved in the city budget, which Ellis is not.

The request comes as the county is trying to massage the relationship between SREC and the city of Spokane, which, earlier this year, proposed to reform the board, breaking it into two bodies, one that handles administrative issues and another that handles operations. That proposal seemed dead in the water at a BOCC briefing session early this month, but that may change with the Valley also wanting in.