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 Council will vote on an Alcohol Impact Area downtown that would limit stores from selling single-serve alcohol containers, ban sales after midnight and prohibit the sale of drug paraphernalia, including pipes and aluminum foil, which is used to smoke some street drugs.
- The Public Safety & Community Health Committee will discuss a resolution to reaffirm the city’s support of immigrants and state law, which forbids Spokane Police Department from collaborating with immigration officers.
- The county commission will vote on whether to start punishing people for sleeping in public, effectively criminalizing homelessness.
- Liberty Lake is considering revisions to city code that would allow emergency shelters and transitional and supportive housing in areas zoned for hotels.
- The Spokane Human Rights Commission is looking to fill two vacant, one-year seats for commissioners under the age of 18.
- The Office of Police Ombuds will present its December report to the City Council, which shows increases in the office’s contacts with community members and an uptick in complaints
- The county Sheriff wants to install surveillance cameras on traffic lights.
Important meetings this week:
- Spokane City Council
- Public Safety & Community Health Committee
- Board of County Commissioners - Briefing Session and Legislative Session
- Spokane Valley City Council
- Liberty Lake City Council
- Spokane Human Rights Commission
- Community Housing & Human Services Board
Spokane City Council
🌶️🫑/5 peppers
It’s a pretty light week at Spokane City Council, with not much on the agenda. However, tensions have been running high because of state and federal policies recently, and that could add additional spice to an otherwise mild agenda.
Brace for impact
Tonight is the night that council will vote on a pair of ordinances aiming to reduce crime, litter and drug use downtown. The Alcohol Impact Area ordinance would prevent retailers (not bars) from selling single-serve alcohol any time of day, and to stop selling all alcohol from midnight to 6 am.
The Community Health Impact Area would prohibit the sale of pipes and other drug paraphernalia like aluminum foil downtown, unless the store is also willing to give out free Narcan.
The discussion around these two ordinances has been interesting. The general argument in favor of them is that they used to exist before and crime and littering was lower then — alcohol-related incidents within the area went up more than 60% over the last three years — so it’s worth bringing the laws back. The administration’s full evidence in support of the laws can be reviewed starting on page 95 of the agenda.
The arguments against these ordinances vary more, with some arguing that it limits commerce by requiring stores to give out free Narcan, some saying the pair of ordinances should be in place citywide and others saying they will do more harm than good because people might buy six packs rather than single-serve amounts. There’s also a concern that, if people can’t buy professionally made pipes, they will just make their own pipes, which could increase risk of infections and overdoses.
We think it’s likely council will pass both of these ordinances, but tonight we’ll find out for sure!
Next week’s sneak peek:
- On the consent agenda, council code will vote to accept a $650,000 grant from the state Department of Ecology to study carbon emissions reductions at the Waste to Energy Facility.
- After a deferral, Council Member Lili Navarrete’s ordinance to direct the city to heighten efforts to recruit bilingual applicants for city jobs could finally be up for a vote.
- A noticeable omission — the resolution Latinos en Spokane and other community organizers have been pushing for to reaffirm the city’s commitment to not working with immigration officers is not listed on the agenda yet. However, we think it’s likely that it could get added to next week’s agenda during today’s Public Safety & Community Health Committee, which will discuss a similar resolution to LeS’s, sponsored by three council members (see below).
Agenda here
Monday, February 3, at 6 pm
808 W. Spokane Falls Boulevard, Spokane, WA 99201
The meeting is also live streamed here.
Public Safety & Community Health Committee
🌶️🌶️🌶️🫑/5 peppers
Police accountability report
The Office of the Police Ombuds is sharing their December 2024 monthly report with the council. Because it is the final piece of data from last year, the presentation has some interesting numbers in it, like the fact that the office’s contacts with the community went up 169% from 2023. Complaints from the community were up 125% from 2023. No reason for those increases was given in the report, but more context may come up at this meeting. If you want to read the full December report, you can find it starting on page 9 of the agenda.
A slew of updates
The public safety committee is one of the most informative to watch, because council gets a series of presentations from different departments on the success of their safety programs. Today, council will get reports on:
- how many tickets the redlight and school zones cameras have issued (and at what lights)
- Spokane Police Department (SPD)’s performance, including where they’re at on reviewing the last two years’ use of deadly force incidents
- the Spokane Regional Opioid Task Force
- SPD’s forfeiture and seizures for the last quarter of 2024
- The city’s Clean and Safe contract with Downtown Spokane Partnership to improve downtown safety
- Police and Fire overtime spending
- All other “strategic initiatives.”
Regional collaboration at an all time low
Currently, SPD and the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office collaborate on the Behavioral Health Unit, a response team that is trained to go out to mental health related calls and seek alternate resolutions to crises, rather than just jail or the emergency room.
Instead of continuing to collaborate, though, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office has elected to pursue their own grant for the program, pulling out of the regional model. Because of the county’s choice, SPD now has to apply separately for a grant from Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs to fund the city’s unit. SPD is presenting their plans to the committee today, but they included the bare bones details in the agenda; they’re going to request funding for seven fulltime employees for the unit — a sergeant, a mental health coordinator and six officers.
We will be following this, as it will be interesting to see what the region does if only one of the departments gets the grant (or neither, sometimes applications are stronger together!)
Is the city getting SREC’ed?
The saga of the city and Spokane Regional Emergency Communication (SREC)’s messy break-up has been dominating local news for the last two weeks (we recommend this comprehensive breakdown by Samantha Wohlfeil at The Inlander). TLDR: the county is forcing the city out of another regional collaboration. How much of that is the city’s unwillingness to compromise, no one can say for sure.
Today, Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates will be presenting an update on SREC’s decision to the council. Hopefully, her presentation will include some of the city’s plans for the next steps, especially if the proposed state law to re-apportion the excise tax that partially funds emergency dispatch to be divided by call volume (which would favor the city) instead of by population (which favors the county), fails.
Another little wrinkle we noticed in a separate committee agenda item: the city is trying to renew a current contract with SREC to share maintenance costs for their Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) programs. The contract renewal would run from May 1, 2025 to April 30, 2026. But SREC has announced its intent to dump the city from the regional collaboration of emergency communications on January 1, 2026. So if this contract passed, and SREC goes through with breaking ties, they would then owe the city $54,208.96 for the contract period.
Support for immigrants
As Spokane has begun to see the impacts of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policies, community organizations have been asking the city to affirm their commitment to state law — the Keep Washington Working Act, which prevents the Spokane Police Department from collaborating with ICE and Border Patrol. Latinos en Spokane submitted their own community resolution with a list of requests of the city (including one that requested the city look for ways to fund LeS’ immigration defense program).
Council Members Lili Navarrete, Zack Zappone and Betsy Wilkerson are co-sponsoring their own version of the resolution, which is up for discussion today. The resolution includes:
- Affirmations that the city will continue to follow state law, and a specific promise that SPD will not collaborate with immigration officers.
- A commitment to proactively building trust with and reducing fear in immigrant refugee communities
- The council’s support to “explore future opportunities to allocate funding to community-based organizations and to expand legal representation and immigration defense services for immigrant and refugee residents,” (but not specifically LeS’ program)
- A commitment to ongoing training of city employees to ensure compliance with the KWWA
- A request for a biannual report from SPD and “any relevant city agencies to assess compliance with the Keep Washington Working Act and to track progress in supporting immigrant and refugee communities.”
The text of the resolution could change based on discussions during today’s meeting, but it will likely be up for a vote next Monday in a similar form.
Agenda here when available.
Monday, February 3 at 12 pm
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
🌶️🌶️/5 peppers
Sheriff’s Civil Office looking to more than double fees
Fees for serving papers in small claims court may more than double. A proposal from the Sheriff asks for fees to be hiked from $30 to serve an individual to $70 and from $40 to $80 to serve multiple people in the same household, among other fee hikes. The last time fees were increased was 2011. The agenda sheet says the fees are needed to cover administrative and operational costs and will help avoid spending public money on those costs.
Sheriff wants surveillance cameras on traffic lights
The Sheriff is asking the Public Works Department for permission to install surveillance cameras on traffic lights around the county. It currently operates cameras on utility poles owned by Avista and wants to expand surveillance.
Steep increases in fentanyl ODs
The Spokane County Medical Examiner will present slides to BOCC showing about a 400% increase in all overdoses, including non-deadly ones, from fentanyl, a powerful opioid, in Washington state from 2018 to 2024. According to data from the Washington Department of Health, 40 people per 100,000 died in 2024 from overdoses from all drugs, most of them related to opioids. In 2018, that number was 10.
Update on millions in fed money for Newman Lake water quality
The BOCC awarded $2.3 million in American Rescue Plan funding to replace equipment that maintains water quality in Newman Lake. The Public Works Department will update the board on that project progress, showing the following statuses for the various aspects of the replacement:
- Completed: Removal of existing in-lake oxygenation and alum dosing equipment
- Completed: Installation of replacement on-shore oxygen line
- Ongoing: Removal of onshore oxygen generating equipment and delivery of new equipment
- Due by June 2025: Schedule for in-lake installation, startup, testing and completion
PFAS task force in county’s federal agenda
The county has published its federal agenda for 2025, which includes a county task force that will ensure the following happens regarding “forever chemicals” contamination in West Plains groundwater:
- State and federal agencies responsible for PFAS mitigation provide regular status updates on cleanup efforts
- Agencies provide real-time notifications on grant opportunities
- Local, state, and federal legislators hold agencies accountable
Agenda here
Tuesday, February 4 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
🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 peppers
BOCC will vote on punishing people who sleep in public
The BOCC is set to vote to start enforcing its 2019 camping ban when shelters in Spokane County are full. This potential move follows a June US Supreme Court ruling overturning a lower court decision barring local governments from banning camping if they don’t provide other options for unhoused people to find shelter. Governments across the West immediately started codifying laws that punish people for sleeping in the streets even when they have nowhere else to go.
In August, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city of Spokane over its camping ban, which it argued violated the state constitution. Advocates of unhoused people have argued camping bans effectively criminalize being homeless.
Board appointment
The BOCC is set to appoint Amanda Randall to the Spokane County Community Services Behavioral Health Advisory Board.
$1.3M for improvements to Cascade Way
The county is set to award a nearly $1.3 million contract to Shamrock Paving, Inc., to make improvements to Cascade Way between Wall and Normandie streets “by roadway excavation incl. haul, crushed surfacing base/top course, HMA, temporary traffic control, signing, pavement markings, and other work,” according to the agenda sheet.
Agenda here
Tuesday, February 4 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
🌶️/5 peppers
New regs governing camping on private property
The City Council is considering new regulations on camping of private property in the city limits that define such camping as a “public nuisance” and allowing the city to remove camping equipment from private property that’s not explicitly for camping. Exceptions to this rule include camping on established campgrounds, camping done by the property owner.
Agenda here when available
Tuesday, February 4 at 6 pm
City Hall
10210 E Sprague Ave
Spokane Valley, Washington 99206
Virtual attendance here.
Liberty Lake City Council
🌶️🫑/5 peppers
Allowing shelters in hotel zones
After holding a public hearing on a slate of proposed changes to city code that would make it easier to operate emergency shelters, transitional housing and supportive housing, Liberty Lake City Council is doing a first read on an official amendment to the code in an attempt to get capacity for 227 shelter beds by 2046 and comply with state law. The amendments strike three old requirements:
- Forbidding shelters from having more than 75 residents.
- Requiring all shelters to be spaced at least ¾ of a mile away from each other
- Requiring shelters to be within ¼ mile of a fixed transit route
Agenda here
Tuesday, February 4 at 7 pm
22710 E Country Vista Drive, Liberty Lake, WA 99019
The meeting is also live streamed here.
Spokane Human Rights Commission
🌶️🫑/5 peppers
Dist. 1, 2 youth vacancies
The commission is soliciting applications to fill vacancies in the youth seats for Human Rights Commission Districts 1 and 2. The terms are for one year, and applicants must be under the age of 18. According to the vacancy notice, the Human Rights Commission “advises and makes recommendations to the City Council regarding issues related to human rights and unjust discrimination and the implementation of programs consistent with the needs of all residents of the City of Spokane.”
Agenda here when available.
Thursday, February 6 at 5:30 pm
Council Briefing Center in the Lower Level of City Hall
808 W Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane, WA 99201
Community, Housing, and Human Services Board
Agenda here when available
Wednesday, February 5 at 4 pm
City Council Briefing Chambers
808 W Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane, WA 99201
Virtual attendance link included on their agenda when available.
