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:
- Spokane Valley might approve a resolution declaring the city is not a sanctuary city and, counter to state law, direct its police department to start helping “other” agencies enforce federal immigration law.
- Spokane Valley is also holding a public hearing for a proposed public safety sales tax of .1% to pay for increased law enforcement costs and to hire more cops.
- Code clean-up and a vote on 2025-2026 priorities for the Spokane Plan Commission at the Spokane City Council meeting today.
- The Public Safety and Community Health Committee will get a few important presentations and discuss an ordinance that could expand “sit and lie” laws to the whole city.
- Spokane County is set to disburse more than $945,000 of federal funding to three contractors to provide body camera equipment and services for the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office.
Important meetings this week:
- Spokane City Council
- Public Safety and Community Health Committee
- Community, Housing, and Human Services Board
- Board of County Commissioners - Briefing Session and Legislative Session
- Spokane Valley City Council
- Liberty Lake City Council
Spokane City Council
🫑/5 peppers
It’s shaping up to be a pretty quiet week at Spokane City Council — which is great news if you were torn between watching council or the women’s basketball UCONN versus USC game — but here’s what you can expect if you choose the former:
- A slate of small city code clean-ups, like consolidating duplicative sections about “offenses involving animals.”
- A vote on the 2025-26 Work Program for the Plan Commission, which ended up incorporating the joint amendment from Council Members Kitty Klitzke and Michael Cathcart.
- A first reading of an ordinance to amend fee schedules for historic preservation, lowering some of them and combining fees for ease of use.
Next week’s sneak peek:
- Somehow next week’s sneak peek is even less spicy than tonight’s meeting; because it’s cancelled! However, April 14, council’s next meeting is shaping up to be controversial, so stay tuned 👀
Agenda here
Monday, March 31, 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
Data for the nerds, the curious and the journalists
This is one of our favorite committees, because the staff reports presented during it are some of the most interesting:
- The Office of Police Ombuds is presenting a report on their February activities. They got five complaints, including a complaint from a community member who alleged that Spokane Police Department (SPD) officers targeted and arrested them during a homeless camp sweep, and a report from a community member who alleged that an off-duty SPD officer ran a red light, causing an accident, and the responding officers did not cite the off-duty officer.
- An update from SPD on their strategic initiatives, which includes detail on the recent return of Neighborhood Resource Officers. This update also typically comes with a detailed slideshow from Chief Kevin Hall that includes arrest, citation and call data.
- A report on the latest data from the city’s red light and speeding cameras. Citations for both speeding and red light cameras are down slightly when comparing this February to February 2024, although that could be because apparently, one of the cameras was vandalized, and a replacement is still in the works.
Cost recovery and city budget efficiency
Twice in one CIVICS edition, council members Klitzke and Cathcart are teaming up. This time, it’s on a draft of an ordinance that would require the city to regularly adjust the fees and charges it collects. Those adjustments would be to ensure that when folks are getting charged for things like general facilities charges, it “reflects the actual cost of service delivery.” The main goal of the ordinance is to make sure that the city actually recovers its costs for services provided, but it also notes a secondary benefit: if each fee actually covers the cost of service provided, then the city (and therefore, the taxpayers) won’t have to eat the difference.
Even more sit and lie laws?
Council Member Jonathan Bingle is proposing an ordinance that would change the enforcement of “sit and lie,” the colloquial term for the laws prohibiting people from sitting or lying on public sidewalks. It’s also a law that is usually only enforced against unhoused people, which has resulted in an ongoing lawsuit against Spokane from the ACLU.
Currently, sit and lie laws only apply downtown, but Bingle’s ordinance would expand the prohibition citywide, make them enforceable at all hours and get rid of an old provision that required cops to check for shelter bed availability before citing someone in violation of sit and lie. It would ensure people in all neighborhoods “benefit from the same protective ordinance that now only benefits the downtown core,” Bingle wrote in the agenda notes.
One interesting note, though: in reviewing enforcement statistics from SPD, citations for crimes intrinsically linked to homelessness are *way* up, but the police rarely use sit and lie as the mechanism, instead preferring to cite people for pedestrian interference — essentially, interfering with pedestrians’ needs to navigate the sidewalks freely. Pedestrian interference can already be cited citywide at all hours of the day, with no shelter bed requirements. It’s unclear if expanding the boundaries of sit and lie would increase citations, or if SPD would just continue to cite for pedestrian interference.
Stats presented by Chief Kevin Hall earlier this month. Sit and lie citations were so negligible they didn’t even make the presentation. Pedestrian interference citations, however, were up 303%.
Agenda here when available.
Monday, March 31 at 12 pm
City Council Chambers – Lower Level of City Hall
808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd.
The meeting is also live streamed here.
Community, Housing, and Human Services Board
Agenda here when available
Wednesday, April 2 at 4 pm
City Council Briefing Chambers
808 W Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane, WA 99201
Virtual attendance link included on their agenda when available.
Board of Spokane County Commissioners Briefing Session
🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 peppers
Nearly $1M in federal funds for sheriff body cams
The county is set to disburse more than $945,000 to three contractors to provide body camera equipment and services for the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office. The funds would be disbursed to the following contractors in the following amounts:
- Polis Solutions, Inc: $399,172 in federal funds
- National Policing Institute: $277,148 in federal funds
- CRA Consulting, LLC: $269,200 in federal funds
Agenda here
Tuesday, April 1 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
SpoVal to renew aquifer protection agreement through 2045
The county protects the Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer, the drinking water source for about half a million Eastern Washingtonians, by using fees collected from property owners in unincorporated areas and some municipalities, including Spokane Valley. That city is set to renew its agreement with the county. The average single-family home in the Valley pays about $15 a year into the protection fund. The BOCC is scheduled to review the agreement renewal, which extends the agreement through 2045, at Tuesday’s briefing session so it can be approved. Through the agreement, Spokane Valley receives about half a million dollars annually from the county in services like aquifer education and outreach, aquifer monitoring and data collection through the Spokane County Water Resources Department.
Board appointments
The BOCC is set to appoint the following people to county bodies:
- Collins Sprague to the Health Sciences & Services Authority of Spokane County
- Cora Lillis to the Spokane County Accessible Community/Elections Advisory Committee
Nearly $3M for Elk Chattaroy Road improvements
About one and a half miles of Elk Chattaroy Road just south of Chattaroy may receive more $2.9 million in resurfacing and other improvements, mostly from state funds. The county will foot about 10% of the bill, or $250,000.
Agenda here
Tuesday, April 1 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
SpoVal may assist immigration enforcement
Spokane Valley could join Mead School District in seeking to flout state law in favor of bending to President Donald Trump’s executive orders and federal direction. While Mead wants to avoid having to give trans students equal protections, Spokane Valley wants to declare itself *not* a sanctuary city and start directing city police to assist “other law enforcement agencies in enforcing US immigration laws.” It could also direct city employees “to require proof of legal residence in the U.S. when it is appropriate as part of their assigned jobs.”
This would seem to violate the Keep Washington Working Act (KWWA), the law passed in 2019 that made it illegal for state and local law enforcement to help federal agents carry out immigration law, ensuring immigrants can still access emergency services without fear of deportation. It also comes as Spokane Valley is facing accusations that the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office recently violated the KWWA in the arrest of Jeison and Cesar Ruiz-Rodriguez in Spokane Valley earlier this month.
Public hearing for new cops tax
Ballooning law enforcement budgets in Spokane Valley are so costly that the city is having to cut other programs in order to fund them. Spending on public safety in the city has increased 5.2%, according to a presentation the city council will hear Tuesday. This does not account for increased spending dictated by the County Sheriff’s collective bargaining agreement with deputies and officers, which also covers the Spokane Valley Police Department. The city also wants to hire the following positions, in addition to 10 officers hired in the last year:
- Four Patrol Deputies
- One School Resource Officer
- One shared Sexual Assault Detective
- One Behavioral Health Deputy (who would work with a behavioral health specialist)
The city is holding a public hearing Tuesday on a proposed public safety sales tax of .1%, which they say will bring in $2.6 million a year, on the ballot for the primary election scheduled for August 5.
Agenda here
Tuesday, April 1 at 6 pm
City Hall
10210 E Sprague Ave
Spokane Valley, Washington 99206
Virtual attendance here.
Liberty Lake City Council
🌶️/5 peppers
Tourism spending plan
Like Spokane, Liberty Lake has a Lodging Tax, a small fee paid on things like hotel room bookings. The money collected by the tax is then used to fund “tourism related activities,” chosen through a Request for Funding process. This year, Liberty Lake had $268,450 available to spend on proposals. If passed by the council, they’ll fully fund all eight proposals for a total cost of $195,572, which include:
- $900 for the Friends of the Liberty Lake Library’s Summer Soiree.
- $1,500 for 2025 Cops, Cars and Cruisers, an event put on by the Liberty Lake Police foundation
- $13,172 for a series of events by the Kiwanis Club, including movies in the park.
- $20,000 for HUB Sports Center 2025 Events
- $20,000 for a season of local theatre by Theater Arts Center (TAC) at the Lake
- $25,000 for the 2025 Winterglow Spectacular
- $30,000 for a series of events by the Rotary Club, like Memorial Day breakfast
- $85,000 for tourism photo and video collection by Visit Spokane
Agenda here
Tuesday, April 1 at 7 pm
22710 E Country Vista Drive, Liberty Lake, WA 99019
The meeting is also live streamed here.
