While 2026 seems lightyears away, government processes are notoriously slow, and so Spokane City Council has already begun the process of identifying projects for funding now, with a goal of releasing a final decision on how the funds will be used by the beginning of June.
Spokane City Council members have been plodding along in the process in workgroups, collaborating with the community to identify needs and spend down funds. Currently, the council’s rough draft for allocating the funding looks like this:
- $1 million to Multicultural Centers, with $100,000 going to 10 organizations identified via an upcoming RFP process
- $2.5 million to Neighborhood Business Districts, for projects like increasing street lighting, beautifying public spaces and potentially building things like courtyards that increase community engagement
- $3 million to Youth Behavioral Health, with the council workgroup currently in the process of brainstorming an exact plan for these funds
- $2 million to “Projects of Citywide Significance,” which will most likely be building broadband infrastructure
- $1 million to Subarea Planning, for neighborhood projects that have already been selected, but RFPs for contractors have yet to go out
Those five broad areas account for more than $9 million, leaving $2 million previously allocated for electric vehicle charging stations and buying a municipal building off the table for now.
Over the next few weeks, the council will be examining the viability of this broad plan, as well as the potential specific projects in those buckets to make sure that they can get dollars contracted out in time, or if they’ll have to reallocate funding from one project to another in order to get the funds spent down.
“We’re looking at [the plan] and we’re saying, ‘Okay, we spent this much of the money. We’ve got these projects or these things we want to do with the rest. Can we get those contracted? Is that reasonable? Is that going to happen?’” Council Member Michael Cathcart told RANGE. “The issue is because time is so short, sometimes decisions have to be made. We’ve got to, as they say in the movie industry, kill your darlings.”
On Monday, Mayor Lisa Brown introduced a new variable to the ongoing process by publicly releasing her plan for how the city should spend the remaining funds. Her list looks a little different:
- $5 million to assist in transitions for Catholic Charities’ House of Charity.
- $1 million to ensure Compassionate Addiction Treatment has adequate facilities for providing critical services to meet the community’s needs.
- $2.15 million to expand broadband infrastructure to underserved communities.
- $1 million to support operations and resources for a “Vibrant, Clean, and Safe” initiative.
- $350,000 for Municipal Court’s Community Justice Services, which provides pretrial case management and electronic monitoring.
Council members RANGE spoke to said they found out about Brown’s pitch for the funds from the public press release, the result of what both Cathcart and Council Member Kitty Klitzke called “crossed wires.”
“It was not a good strategy to send out a press release and inform council via the news media of her plans,” Cathcart said. “But I also think there was a combination of some crossed wires where she thought we were going to be allocating dollars sooner than we actually had planned to, and so I think she felt like she had to get this out to have her ideas out in the ether to be considered.”
Brown says that she’d communicated with council members that she would be providing ideas for how to spend the funds. The timing of her press release, she said, was because she thought they were running an exercise to help them make decisions on funding later that afternoon and she wanted to be proactive in sharing her ideas. The council’s exercise ended up getting postponed after Brown’s release came out.
“We were already working on [a funding proposal] and I heard [council members] were going to do their own meetings to indicate where they wanted to spend funds, and I thought, ‘well, we better get our proposals out there so that our proposals are in the mix.’” Brown said. “In the end, the council gets to make that decision, but my goal was just to make sure that proposals from the administration were out there to respond to.”
Some of the council members found the details of the release shocking, and worried that Brown’s proposal would mean less funding for projects that were close to being ready and had community support, like the funding for multicultural centers.
Council Member Zack Zappone said an RFP calling for community proposals for those multicultural centers is almost ready to be sent out, but if the council follows Brown’s recommendations, they would have no money to spend on it anymore. Under Brown’s proposal, he says, they’d have no money to spend on any of the priorities they’ve identified and been working to advance.
“She basically gave the recommendation to pull all of those things back. That is what her press release says, is that ‘You should allocate $9.4 million this way,’ and it does not match any of [our priorities],” Zappone told RANGE. “We’ve done a lot of community outreach to make sure that we are intentionally meeting the needs of our community … So to hear a recommendation of not allocating any of the funds is pretty alarming, and surprising to a lot of these stakeholders that they wouldn’t get funds.”
Zappone said that, by putting her statement out publicly, some of the constituents, nonprofit organizers and business owners he had been communicating with about potential projects funded by ARPA dollars were caught off guard. He said some of those advocates misunderstood the intent of the release, and took it as a definitive statement of how the dollars would be spent, and they feared it meant projects they’d advocated for (such as multicultural centers) would fall by the wayside.
Cathcart is worried that however they split up and use the remaining funds, it may be too late to make the kind of “overarching investment that really just changes the dynamics of our community,” something he’d hoped for when the city first received ARPA funds.
“I don’t feel like we’re in a position where 3, 5, 10 years from now, we’re going to point back and say, ‘Wow, look at that really big, meaningful investment that we made with ARPA dollars that could have never happened otherwise, that has transformed our community, that has really moved the needle in our community,” Cathcart said. “I don’t think that we will have that. And that’s something that really is upsetting to me because I think we had this amazing opportunity and I just think we’ve nickel and dimed ourselves to the point that we’re in.”
Cathcart didn’t elaborate on what kind of project might qualify, in his mind, as a meaningful overarching investment, though he did say what didn’t count. “We’ve been able to put millions of dollars out of our budget and out of other pots of money created as a result of COVID into TRAC and into other programs,” he said, “and that money is going to be gone. Once we get basically to the end of this year, there really is no more of these extra federal dollars.”
Brown said she respected any process the council members had gone through, but that there are three new council members and a new administration, so there are new voices to consider. She also said, “I’ve been engaging with the community too … I spent a year talking to thousands of people in the campaign and organizations and then working with my administration over the last couple of months to put forward some proposals.”
Cathcart was also worried that because the mayor’s release had named specific organizations to contract with, like Catholic Charities and Compassionate Addiction Treatment (CAT), her list, if adopted, would circumvent the Request for Proposal (RFP) process Spokane uses for any city contract over $10,000 in value.
“I don’t think we can just hand over money to organizations,” Cathcart said. “There has to be an RFP process. There needs to be a process around it, and I think that [naming organizations] kind of biases that RFP process too. And so I think that was a mistake.”
Brown interpreted that city policy differently, saying that while RFPs make sense in most circumstances, her proposals for Catholic Charities and CAT were for specific, one-time facility projects to improve conditions along the 2nd and Division corridor, and since those organizations operate facilities there, it wouldn’t make much sense to go out to RFP.
Though Cathcart and Zappone voiced some concerns about the process, Klitzke was much more measured, speaking in-depth about the integrity of the process.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a fight, but it is going to be a discussion and people are going to have different opinions,” she said. “I don’t think [Brown] was firing a shot across the bow. I think she was trying to get her proposal out there before we have our dot exercise.”
On the one hand, Klitzke downplayed the drama, saying “She’s allowed to have a proposal too. I don’t think it’s a big deal. I think some people just didn’t see it coming.” At the same time, she reasserted that it was the council’s decision to make, and hinted that, with more than $18 million in potential projects for a $9 million ARPA pot, not everyone was going to get their way, concluding, “It doesn’t change the fact that we [the city council] get to decide and that we’re not all gonna agree on things.”
While council members are correct that they hold the power of the purse, and get to decide how to allocate funds, they cannot write their own contracts — that authority lies solely with the mayor’s administration. Cathcart also pointed out the federal government put a lot of constraints on the ARPA funding in question, which further impacts the process and changes how they can and can’t spend the money.
One thing Klitzke, Cathcart and Brown all seemed to agree on: “One time money is best utilized on one time things,” as Brown succinctly put it.
In two weeks, the council will have those hard conversations about setting fund allocations in stone. Klitzke has faith in the process.
“It’ll all be transparent. It’ll all be daylighted and I think it will all be pretty fair. I definitely want to consider what the mayor is talking about, but I also want to consider what my fellow council members are going to bring to the table,” she said. “And of course I have my own opinions as well.”
“I think it’ll be a fair fight. I don’t think it will be a bloody fight.”
