Current city council member Jonathan Bingle faces community organizer Sarah Dixit in the race to represent Spokane City Council District 1.
District 1 spreads northeast from downtown, across two university campuses to Shiloh Hills and is home to the dueling identities as the city’s tourism engine and its poorest district. It’s currently represented by Bingle and Michael Cathcart. While the seats are nonpartisan — meaning they don’t run as a Republican or Democrat — Bingle and Cathcart are the only conservatives on the seven-member body. If Dixit were to flip the seat, the progressives could hold a 6-1 majority on the council, depending on the results of other races (CM Zack Zappone is also facing a conservative challenger).
Learn more about the candidates vying to represent District 1 and what they want to see in the city.
Jonathan Bingle
“Living the dream!”
It’s the standard response city council member Jonathan Bingle will give when asked, “How are you?” For the Spokane native, that dream means raising three kids with his wife, running an event planning business and serving his Spokane community through politics.
The 38-year-old is running for a second term after being elected to the city council in November 2021.
Bingle, owner of Bent Events, was born to pastors involved in ministry work and spent the early part of his career as a pastor. Faith is a central element to Bingle’s life, and he felt called by God to serve his community by getting involved in politics.
“This is what God made me for,” Bingle said.
Originally, Bingle said he planned on becoming a politician once his kids were older, but decided to move up that timeline after COVID-19 temporarily closed his business, resulting in his “family’s future being stolen from [him] overnight with the swipe of a pen.” Bingle said there needed to be more representation of small business owners’ interests in government during the pandemic.
During his first term, Bingle sponsored a 2023 ordinance to make public drug use and possession a gross misdemeanor, punishable by mandatory addiction treatment or jail time. He felt stricter local drug laws were needed after the Blake decision, a State Supreme Court ruling that found the state drug statute unconstitutional as it criminalized unknowing possession. The same year, Bingle also partnered with former Council Member Karen Stratton and current Council Member Michael Cathcart to pass the “Parks after Dark Ordinance,” which made being in Spokane parks after hours an arrestable offense.
Four years after his initial run, Bingle said homelessness, crime control and public safety remain the main concerns among his constituents, with the core focus of his campaign promoting a “clean and safe Spokane.”
Bingle said implementing these values requires “getting serious” about crime and public drug use in the city, including addressing addiction by creating easier pathways to addiction resources and stricter penalties for public drug use.
“If they refuse to voluntarily try to get out of substance use disorder, we need to be willing to say: ‘Okay, then you can choose jail or treatment,’” Bingle said.
He said that Spokane is burdened with people coming to Spokane from other areas in the region, and that if the city were to prioritize local residents, there would not be a lack of services to address homelessness and addiction.
“We have a number of folks who are here receiving services from the city of Spokane that are not from Spokane,” Bingle said. “Spokane is not their home.”
A survey commissioned by the Spokane Business Association claimed 50.2% of unhoused people in Spokane moved to the city after becoming homeless. But the survey’s small sample size, its strict definition of “visitor” versus “local” and its obscure methodology led homelessness researchers to be dubious of its claims. A 2025 count of the city’s homeless population found 1,806 unhoused people living in the city, with 1,189 of those people being sheltered in emergency shelters or transitional housing.
Another key issue of Bingle’s campaign is reducing the cost of housing, with a specific focus on boosting homeownership. His proposed solutions include adjusting zoning to maximize land available for development, providing a tax exemption to developers that build multi-family housing and better funding for roads, parks and fire stations.
Focusing on the supply of housing — including large, single-family homes — would inherently reduce housing costs, he said.
“Housing is a ladder, and so even a luxury home, if somebody is building it, and they move into it, that frees up a house,” Bingle said. “People are constantly moving up and down, and all housing production makes housing inherently more affordable.”
Bingle added that lowering taxes, rather than expanding government services and spending, would have a great impact on affordability, citing the Climate Commitment Act (CCA), which he claimed raised gas prices by $1 per gallon. While the act imposes no direct consumer tax on gas, it caps greenhouse gas emissions from Washington’s largest polluters, which opponents argue would have market impacts on gas prices. The conservative group Let’s Go Washington has advocated for a repeal of the CCA based on similar claims, but other causes, including supply issues, refinery closures and gas tax are also part of the picture. The state’s Department of Ecology estimated the overall economic impact of the act to be a 1% to 3% increase in gas prices and argued that gas prices are more impacted by supply and demand and international trade factors.
In regard to federal funding cuts by the Trump administration and their impact on local budgets, Bingle said the single most important thing city government can do is to stop picking fights with the federal government, specifically on issues regarding immigration.
“Immigration is not within our purview, but we continue to take stances – bad stances – on immigration policy that absolutely will bring us into the crosshairs of the federal administration,” Bingle said. “We absolutely will be losing funding, and it is a far more substantial amount of money that we’ll be losing in those stances than from CDBG [Community Development Block Grants] or anything else.”
The elimination of the CDBG program resulted in a loss of $3,050,000 a year that supported housing and human services response, including supportive housing services, investments in affordable housing units and youth housing programs, according to the city’s Director of Communications Erin Hut.
Despite these cuts, Bingle said Washington budgets don’t have a funding problem but a spending problem, referencing the Washington budget and tax bills signed by Governor Bob Ferguson in May that will bring in $9.4 billion over the next four years.
“I think that the state of Washington should get its act together when it comes to: what are our spending priorities?” Bingle said. “We need to get back to the basics of what government exists to do, which is to provide for the infrastructure and protect its citizens. That’s it.”
Despite maintaining that the government should get back to the basics, the councilman has also been vocal about his position on social issues, particularly regarding trans rights. However, Bingle said it’s not in his purview as a council member and he “never bring[s] them up, because the things that I’m focused on in the city of Spokane are things we can affect.”
“There’s a difference in the things I advocate for in my personal capacity and in my professional capacity,” Bingle said. “My kids and I, we live in the Mead School District, and so when things come before the Mead School District, I’ll speak on those as a parent, not as the city council; that is not within our purview.”
Still, Bingle has brought up these issues in political speeches at past GOP conventions and candidate forums, including a recent forum at Calvary Spokane Church, where Bingle repeatedly brought up issues regarding gender identity and trans rights, mocking the city’s use of gender inclusive language as “nonsense.” The councilman specifically questioned the terms “pregnant individuals” instead of “women” and “Ombuds” rather than the original Swedish term “Ombudsman.” He went on to discuss the ethics complaints filed against him, saying Spokane needs “strong men and women” who are not afraid to speak out for their values.
“And instead of saying, ‘Hey, maybe no boys should be in girls’ sports. Maybe men shouldn’t be in women’s restrooms,’ when we say those kinds of things, I get ethics complaints filed against me because now I’m supposedly discriminating against trans individuals,” Bingle said at the forum. “That’s the kind of stuff that we’re up against right now, and that’s not going to be a place where weak people are going to be able to make a difference.”
Sarah Dixit
First-time candidate Sarah Dixit is used to attacks for her age (29), background in reproductive justice organizing or California upbringing. But, the candidate and community organizer said she is reclaiming those attributes.
“I’ve always felt kind of the imposter syndrome of feeling like people are gonna say I’m too young, or whatever else they might say, and I think those are actually my strengths, not my weaknesses,” Dixit said.
Dixit grew up in Southern California as a child of immigrant parents from India but has chosen Spokane as her home. She’s lived in the city for the past 11 years after moving to Spokane to attend Whitworth University, where she graduated with a degree in Sociology.
Dixit became involved in organizing at Whitworth, working to create the school’s first “pro-bodily autonomy club,” focused on advancing reproductive rights. After graduation, Dixit continued working in reproductive justice organizing with Planned Parenthood. Through her organizing work, Dixit said she practiced “authentic relationship-building” across communities, something often lacking in current politics.
“Being able to have those conversations and really understand the ‘why’ behind people’s beliefs is what being an organizer is all about and is what being an elected official should be about,” Dixit said. “Organizing and doing advocacy work is really showing the humanity behind things.”
Dixit has distilled her campaign goals to her “ABCs: Accountability, Belonging and Community”.
If elected, she promises to hold townhalls and community meet-ups throughout District 1 to be accessible to her constituents. As a city council member, she said she would support the Ombuds’ authority to hold police accountable and would work to strengthen communication between civilians and elected officials, partly by expanding ways to submit feedback and reports, such as hate crime reports.
She also supports investing in urban tree canopy projects, lighting and sidewalk infrastructure and neighborhood cleanups, as well as restrictions on rent increases and stronger labor laws.
To address homelessness, Dixit said criminalization won’t address the root problems but that the city must instead amplify health and economic opportunities, including policies like Mayor Lisa Brown’s scatter site model that integrate facilities with tailored services within the community.
Punishing homelessness “may sound like the law and order type of thing to do, but if it’s not actually going upstream to what’s causing these problems, it’s not going to be a genuine solution,” Dixit said.
Dixit has experience working with city budgets as chair of the Equity Subcommittee, which is part of the city council’s Finance Committee. She said she supports participatory budgeting processes, where individuals would have a say in where and how money is spent. While this structure would take more time, the candidate said it would be worth it to increase inclusion within city decision-making, though did not give specifics on the logistics of implementing one.
To make up for cuts in federal funding to Spokane, Dixit said the city needs to look upstream and advocate for state allocations that support local needs while making more sweeping changes to ensure balanced budgets that adequately provide for city services.
“For us in Spokane, it’s really important to do advocacy when it comes to our state budget and how those funds are being allocated and looking into more progressive revenue options because, doing the ‘take a pinch here, take a pinch there’ and trying to balance it that way can only work for so long,” Dixit said.
These reforms would include “getting creative” with tax structures, including wealth tax and taxes that target wealth redistribution, while educating people that a wealth tax would only apply to people with “exorbitant” income. While similar policies exist at other levels, it’s not yet clear how the city council could impact tax structures like this city-wide.
“If it’s mostly middle and lower class folks supporting the budget in Washington and Spokane, that’s not a fair way of doing things,” Dixit said.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, for people earning less than $33,500 yearly, total taxes make the highest share of family income at 13.8%, compared to 9.4% for people earning between $107,700-$162,900 and 4.1% for people earning over $878,400.
Immigration reforms are complicated given the various jurisdictions involved, Dixit said, but maintained the importance of looking into work that can be done at a city level to support Spokane immigrants.
“I think being really clear about what we’re able to do as a city charter is important, but I also don’t think that means we throw up our hands and say, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do. We have to wait until there’s a new Congress or a new White House administration or whatever.’ I think it’s about being creative,” Dixit said.
Through her organizing work, in 2018, Dixit worked to pass an ordinance that restricted the presence of customs and border patrol from entering private spaces within city-owned property, such as Greyhound buses parked at public bus stations.
She has also been involved in protests against ICE activity in Spokane, including the June 11 protest that resulted in 31 arrests. (She was not arrested).
Dixit said protesting is an important way to enact her rights as an American and be there to support District 1 residents being impacted by ICE’s actions. She said as a prospective city council member, it’s important to be on the ground to witness these events first-hand.
“For me, protest is really powerful because when a lot of people are feeling anger and feeling really lost … being able to be in a group of people who are caring for one another and really trying to show like, ‘Hey, what’s happening here is not okay,’ I think that’s where the beauty of Spokane comes through,” Dixit said.
If elected, Dixit would work with Cathcart, who would be the sole conservative on the council. While there can be a perception of polarization and division between the council members, Dixit pointed to the often unanimous voting record of the council as evidence that each member shares an investment in the city’s wellbeing.
“I’m my own person and would be representing a different district, so who I’m representing would be different,” Dixit said. “My job would be to reflect those values and those issues that people are really caring about in District 1.”
