Each week, in government chambers across Spokane County, Eastern Washingtonians gather to hammer out a small piece of the collective work of moving the Inland Northwest forward. Some are elected and sit behind a microphone, separated from the room by nameplate and platform. Others are average Janes, scientists, gadflies and political junkies. They’re there to protest, inform, clarify and point fingers at wrongdoing.
This is a manifestation of people meeting the government where it’s at. But it works both ways: the government also has to meet people where they’re at, showing up to community events, crafting frameworks for public participation and showing the community the system’s victories and warts.
This all fits into something the World Bank in 1992 began calling “good governance” because the dark art of the economist is to take extremely important topics and render them impossibly boring. But if you fall asleep, you’ll be leaving your power on the table! Much is happening these days in the new Spokane government, and now is the time to set a tone for how to relate to your electeds.
If good governance is about public participation and transparency – and it is – the new government of Spokane is off to a rough start. One big test of this central issue to local government is the new slate of rules governing open forum, decorum and legislative testimony at City Council meetings – which gadflies and activists have said they loathe. The rules bar, in part, standing up during city council meetings, which is an act some people feel is their only recourse in addressing their government. But the arguments over them have been so high-profile that protests against them have pushed the council into recesses, eating up important time that could have been dedicated to doing the people’s business.
But one flap over new rules – even if it was particularly heated – cannot be the only measure of good governance. Another measure goes in the opposite direction: how a government communicates with its constituents is another potent signal of a healthy society.
During interviews conducted going into the new year by RANGE, leaders from the tippy-tip of the city’s northeast and across Spokane’s urban core – electeds, community organizers, activists – articulated a range of ways Spokane’s leadership can assure it is meeting the needs of the community and effectively communicating about those efforts.
Breaking bread
If there’s one measure of good governance that most community leaders we talked to agreed on, it was that the politicians should be out in communities, attending events by community groups, appearing before their constituents in person and reaching out to former – and current – foes for common ground.
Barry Barfield, longtime administrator of the Spokane Homeless Coalition and a campus minister at Gonzaga University, told RANGE that his biggest hope for the early months of 2024 is that more people can be involved in the homelessness response.
“The number 1 priority for the homeless coalition is to provide as much information and as much opportunity for collaboration as possible,” Barfield said. “That’s what the homeless coalition is. It’s anyone interested in homelessness. We’ll take anybody who wants to be on our listserv and everyone is welcome to come to our monthly meetings.”
Barfield identified local and national partisan divides as the culprit of inaction. Individual people, he said, must take personal action before acceptable solutions can be implemented.
“Let me go out on a limb here that we’re polarized, that there’s a split, left-right, Republican-Democrat,” Barfield said. “And I’ve researched where that comes from, and the only answer I could find was a collaboration, and it’s got to start with me.”
Dave Richardson, executive director of the Northeast Community Center, noted Northeast Spokane’s two city council representatives – Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart, the only conservatives on the seven-member council – have spent a lot of time on the ground in that area of the city in previous terms. He hopes the new council members will invest the same amount of energy in the Northeast.
“We see them at a lot of our safety neighborhood council meetings,” Richardson said. “And so we know that the voice of our constituents of our area is being met. And so it’s getting [freshmen city council members Paul] Dillon and [Kitty] Klitzke out here so that they can see what’s going on in our district. And if nothing else they can see what good things are being accomplished and hopefully take and share that with their neighborhood councils as well or even replicate other programs that we’re doing.”
Dillon, the former spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, said another piece of the puzzle is to provide Spokanites more opportunity to speak to their electeds.
“I think part of the concern is there are people who feel like [City Council] open forum is not a place where I can go to express my concerns or an issue either because Monday night at six o’clock doesn’t work for them,” he said. “Parking is a challenge. They can’t make it. Just kind of sitting through everything. So maybe what does that look like more neighborhood town halls for those folks who can’t make it down to hear more about their granular concerns.”
Roo Ramos, executive director of the Spectrum Center Spokane, which advocates for the wellbeing of 2SLGBTQIA+ people in Eastern Washington, said their communities need representation high up in the city administration and able to influence policy, including from within the mayor’s cabinet and transition team.
“Community is just dying for leadership that can talk about trans rights in a real authentic way that would change how we feel about the potential of policy in the city,” Ramos said.
But Ramos also noted that much simpler solutions – like making public bathrooms gender neutral – can go a long way toward creating a welcoming city for 2SLGBTQIA+ people.
“You go to Seattle and walk into a space, and all the bathrooms are non-gendered and anybody can go into them and you just use it to use it and then you walk out,” Ramos said. “It’s just business, going to the restroom. And here it becomes a hot button issue, and it’s really painful to see our young people feel the pain so deeply that they kill themselves.”
Ryann Louie, executive director of Asians for Collective Liberation, told RANGE that peoples’ lives don’t move by the cycles of local government, so the city must be willing to tailor engagement opportunities to individual circumstances.
“In general, I feel like our world and our institutions just move at a pace that is about capitalism and it’s not about human experience,” Louie said. “Because they want to get things done by Q1 or they want to get things done in a year, but people don’t operate like that.”
Slowing down to get authentic community input is exactly what freshman Council Member Kitty Klitzke wants the council to do.
“I’m trying to do things in a more participatory way so that we get quality results,” Klitzke said. “And so I’m not going to make a bunch of big audacious promises for the first 100 days. I’d like to see our system work better.”
But choosing to engage with the community is not only an interpersonal project. It also requires attention to technical aspects of governing, like methods for gathering and communicating useful information.
Bad numbers and a big budget hole
The new mayor, Lisa Brown, is an economist who formally served as the state’s commerce director. She is laser-focused on metrics and how to communicate them to the public. So one of Brown’s first priorities in the early days of her administration is to establish what those metrics are, she told RANGE.
“So for example in public safety: I’ve talked about what are police and fire response rates and times?” Brown said. “How do they vary by the type of crime or incident, and how do they vary by the neighborhood?”
It would be crucial for the data to be straightforward and tell clear stories even when the stories paint the city in a negative light: if response times are too long in certain areas, the city is obligated to tell people that without any spin.
“I think that kind of information is not always positive, but being transparent about it with the public helps to build a sense of trust that we’re telling you how it is and what we need to work on,” Brown said. “I don’t want people to [just] say what’s great.”
These are not small things to citizens.
“Even if the measurements are not perfect, if you measure the same way over a period of time at least it’s telling you what’s happening in an accurate way,” she said. “… People in neighborhoods want to know, ‘What’s happening in my neighborhood?’ The way they can figure that out is just by anecdote unless we collect the information and make it available.”
And what is the story that data will tell? It may be a tale of budget woes.
Two big proposals that would have affected the city budget were recently rejected by voters: the Measure 1 sales tax failed in November and a bond measure for school facilities failed last week. Both would have funded specific or new projects that don’t figure into the broader budget, but the failures might signal that voters aren’t in the mood for more costs.
On top of not having new tax money to utilize, Spokane already has a $20 million hole in 2024’s budget, and has even already tapped out the year’s emergency allocations. Council Member Zack Zappone said the council would need to present a plan to voters, like a levy, to get more funds or see if Spokanites want to adjust services to meet the budget.
“Businesses get to raise prices, but cities can’t,” Zappone said. “We can’t increase revenue to keep up with inflation.”
The council is planning to have monthly study sessions focused on the budget, and council members have proposed solutions they believe will alleviate some ways the complex budgeting process impedes good governance, he said.
Cathcart told RANGE he’s been seeking support – including from Mayor Brown – for creating a two-year budget rather than an annual budget, so the city can plan past the coming year and keep its eye on longer-term goals.
Zappone also said the council must prioritize implementing American Rescue Plan funding because that money must be spent by the end of 2024 or the city loses it. This means expanding programs, building a new multicultural center and helping Neighborhood Improvement Districts use that money.
Klitzke pointed to the various contract snafus the city has been in over the years, the most prominent being the TRAC shelter contracts, saying she suspects that the city moving too quickly is the reason it often ends up with weak contracts.
“Sometimes when we pull things together quickly because we’re excited to make something happen we forget the accountability basics,” Klitzke said. “And we’re looking at a $20 million hole in our budget and an even bigger one next year if we don’t solve these problems and accountability is a big part of that. And I think hasty contracts, hasty legislation may have contributed to the issue.”
And it’s a cycle: budgetary issues directly affect good governance processes too: cash-strapped city departments find it difficult to meaningfully engage as quickly as people need it. “I don’t think that any leader should try to fool themselves that they’re so strategic and charismatic that they will be able to be bipartisan without community engagement on the issues,” Klitzke said.
But it is not only the city that is responsible for good governance: it’s a two-way street. Communication should flow from constituents, not only to them.
Keeping ‘em honest
The final piece of the good governance puzzle links back to the new rules for open forum, testimony on legislation and decorum during city council meetings. It’s at these meetings that people have an audience to point out problems or solutions or to criticize their representatives to their face, which can be a visceral and even intimidating experience for both sides of the dais. Public participation is often a remarkable mash-up of eloquent oratory from the unlikeliest of characters to inane babble from folks who look like they have their stuff together. It can, by turns, be depressing and inspiring. And, yes, sometimes it creates an atmosphere of contempt and division. But whatever happens, the open forum dais represents something so sacred in American government that it was enshrined in the US Constitution: it’s a place where people can express themselves and seek a redress of grievances
That’s why the controversy over the new rules – which bar attendees from standing in the room to make a political statement (standing is allowed for physical comfort) and from taking photographs unless taken from the media area – was so pitched. During the January 8 meeting – the first of the year and the first under the new rules – Justice Forral, an activist with Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR), told the council, “Our participation is not a problem. Your reaction to our participation is.”
The Reverend Walter Kendricks, pastor of the Morning Star Baptist Church and a founding member of SCAR, said the issue of public participation at city council meetings has brought together disparate ends of the political spectrum.
“Surprisingly, some of our conservative friends have reached out to SCAR saying that they support us on that,” Kendricks said. Those conservatives agreed that “city council should be transparent or as transparent as possible, which is fascinating.”
Those protests have not stopped. In a January 29 letter, local attorney and editor of The Black Lens, Natasha Hill, who wrote on behalf of SCAR, threatened to sue city council if rules banning standing and videography were enforced. In response, the council has voted at the top of each meeting for the last few weeks to suspend the controversial rules..
On February 12, the most recent council meeting, Wilkerson said council must mint new rules rather than just continually suspending the old ones.
“We have had many comments regarding the recently adopted council rules, especially with respect to public conduct during the meetings,” Wilkerson said. “We are reevaluating those rules in light of comments and expect to propose some revisions soon at the next Finance and Administration Committee meeting.”
The open forum, testimony and decorum rules have been the most prominent bellwether of the new government’s commitment to fostering communication with the public, but it remains to be seen how the entire landscape of good governance will take shape in Spokane over the course of this administration.
Erin Sellers, Valerie Osier and Luke Baumgarten contributed to this report.
This is the first in a series we’re calling The Peoples’ Priorities, where we asked community leaders what they and their communities feel are the biggest needs to address in Spokane in 2024 and then spoke with every city elected to see how well their priorities line up. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more.
