Five hours and 35 minutes is more than half a work day, almost two Lord of the Rings movies or a short night of sleep. It’s how long this RANGE reporter can sit and play Baldur’s Gate 3 without needing a bathroom break. It’s a quick cricket match, but an extremely long meeting.
Last night, the Spokane City Council — and everyone who toughed it out through the meeting — got to experience just how long five hours and 35 minutes of nonstop democracy can be.
(Note for transparency: my laptop died right after the 4.5 hour mark, so I got to tap out a bit early.)
In all those hours, though, the council made a bunch of important decisions, and some shocking ones. And the 5+ hour meeting is not including the two-hour-long Briefing Session that started at 3:30, where councilmembers discussed and voted on all the potential amendments to the agenda. If reading down our lengthy live tweet/skeet isn’t your speed (we’re assuming here that watching the lengthy marathon is definitely not your speed), here’s the bare bones breakdown of what you missed on Monday night’s episode of Parks and Recrea— sorry, Spokane City Council.
(And if you’re new to our CIVICS coverage, may we introduce you to our spice meter: 🌶️/5 peppers is a meeting or decision with low levels of contention, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 peppers is a meeting or decision with high levels of contention. Bell peppers indicate a half pepper.)
The Legislative Priorities
Spice Level: 🌶️/5 at Briefing Session, 🌶️🌶️/5 at Legislative Session
Vote: passed 5-2
Highlights: The city’s legislative agenda guides which items Spokane lobbies for at state and national levels and is a good indicator of the city’s financial priorities and policy goals for the next year. There was a lot to be stoked about in this package of legislative priorities. The big thing we’re going to be keeping an eye on is Spokane’s request to develop and run a pilot program of a land value tax downtown. This levies property taxes based on the land rather than the value of buildings and improvements. Currently, land value tax is forbidden by Washington state law, but the city’s legislative lobbying team will be pushing the state legislature to pass a bill allowing pilot programs of the tax to be run by municipalities. The tax is intended to encourage development by rewarding owners for developing and improving land they own rather than sitting on it to avoid increasing their property tax.
There are a few potential cons to this, like a point Council Member Jonathan Bingle brought up about it potentially penalizing historic buildings that can’t build any higher and could end up paying more in tax than newer buildings, or buildings that have already been built tall, like the Davenport Hotel. But, there are also potential pros, like taxing parking lots at a higher rate. And, as Council Member Kitty Klitzke stated, they’re *just* asking for permission to create a pilot program; whatever program they create can address Bingle’s concerns.
Either way, this is something we’ll be keeping a close eye on, especially with a pretty pro-housing state legislature.
The Rules
Spice Level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 at Briefing Session, 🌶️🌶️/5 at Legislative Session
Vote: passed 7-0
Highlights: “Compromise,” was the word of the night, especially when it came to the council rules discussion that had been contentious for the last week. Fourteen amendments on the original draft of the rules were submitted by members of the council, and after a surprisingly civil Briefing Session, those got whittled down to a set of rules the council could unanimously agree on.
Here’s what’s left after the progressive supermajority walked back all of their most controversial changes:
- Meetings will stay on Mondays at 6 pm, at least until 2026.
- Committees will meet at noon on Mondays instead of 1:15 pm
- Legislation can be placed on the Monday evening agendas with two sponsors
- 15 community members can now testify at each committee meeting for two minutes each
- Advance agendas will now be available for review two weeks before each meeting, giving the public more time to review
- Written testimony submitted on time will now be included in the publicly available agenda
- Testimony time on first readings and the consent agenda has been reduced from three to two minutes, but stays at three minutes for final action items.
The only reason we rated this spicy at all was the sheer amount of angry people who testified about changes that had been walked back in Briefing Session, including someone questioning if Bingle was being discriminated against because he “is a white, heterosexual male with a beautiful heterosexual wife and family.”
(This is a shameless plug to subscribe to RANGE so you can stay up-to-date on that stuff and avoid embarrassing yourself at the dais.)
The Committee Appointments
Spice Level: 🌶️/5 at Briefing Session, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 at Legislative Session
Vote: passed 7-0
Highlights: The Spokane City Council gets seats on committees and boards throughout the county. How the council determines which of its members will represent their body (and voters) is decided each year in committee appointments, and the decisions made on these external boards can have lasting impacts — like the upcoming decision on who will be the new CEO at the Spokane Transit Authority. There was almost no discussion of this item at the Briefing Session (though Council Members Zack Zappone, Michael Cathcart and Bingle voted against it) and we expected the legislative session vote to be wild. The progressive supermajority had made some compromises in their original proposal — like seating someone from District 1 on the Spokane Transit Authority board — but they’d also consolidated most of their (largely symbolic) internal power by removing the conservatives from chair positions.
In my first year of covering city government, there have been very few council decisions that have shocked me. But Council Member Lili Navarrete’s decision to give up her chairship of the Urban Experience Committee to Cathcart was one of those decisions. Especially going into an election year when the appointed Navarrete will need to make a case to voters that her experience on council has earned her another term, her sacrifice in the name of listening to community feedback was a big one.
It also kicked off a round of musical chairs that got progressively weirder:
- Cathcart demurred Navarrete’s motion, suggesting Bingle be seated as chair instead, since Bingle has never been a chair during his council tenure. The body voted Bingle as chair 6-1, with Navarrete voting against it.
- Zappone then gave up his seat on the internal Board Operations Committee to Cathcart, which passed unanimously.
- Then, Zappone motioned to replace Council Member Paul Dillon as pro-tempore (the council second-in-command) with Cathcart as well.
- Cathcart declined that as well, and said Dillon would be a better fit to work closely with Council President Betsy Wilkerson, so Dillon, who had been a driving force behind getting the rule changes to something everyone could live with, stayed pro-tempore.
Another highlight from this section of the meeting included Cathcart accepting his appointment to the STA board (even though Bingle wanted it) and giving a heartfelt speech about a low-income apartment building in his district that is stranded a mile from any transit stop, and how he wants to work to get STA service to them. Cathcart was gracious about all the concessions the progressives made, and said he was “very appreciative,” of how the evening turned out.
The COPS Contract
Spice Level: 🌶️🌶️/5 at Briefing Session, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶/5 at Legislative Session
Vote: passed 7-0
Highlights: Once again, the room was full of COPS volunteers who wanted the city to renew the contract with the community policing nonprofit. The testimony was spicy, and in some cases, moving, as people talked about their experiences as either victims of crime or volunteers or sometimes both.
Multiple people were upset that Wilkerson had remarked to RANGE that the volunteer demographic was “dominant culture and of a certain age. They were pretty senior.” Again, though, the group testifying was largely exactly what Wilkerson described, which may be an issue for a group that states one of their chief values to the city is in serving people who may be uncomfortable or uncertain about interacting with the actual police.
Despite ultimately unanimously voting to support a $125,000, three-month contract extension to tide COPS over while the city runs a competitive Request for Proposal process, there was heated debate prior to the vote. The central question centered on hypocrisy and fairness: is the city requiring more metrics from COPS than other nonprofits, or was COPS getting a sweetheart deal that they’re now frustrated to lose? The answer differs depending on which council member you ask.
The Budget
Spice Level: 🌶️🌶️/5 at Briefing Session, 🌶️🌶️🌶️/5 at Legislative Session
Vote: passed 5-2
Highlights: For weeks, the Spokane City Council and the Mayor’s office have been going back and forth on what the city’s budget for 2025-26 would look like. Brown called it “a balanced, two-year budget that puts us on track to close our $50 million deficit.”
From the dais, conservatives Bingle and Cathcart called that balance “smoke and mirrors,” and expressed concern over some of the revenue sources that they considered to be using one-time funds to cover ongoing expenses. Cathecart did give Brown a little bit of credit, telling RANGE that “inherently, it’s more sustainable,” because it’s a biennial budget, but he still doesn’t think it’s sustainable in the long-term; if you took this budget and duplicated into the foreseeable future with no changes, he said, it would also run a deficit, even if it’s “balanced” for two years.
Some of things we noticed in the nearly $2.5 billion budget for the next two years:
- Traffic calming money from the Safe Streets For All fund (that’s supposed to be used on infrastructure improvement) will *not* be used on traffic cops, but it will be used to pay the salary for the new Director of Transportation and Sustainability position.
- $30,000 is going to study the SCRAPS animal control contract and potential alternatives for the city when that contract expires at the end of 2025.
- Spokane Arts and the Arts Commission will remain outside city control for one more year and received a one-year contract extension as the city and the organization figures out exactly how to absorb them.
- The 1% utility tax imposed by former mayor Woodward that was supposed to be for just one year has been renewed for another three years.
- The city included funding to tow junk cars and RVs starting at the beginning of 2025.
- According to Erin Hut, the city’s spokesperson, the new public safety sales tax will be spent on “bringing back the Neighborhood Resource Officer program, traffic enforcement, replacing outdated fire rigs, fire station improvements, sustaining criminal justice services, and expanding staff/training/outreach capacity within the Office of Police Ombuds.”
There’s obviously a lot more in the budget that we hope to dig into, but for now, that’s your bitesize overview.
Thanks for sticking with us and we hope this was less painful than a five hour meeting!
