Over the years, Spokanites have gotten used to big, important, often public fights at city council meetings.
One of the first big fights of 2024, though, is about who gets to sit on the smaller, less visible but still important myriad of smaller boards and committees council members split among themselves every session, and whether key snubs are just political fair play, or meaningfully harming representation for parts of Spokane.
Some of these smaller council committees control the flow of how legislative ideas work their way up to an eventual council vote. On many regional boards, council members act as the city’s representatives on matters of county-wide importance, like transit, housing and homelessness strategies and public health.
The council president proposes these assignments and the council approves them. Every council person ends up sitting on a lot of boards and committees, and there isn’t always much conflict over assignments.
This year is different, and the primary fight is over who gets to sit on the Spokane Transit Authority Board, and who, therefore, will have input over large capital projects that could remake neighborhoods and reshape travel across the county.
Council Member Jonathan Bingle — one of only two conservatives on the council, both of whom represent District 1 — asked to be assigned to the STA board. Council President Betsy Wilkerson left him off. Neither Bingle nor his counterpart, Michael Cathcart, were offered positions on another important transit-related board, the Spokane Regional Transportation Council (SRTC), either.
District 1 stretches up Division Street on one side and out to Felts Field on the other, while also covering most of Downtown north of the railroad viaduct, and is slated for some of the largest upcoming transportation projects in the county.
Among them are the South Logan Transit-Oriented Development project, which will significantly change zoning rules along the new City Line transit route, and could end up meaningfully remaking the character of the neighborhood. Another big project, the Larry-Stone-opposed Division Road Diet — which will eventually form the spine of Spokane’s first major north-south Bus Rapid Transit project, could remake the district’s western edge as well. (Division is the dividing line between District 1 and District 3 running up much of north Spokane.)
For Bingle, the snub means the constituents in his district won’t have their chosen representative advocating for their needs.
“The frustrating thing for me is that they talk about the importance of representation all the time, and then they neglect District 1’s representation here,” Bingle said. “And so you can talk about my district and you might actually even be right, but you might be missing one key piece of information that I know because this is my district. I live here, I ride here, I do all those kinds of things. I talk to these neighborhoods all the time. I’m at their neighborhood council meeting.”
For Wilkerson and Council Member Zack Zappone (who has served on the STA board since his election), when a council member sits on a regional board, they are representing the whole city, and the will of the majority of council, not their particular districts.
“I don’t represent District 3 on [the STA] board. I represent the city of Spokane on that board,” Zappone said. “If you’re in those spots and you’re not saying the thing that the rest of the majority agree with or if you’re you’re negotiating something that doesn’t represent what would get passed by a majority of council, that’s not very useful or helpful and accurate.”
On Wilkerson’s draft committee assignments list, Zappone will remain on the STA Board, and be joined by freshman council members Paul Dillon and fellow District 3 representative Kitty Klitzke.
The STA Board is made up of 14 people, nine of whom are allowed to vote. The city of Spokane’s four voting seats represent the single biggest block of votes of any municipality, including the county government. Spokane Valley and the county commission each get two voting seats, and the final vote rotates every two years between the smaller surrounding cities.
Wilkerson is slated to take the city’s fourth board slot. She thinks her presence should be enough to alleviate Bingle’s concerns about representation, saying “I was just elected citywide, and I’ll be representing District 1, so they will have a voice.”
Bingle still thinks he would bring a deeper level of awareness of the concerns for the people of District 1, some of whom reside in subsidized housing along Upriver Drive, which doesn’t have access to a bus line at all, an issue he planned to advocate for if he would’ve been appointed to the board.
“I am engaged with my people,” Bingle said. “And that’s going to bring a level of understanding, and experience that other people don’t have, despite the best of intentions.”
Fair play or partisan hackery?
The STA Board has been the site of an unusual amount of particularly charged political maneuvering in recent months, with frequent arguments around free fare and the philosophy of transit, and much of that debate has been framed as liberal versus conservative, city versus county. The board will be chaired by County Commissioner Al French, a decision that all representatives from the Spokane City Council voted against in December.
“I think they see me as an obstacle, which is frustrating. Because my allegiance is to my district and to my city, not to any particular political party at all,” Bingle said. “That’s not to say I wouldn’t vote with [French] on a lot of things, but I’m not a rubber stamp for [French].”
Bingle thinks the decision to leave him off the STA Board reads like partisan politicking, rather than what’s best for transit riders in his district.
Wilkerson didn’t necessarily disagree about the partisanship: “New council comes in with different political leanings,” she said, “So new leadership, new directions. I think it’s part of the dynamics of politics.”
To illustrate her point, Wilkerson noted that another way to get representation for the people of Spokane Council District 1, would be for County Commissioners French and Josh Kerns — both conservative — to give up one of their seats, but it would require giving it to Amber Waldref, a liberal.
“There could be a shift from the County Commission side,” she said, “There are county commissioners who represent [City] District 3. That’s Amber Waldref. They could appoint someone [who] also represents that area.”
Waldref represents Commissioner District 2 — an area that largely overlaps with City District 1.
“People say, ‘we don’t want to be political.’ Well, that’s bullshit, because it’s politics. To say this is not political, in some ways it absolutely is political,” Wilkerson said. “Do I want that to be the driving factor, though, for us to do good? Absolutely not.”
When he looked at the list of proposed assignments, Bingle said it felt like he and Cathcart were getting sent to the “little kid table” of assignments.
The city council has four big committees, Finance and Administration, Urban Experience, Public Safety & Community Health and Public Infrastructure, Environment and Sustainability, and their respective chairs have some control over the legislative agendas.
Though Cathcart is set to chair the Finance and Administration Committee, Bingle’s requests to chair three of the four city council committees — he hoped he’d get one and Urban Experience was his priority — were denied, and he wasn’t assigned to sit on other regional boards and committees he views as crucial to his district, like the Plan Commission and SRTC.
Wilkerson said that she tried to consider council members’ areas of expertise and ongoing projects in her assignments, but that some of the choices were a natural occurrence of folks having an “alignment with the vision.”
For Zappone, the big picture is important: whatever complaints Bingle may have, it’s better for minority council members in Spokane than in neighboring cities, like Spokane Valley, where minority members like Ben Wick and Brandi Peetz have had their committee assignments stripped entirely.
“I actually think we do a really great job at the city of Spokane to give minority members voices and input throughout the process,” Zappone said.
The vote on the proposed list of Spokane City Council members’ board and committee assignments for the year, as well as the new council rules, was originally scheduled for the upcoming Monday meeting, but due to a combination of conflict and a desire to hear community input on both issues, Wilkerson is planning to move to postpone the vote until the January 22 meeting.
And if Bingle wants his voice to be heard at STA in particular? Wilkerson has suggestions.
“He can actually come to STA board meetings. They have an open forum he can show up [to] every month, and advance his ideas until they get traction. If he’s that committed to the work, then that’s what it’s going to take anyway,” Wilkerson said. “Nobody’s kept you from advancing your ideas. And nobody will keep you from advancing your ideas. But you gotta be able to sell it so other people can believe it, and wanna get in the cause with you.”
