In view of yesterday’s first ever guilty verdict of a former U.S. President I considered not posting at all today, but I wish to distract you with fascinating article I have now read twice while several readers independently flagged the article to me as a landmark story well worth the time to read.
Of course, the story’s local relevance plays out on the West Plains. Officials associated with Spokane International Airport, almost certainly including Spokane County Commissioner Al French (who serves the Airport’s board), knew that PFAS (the “forever chemicals”) from fire fighting foams used on site were found in test wells in 2017—but kept the discovery quiet even as French’s downstream constituents, kept in the dark, drank PFAS-laden water.
Read the story and marvel at how company profits override consideration of human health.
Tuesday’s Spokesman article by Emry Dinman, “Development in the Latah Valley put on hold for a year as strained infrastructure examined,” is worth your attention both for the good of the people of the City of Spokane and for the political implications. The story of the development moratorium is worth examining—especially in light of the current work on updating the Comprehensive Plan. This is area of the moratorium (from Dinman’s article and the City of Spokane website):
The Grandview/Thorpe and Latah/Hangman Neighborhoods are worth a visit. You wouldn’t want to be trapped there in a fast moving wildfire pushed by a west wind, like the fire that burned part of Medical Lake and a significant piece of the West Plains last August. The landform of the Latah Creek valley itself constrains access and egress on the east side of both these neighborhoods. Both are dependent for east side access on the high-speed, four-lane U.S. Hwy. 195. Although governmentally part of the City of Spokane (as well as Spokane County, as we’ll see), the only connections of these neighborhoods to the city depend first on either U.S. 195 or U.S. Interstate 90. Once you’re on one of these thoroughfares the connections to the City of Spokane are limited by the terrain: either Hatch Road (on the southeast) or by wending one’s way on Thorpe Road across Vinegar Flats and up W 7th Avenue near I-90. Access from the west is limited (especially for Grandview/Thorpe) and subject to closure by fire. Indeed, residents of Grandview, during one of last summer’s fire scares were left to evacuate into a traffic jam in a maze of streets running down W 16th Ave onto U.S. 195. (Check it out on Googlemaps if you lack the time to explore. The “Terrain” option under “layers” in the lower left corner helps you see the constraining landforms of the Latch Creek valley. The flattest creek bottom east of 195 has been built up for a century. Much of the rest of the land east of 195 is not suitable for development,)
WSDOT was so concerned about adding traffic to the interchange at 195 and Interstate 90 that they sent the city a letter in February 2020 warning that the state agency could be forced to limit local access points to 195 if the city didn’t build out other streets. In the letter, WSDOT Eastern Region Administrator Mike Gribner asked the city to halt any development near 195 until those improvements are made.
Given these very real concerns the City of Spokane City Council voted in September 2022 to impose a six month pause on building permits in the Latah Valley while they considered raising the fees builders and developers pay up front to connect to city services. Predictably, builders and their strong allies, Spokane County Commissioner Al French, and City Council Members Bingle and Cathcart, were vehemently opposed. (Mr. Cathcart, it should be noted, is the former government affairs director of the Spokane Home Builders Association.) In a video referenced below builder/developer Jim Frank of Greenstone Homes says, “Building moratoriums don’t solve problems, they just delay the inevitable.”
The recent vote that passed the City Council’s new moratorium was 5-2 with Council members Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart voting against (Note that both of them represent the other side of the City [Northeast]). According to an earlier Spokesman article, CM Cathcart “acknowledges that the area has severe infrastructure needs, [but] believes that an anti-growth or ‘not in my backyard’ mentality is also motivating supporters of the new moratorium.” Hogwash.
There is something very wrong with this picture, considering that, by Spokane County Commissioner Al French’s own notation (see below), several infrastructure projects in the 2001 Comp Plan that might have addressed these access issues never happened—and here we are, twenty-three years later.
This is not just a City of Spokane issue to be addressed only by the City of Spokane City Council. Spokane County Commissioner Al French is busy lobbying for more building in the Latah corridor. He appeared with developer Jim Frank in a half hour presentation on KSPS in April lobbying for additional development in these neighborhoods and proposing (somewhat dubiously, I think) to fund infrastructure improvements with “tax increment financing (TIF).” As I see it, TIF is a method of paying for the present lack of infrastructure by offering builders a subsidy, basically a mortgage based on expected future growth, to build more structures that, in turn, will require infrastructure themselves. This use of TIF looks like economic sleight-of-hand (at least in this particular setting)—but that’s a topic for another day.
In the KSPS video with Mr. Frank, Mr. French notes that he lives in Latah/Hangman and that this is part of his county commissioner district. He says that the 2001 Comprehensive Land Use Plan contained a series of capital infrastructure projects that were identified and “haven’t happened over the years.” Of course, that begs the question, “Why?” Mr. French has been a Spokane County Commissioner since 2011 and before that served on the City of Spokane City Council. Where was he on these infrastructure issues all this time—and why is he now suddenly interested and out talking about them? If he succeeds in his re-election bid this fall, how long will it take for his interest to turn elsewhere?
Challenging Mr. French for his Commissioner seat is Molly Marshall. Molly has been tackling these issues for years through Citizen Action for Latah Valley, a group she and her husband founded. It is time give Molly Marshall, a local resident with a real stake and broad knowledge of the issues in these neighborhoods and on the West Plains, a seat on the County Commission. Let’s give the folks in this district a voice that speaks to their concerns even when it is not election season.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Here’s some perspective on the issue of how far we are behind on the issue of infrastructure in the Latah Valley: Mr. Frank, in the video [at around 6:00] says, “The infrastructure needs in Latah Valley with just roads and sewer and water are very significant. They’re in the range of 200 to 250 million dollars.” That’s a quarter billion dollars, billion with a “b”. For perspective, the entire 2024 expenditure budget for the City of Spokane [pdf page 16] is 1.3 billion. A quarter billion is one fifth of the entire 2024 City budget. The Grandview/Thorpe and Latah/Hangman neighborhoods are just two of twenty-nine City of Spokane official neighborhoods. How on earth did we get a quarter of a billion dollars worth of infrastructure behind in just these two neighborhoods?
ime to pay some attention to the Comprehensive Plan
Is the Spokane County Comprehensive Plan a bit of an enigma? It’s time to learn and get involved. Starting today there are a series of 2PM local meeting that can serve as an introduction to the Comp Plan process and importance (see list below). You can attend in person or by Zoom. Below I’ve taken the liberty of copying Spokane County Commissioner Amber Waldref’s invitation to these meetings. On Friday in Part II I plan to expand on why the Comp Plan is important to our lives in our cities and in our county. Development isn’t just rows of new homes. Sensible, sustainable development requires well-planned streets, sewer, water, and fire protection (think wildfire) at a bare minimum—and within our boundaries we already have areas deficient in all those things.
For now do a little digging and attend one of these meetings.
County Comprehensive Plan Meetings
I invite you to attend an upcoming County Comprehensive Plan Update Kickoff Meeting. What is a Comprehensive Plan? It’s a 20-year look ahead at how/where we want to grow as a community as our population grows. Where will we put more homes, businesses, and parks/trails? How will we serve future populations with water, sewer, and roads?
At these meetings, planning staff will provide info on the planning process (County must adopt a new plan by July 1, 2026), Spokane’s current/future population profile, elements of the plan, and take public comments and questions. You can also learn about opportunities to be involved in the process and specific chapters like climate resiliency, affordable housing, and open spaces/trails, which is extremely important. Join me in planning for our future!
May 22, Wednesday, today| 2pm | Spokane Central Library, 906 W Main May 23, Thursday, tomorrow | 2pm | Airway Heights Library, 1213 S Lundstrom May 28, Tuesday, next week | 2pm | Cheney Library, 610 1st St June 3, Monday | 2pm | Medical Lake Library, 321 E Herb June 6, Thursday | 2pm | Spokane Valley Library, 22 N Herald
Join any of these meetings virtually using this zoom link.
More information on the Comp Plan and ways to get involved can be found here.
Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Suzi Hokonson, I, with several others, have attended a number of the Spokane County Commission’s legislative sessions held at 2PM on Tuesdays in the auditorium on the lowest level of the Public Works building at 1026 W Broadway. (See P.S. for more detail.) It has been time well spent.
These meetings are typically short, rarely running more than an hour and sometimes only twenty minutes. Even so, just seeing one’s elected officials in person interacting with one another in their official Robert’s Rules of Order format is well worth the visit. The agenda, usually available in print on a table just outside the auditorium and online (See P.P.S.) looks daunting, but typically only a few of the items on the agenda are taken separately.
These “BoCC Legislative Session Meetings” are sparsely attended by the public, in part because they are held on a workday in the afternoon rather than the evening (something that ought to change). In a hall that would comfortably seat at least a hundred there rarely are more than twenty occupied seats—and only a few of those seats are occupied by visitors. One often finds oneself sitting with (and sometimes being introduced to) the commissioners’ legislative aides or other county elected officials (for example, Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton is sometimes in the audience). Putting faces to names and watching how people conduct themselves in person is valuable civic learning.
Usually there are only one or two attendees who offer a public comment on general topics near the beginning of the 2PM meeting (strictly limited to 3 minutes each). Recently one particular fellow (sometimes with a friend) “demands” of the commissioners that they “demand” (starting at about 5:40 in the linked video) of the state auditor a comprehensive audit of our voting system. He suggests a DVD (or YouTube streaming) of a documentary titled “Let My People Go”. I have since learned that it features two and a quarter hours of thumping music and an expounding Steve Bannon (among other luminaries). Lately there have been a couple of three minute commentaries on County Commissioner Al French’s mishandling of the PFAS contamination of the West Plains groundwater. (Here at about 2 minutes for one of them.)
There are ways to stream the meetings live or after the fact, but, while useful, that is an inadequate substitute for actual in person attendance. I highly recommend the experience as a way of understanding the workings of county government. Prior to 2016 I labored under the misconception that the county commission was responsible for those parts of the county not under municipal government. The truth is that the county commission is interlinked at many levels with municipal governments, county commissioners are far better paid than city councilpersons, and the commissioners wield far more power and influence. Especially prior to the expansion of the county commission to five from three members that commenced in January 2023, Commissioner French was unquestionably the most powerful, best connected, and one of the least noticed elected officials in Spokane County.
Spend an hour on Tuesday afternoons getting to know your county government at work. Visitors to these meetings are welcomed, but if you would like a bit of connection and support as a first timer, email Suzi Hokonson at suzihokonson@yahoo.com.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. The Public Works Building is the building to the right (east) of the historic Spokane County Court House as you face it from the street. Unlike the Court House, you don’t have to go through a TSA-like screening to enter Public Works. You just walk in, turn left, then right and go downstairs. I’ve never had trouble finding a place to park on the street within a block. (The meters accept coins, but it can be more efficient to use the ParkMobile app on your smart phone once you have it set up.)
P.P.S. The Spokane County Website takes some diligence to navigate. Seeing the agenda for the 2PM meeting ahead of time isn’t essential, but you can see it by going to spokanecounty.org then “Your Government”/”County Commissioners”/”Agendas, Minutes and Resolutions.” Then look for the “BoCC Legislative Session Meetings” on the correct date and then download. A somewhat easier (and more entertaining) way to see the agenda in advance is through RANGE Media’s Monday “Civics” post, which you can sign up to receive or visit the website.
P.P.P.S. There is a lot of preparation for these “BoCC Legislative Session Meetings” that occurs leading up to and during Monday morning “Strategic Planning Meetings” and Tuesday morning “Briefing Meetings”, both held at 9AM in the main Court House (in a much smaller room). Both of these meetings are typically much longer and are rarely attended by the public in person—but they are open to the public.
“The Boys in the Boat.” the 2023 inspirational true story of the University of Washington crew team’s gold medal win at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany. The book of the same name from 2013 is a terrific read.
I am old. I remember the 1960s, the protests, the outrage, the sense of progress attained on many fronts, the real gains in voting rights and personal liberty. That “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice” seemed almost a given (even though that was not the proper interpretation, click the link). With the reactionary curtailment of voting rights, the Dobbs reversal of Roe, and the flood of Republican-sponsored restrictive legislation, the “bend toward justice” feels fundamentally threatened. It pains me to think that all that progress may be lost and our children and grandchildren will be forced back into a dark, restrictive world from which we thought we were emerging.
I start my day by reading two Substack emails, Letters from an American by historian Heather Cox Richardson and Today’s Edition Newsletter by retired attorney Robert Hubbell. The ending Hubbell’s May 14th Newsletter spoke to me on this sense of pain:
I spoke to a reader today about astrophotography, and the conversation turned to the fractured political dynamic our nation is experiencing. The reader noted that he actively participated in civil rights and anti-war protests in the 1960s and 1970s. He observed that it seemed as though we were losing ground that was captured in those decades.
Many readers of this newsletter likely have the same experience of participating in protests and witnessing rapid social and political change. The reactionary MAGA movement and civil rights setbacks of the last six years seem anomalous. The loss of civil liberties under Trump’s reactionary Supreme Court rightfully raises dire concerns about the world we will leave our children and grandchildren.
But, with a bit of perspective, it appears that the rapid progress of the 1960s and 1970s was the anomaly. Readers who came of age during those decades reasonably assumed that such rapid progress was in the natural order of things. In truth, the progress of the 1960s and 1970s was built on decades of frustrating losses, setbacks, and seeming futility that prepared the ground for future victories.
We may be experiencing another season of discontent that will precede rapid progress. It took the reality of Dobbs to remind us of the hard-fought victory of Roe v. Wade. It took the slap in the face of Shelby County v. Holder to remind us of the crowning achievement of the Voting Rights Act.
In loss, there is pain and remembrance. Fortunately, those who remember the lessons of the 1960s and 1970s have rallied to reclaim the ground gained half a century ago. But to complete the victory, we must involve the next generation—whose rights and freedoms are on the ballot in 2024.
So, spread the word! Do not pass up the opportunity to remind younger voters of what it took to gain the rights and liberties now under attack. Together, we can reclaim and expand the rights guaranteed by the Constitution!
The Weekly Sift
Every Monday I read Doug Muder’s The Weekly Sift. In part of his May 13th discussion of possible bias at the New York Times this paragraph stood out as painfully true:
You can’t really understand left/right journalistic bias without this observation: Most MAGA positions rely on believing (or at least arguing) things that simply aren’t true: an immigrant crime wave is sweeping through America’s cities, crime in general is up, climate change isn’t real, the Covid vaccine did more harm than good, the economy is terrible, Trump really won the 2020 election (which entails its own full basket of untruths: undocumented immigrants voted, dead people voted, voting machines were rigged …), healthy fetuses get aborted up to (and even past) the moment of birth, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is justified, the Southern border is “open“, January 6 was a peaceful protest led by patriots, the Black Lives Matter protests burned American cities to the ground, and so on. (I’m sure I missed a few.)
You will find an echo of at least one and often many of those fabrications in the campaign literature of nearly every Republican candidate. “Election integrity” is code for “the 2020 election was stolen and we must ‘fix that’.” “Sanctity of human life” is code for “I would vote to outlaw abortion and contraception given the opportunity.” “I’ll protect your gas stoves” and candidate for Washington State governor Dave Reichert’s “‘the guy upstairs’ is responsible for controlling the weather” is code for “Climate change isn’t real and, if it is, there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it, so full steam ahead with fossil fuels!”
I am a big fan of the folks at RANGE Media and their local reporting. We have a golden opportunity to direct $10,000 to their support. All it requires is a few moment of time on line for each of us to cast a vote.
Background
RANGE Media is a local news startup founded in April 2020 by Luke Baumgarten and owned by the Spokane Workers Cooperative. (Click that link to check it out.) These are up-and-coming young people who are doing a terrific job of connecting local readers with local government—and they’re doing it on a shoestring. Click here for more about RANGE. If you don’t already receive RANGE’s emailed newsletter I highly recommend you click here to sign up for free (all centered on local issues!). If you appreciate the coverage I encourage you to become a paid subscriber.
RANGE has an opportunity to obtain a cash infusion of $10,000 if enough of its fans vote for RANGE in an internet-based Public Choice contest (one of a number of grants) by The Next Challenge for Media and Journalism. From RANGE:
Next Challenge is a national competition awarding big money to “groundbreaking for-profit and nonprofit startups that will reinvent media and journalism in the coming decade.”
That’s us. We’re groundbreaking. We’re also in the “Future of Local News” division, meaning we’re “pioneering a sustainable new business model for local journalism.” And while we’re not working with covered wagons and dying of dysentery, we are building something rare in local news — worker-owned community journalism — and that comes with its own set of trials. Namely: we need money, and this competition is one way we can get it — but only if we have your support!
Specifically, if you vote for us, we could win the Public Choice Award, which would bring us an extra $10,000 in this competition! This award would help us continue bringing you the deep analyses and investigations we’re known for, like our ongoing reports on tragic conditions in local homeless shelters, the policy and politics around sex labor and religious extremism in Eastern Washington.
Click here to watch a video of Luke making the case for worker-owned news and to vote for RANGE. (The platform will ask you to verify your phone number and we know it’s annoying, but we promise it’s like two steps!) Voting closes at 11:59 p.m. PT on Sunday, May 19!
I voted. (Start by clicking here.) It took only a few minutes and a little brow-furrowing as I fussed with the phone number verification steps (no doubt meant to screen out things like using an internet bot to mess up the voting). It does look like you have to have a phone that can receive text messages in order to get verified, but, hey, if I can do this so can you :-)!
For High Ground readers who don’t live in Spokane, you should vote, too. RANGE is digitally based, can be read anywhere with an internet connection, and it produces a lot of interesting articles.
