Hey, it's Aaron. This week on the pod, Luke and other Aaron talk about a pair of pro business cranks, as they refer to them, and a congressman who lots of eastern Washingtonians are mad at. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. I'm Luke Baumgarten, your host, and we got an old school free range lineup today. team members, no guests, just that raw, uncut Sellers and Baumgarten you remember from the very first time we talked and a couple times after that. It's been a wild week, Aaron starting with Gonzaga. Blowing out so far their first round opponent 56 to 34. Would anybody that is listening to this? I actually, is it even a legal, is it legal to talk about sports on a community radio station? I don't know, but we're doing it anyways. We're only going to do this once. Luke and I are both Gonzaga graduates and I am not a sports baller, but for one month, a year, I pay attention. And I'm not. I'm a lapsed sports fan, except I still do follow college basketball, because it's my favorite. In addition to that it's been wild in other ways this week. Our free range week runs Friday to Thursday, since we're, here on Thursday. So, the wild week started last Friday when we published a story. For a segment we're entitling Good Cop, Bad Cop, it has been a bad week to run an email newsletter in Spokane. Or I guess, I don't know, maybe an okay week in the no or all news is good news or no publicity is bad publicity sense, because I think a lot more people probably know about these two particular newsletters than used to. But a couple big stories came out, one from us and one from the spokesman, on two different email lists. that are politically motivated or politically driven, one by an actual organization and one just by a cranky older person. A crank, I think, is the respectful way to refer to him. That's true. I should have just, yeah, said crank, not I should have dropped the Y there. First, on Friday, though, was your story. We put out called the 5 a. m. Crisis Walks Will Continue Until Conditions Improve. I have to say both these stories also had some multiple layers of literary allusion in the headlines and in other places. So I'm pretty proud of both us and the spokesman here, but It was a snappy headline and one that we came up with literally at the very last minute as we were about to run an extremely dry headline. And I was like, Val, would this work? And she was like, let me ask Luke. Yeah, it's a, you don't want to be disrespectful or flippant, but you also want to hook people in, so you gotta, you gotta think about it. It's a tough line to walk. Yep, absolutely. So you went out on one of these 5 a. m. walks with a photographer friend of ours named Ben Tobin. You want to talk about that? Yeah, so every morning at 5 a. m. Since mid February Gavin Cooley who Previously was the director of the Spokane Business Association and is now I want to say it's director of strategic initiatives They're like manager of strategic initiatives. He had a title change in the middle of me reporting this story But he's an employee of the Spokane Business Association and alongside his staff service provider, Barry Barfield. These two guys lead a walk every morning at 5 a. m., takes off from City Hall, and they walk for about a mile downtown. And, I had a couple of preconceived notions going into this. One of them being, Oh my God, do I have to get up at 4 a. m. for work? I'm a little miserable. But we got on this walk and. It's always tricky as a reporter, how much of my own feelings I need to include. But part of the reason I went on this walk was to get like a first person experience of what it was, as opposed to just hearing from other people who went on the walk, what it was like. Yeah, for sure. And from my perspective, it felt a little bit like a safari. You've got this kind of group of concerned business owners. who aren't usually in this part of town at this time of day. So in that sense, it's also reminds me of a safari. Yeah, and they get together and they kind of speed walk around downtown and they don't have a set route necessarily. They told me they try to walk through Riverfront Park. And they try to walk under at least one of the viaducts, and they try to walk in front of the Riddpath Apartments. But the exact route that takes them from those three things can change depending on the day, depending on the people who are there. They have tended to start and end at City Hall. Yes. With the exception of one morning, I think. And so I show up, and they're I think, because media's there, they're Keyed maybe a little bit differently, but Gavin gives this speech about the point of the walks and why everybody's here and, how it's sparking discussion and and then they, they go out on this walk and, we walk for 37 minutes, we go through Riverfront Park first, we didn't see a single unhoused person in the park and the whole time the group is expressing Frustration about the politics of what they call the problem or the crisis and what they're talking about is And again, these are their words visible homelessness in downtown spokane that phrase rankles me a little bit just because I think framing it as the problem or visible homelessness Dehumanizes people in a way. I like it because it really accurately portrays what they're like There were 7, 000 people in Spokane that accessed homelessness last year. Homelessness services. They are by their own yeah. Homelessness services, sorry. They also may have accessed homelessness, but not in a good way. They, this group, which again, Spokane Business Alliance, What do they do? Association. I guess what I'm saying is, it's, it's, they're, it's a vague term and it is a collection of business leaders, generally speaking, but they're a one issue organization and it is visible homelessness in downtown Spokane, right? Yeah. Gavin was telling me that he hopes that one day they get to move on to a different strategic initiative. But right now the initiative is, the goal of these walks, in their words, is that one morning they'll go out for a walk and they won't see a single homeless person, and that will be because the city and the county have gotten together and addressed the problem. in a collaborative way. And again, these are their words. And, and so we're, we're moving along, we're walking really quickly. I honestly got a pretty bad blister from this because I had a hole in my sock that I didn't realize I had until we go out on this 5am walk, which also made me cranky. I've been meaning to have us have a sit down about sensible shoes for walking reporting trips, but. And, they're, they're back and forth about there's a discussion around wording and language, like how when they use the phrase zero tolerance for visible homelessness downtown, that turns liberals off, it makes, maybe it makes people feel like, They're dehumanizing people. But the flip side of that coin is that Barfield has who is a service provider, has coined this phrase I refuse to abandon a single one of our unhoused neighbors to the streets. And so that's the complexity of these things. But we, we're walking really quickly and then we finally, 37 minutes in, we hit one of the viaducts and we see some unhoused people and typically when this happens because I've had a couple of friends who have gone on these walks, other reporters, and also a city staffer who's gone six times who gave me some information about what the different, what they've looked like every morning. Right. This morning was different. That same city staffer who works on homelessness for Spokane was there. She Nicolette Oakletree. Yeah, we quote her in the story. Yeah. was frustrated by her past experiences on the walk, feeling the same way I did, of okay, these people meet, they walk really fast, they don't make eye contact, they're not really adding anything of value to these unhoused people's lives, and the whole time they're walking, they're talking about these people who are sleeping under the bridge, having probably a pretty rough morning. Yeah. bunch of wealthier people bundled up in their expensive sportswear, like trundling past really quickly, not making eye contact and talking about how bad homelessness has gotten downtown. You had an anecdote in this section of the story that I thought was really eye opening for me. David's Pizza brought the group of walkers a breakfast pizza in the morning and none of that pizza made it to any of the unhoused people that were there. So, But that morning Nicolette brought snack packs that she told me she spent 70 of her own money on because she was like I want to go out on this experience and talk to these people maybe let them know how it's being perceived by others I don't feel morally okay about going on these walks again without having something of value to offer to the people that we see and you know by We saw maybe, maybe a dozen unhoused people, and all of Nicolette's snacks were gone by the end of that. Somebody told her that he was thirsty, and all she had was a half drink bottle of Perrier that she had bought for herself. She was like, this is awkward because I've drank out of this, but it's yours if you want it, and he took her up on it. He took it, and another person asked her for water later in the walk, and she didn't have anything to give him, and I'm, I'm It was hard for me, too, because I've gone out on walks before as reporting, I've talked to people who were unhoused, literally just wandered around and talked to people about their experience, and I wasn't there that day to talk to unhoused people, I was there that day to see what the walk did. And so it was pretty uncomfortable for me to just follow along at their pace, not stop and ask anybody questions. You had a note for me in my first draft that was like, did you have a chance to ask any unhoused people what they think of this walk? And I'm like, no, cause I was fighting for my life and my impractical shoe wear to keep up with them. And yeah, I mean, I think like there is a real complexity between like intent versus impact. I told Cooley that I felt. I felt like a voyeur, or it was, like I was, it just, yeah, that sense of oh, I'm looking at people, I'm talking about people, and not being present with them, not engaging in a way that actually helps them, and I told him that that was my experience, and he was pretty wrinkled by that, and he, he was, he shared some of his own experience with a child who has struggled with addiction issues and mental health issues and told me that, for him, it's not voyeuristic. He thinks about his kid when he's out there on these walks. He's worried that he, one day, he might see his kid's face or his nightmares about that. And I do want to acknowledge that for some I'm not trying to say that every person that went on these walks had the same. I can't speak to that, but I do think I keep coming back to how it looks to the people who are sleeping under the bridge, regardless of what each of these individual people walking are thinking about when they're on the walks. When I think about, that's just very different to the way we try to report and different people have different, standards and whatever, but that, that piece of putting yourself in the shoes of somebody who might be waking up as a group of people walk past at an ungodly hour. So much of the value of the kind of work that we do, I think, is really an opportunity to have a mutual connection with somebody and not just understand Especially when it's somebody who's impacted, like an unhoused person or any other of the folks that we talk with in our stories. Not just to get their point of view, but to just help also be a point of connection to a world that they may or may not have been either excluded from from their whole life or, temporarily because of their situation. And I think both of those things are really, really important and so, I, I think you're right and it's not necessarily our, I think there's a lot of different ways to do effective work. I just don't know how you can How you can expect to reach people without talking to them, I guess, is one of the issues. Yeah, and if that was all that happened, they went on this walk every morning and then they went home, I might be able to accept the sort of, we all have different intents. And I, my story might have been framed differently if that was the case. Right. But after all of these walks, Cooley sends out an email to this listserv that's here's what I, here's a selfie of our walking group and here's all of his thoughts on what the city's doing wrong and what they could be doing differently to eliminate visible homelessness. And sometimes he included photos of unhoused people that they saw on the walk, like with people's faces. Sometimes people in distress, people sleeping under a bridge, people, maybe with drug paraphernalia in view or huddled around a fire of trash, which is something that I saw on the walk was people warming their hands on a pile of trash that they'd set on fire under a bridge, technically illegal, but I think it's hard to fault anybody for that at 5 a. m. when you are also cold and wet. And, and so he goes on these walks and then sends out these emails and it's part of this targeted campaign to, he uses the language, get real collaboration from the city and the county and to get all of these different regional groups to treat. as the emergency it is. And he really toes this fine line between language that is, I think objectively appealing to conservative readers and language that's appealing to more progressive or liberal readers. Ultimately the solution he's proposing is that we Involuntarily. Involuntarily commit people. Yeah, if necessary, yeah. Which is a conservative tactic that has been taken up by some, I would say, moderate Democrats or moderate liberals in various places across the state. But I haven't really seen that would require a state law change. It's really complicated right now to actually involuntarily commit somebody. It's not a silver bullet at the moment, and there are some cases, I think, that might require that, but one of the things Mayor Lisa Brown told me was that A, it's more humanizing to treat each people, each person, as a unique individual with a unique set of circumstances and challenges that require different things. It's also just gonna be more effective. It is, yes. So, involuntary commitment has there is a lack of research around it. I really struggled to find long form research pieces about how effective it is. I found a couple, though, and the couple that I did find pointed to recidivism. And a lack of trust in the mental health system afterwards. So, if you are somebody who's on the street and you get picked up and taken to Geiger Correctional Center where you're put in a Kind of recommissioned jail cell and given mental health treatment and detoxed. You might not, you're probably going to have ongoing mental health issues after that. There's no, not usually a quick and easy solution to mental health issues, usually. And so, if you have this distrust in the medical system, you might not go back and get that long term help. Or fill a prescription, or there might be a fear that a doctor is going to take you back to Geiger Correctional Center well, and no great fan of liberals former sheriff Ozzie Konezovich was. One of the things he was pretty clear about was that the Spokane County Jail, which would include Geiger at the time he was talking about this, because Geiger is, an extension of that system is the second largest mental health facility in Washington State behind the Western State Hospital, which is an actual psychiatric facility. Our jail is not a psychiatric facility, it's a jail, and one of the problems, even if somebody ends up in jail because of a mental break, probably, if they've been previously medicated, it means they've been separated from their medication for some reason, and if they, Were, dissociating or whatever badly enough that they were taken in off the streets or out of their home or something. Imagine how much worse that disassociation is gonna get once you get thrown behind bars. That's an escalating factor. Yeah, and if somebody was misdiagnosed, it's a lot harder to get a new prescription, or new medicine, or new treatment in jail. A lot of times they're working with old medical records. And so it can just be re traumatizing and maybe get people care that wasn't working for them. On the topic of involuntary commitment though, it is, it is more complicated. I think I am, as a, as a person, as a human thinking ethically about these things, that's like absolute last resort in my mind and, and really feels like there has to be a really good reason for taking away someone's civil rights in that way, without due process, without a court order and stuff like that. I will say there was a really fascinating, I think, four episode podcast last year from KUOW, the, the public. radio station over on the west side of the state called Lost Patients, which deals really empathetically with this issue. One of the, one of the, so right now, voluntary commitment, involuntary commitment is possible, but it generally requires some sort of interaction with Police. I've been on an involuntary commitment case on one of my ride alongs. So one of the people, one of the families that this, this podcast covers is a mom and dad whose son is, who's now in his thirties is really struggling and they're trying, he ends up breaking into their house. They buy him a condo to just so that he can maybe live, a little bit more peacefully or comfortably. They're trying to take care of him without forcing him to be under their roof. But they go through this whole process where he breaks in and gets a little violent at one point and there's an entire episode where they're trying to see what they can do with the system to give, basically give him a time out, put him into a facility that will, help him get straight and it becomes a point where it becomes clear they're going to have to wait for something bad enough that the cops are going to have to get called and then you hear these parents talk about, I'm worried, That if cops show up when my son's dissociating It's going to end up with him dead and which I think is a real concern that and so if we're thinking about There's all these little nuances and fault lines that I do think there is more complicated Conversation to be had about involuntary commitment and these are probably one to five percent of cases though, too so the the concern for me from a harm reduction lens is Making that a blanket for a hundred percent of the population feels like the wrong move, but we do also have to think about the The health and well being of that, maybe two or 5 percent of people we should move on to the next one before we did. I just wanted to say that Oh, I do want to, yeah, I have one more thing to say about this, which is to string it into the next thing, which is that the Spokane Business Association, which Cooley works for, is, was started by Larry Stone, who is one of the biggest, okay, okay, well, you were going to ask me, I was going to bring it up on my own but he's a massive conservative donor, and so the heart for it. of one of the arguments in my story. It was like, is this political? Is this not political? Mayor Brown was telling me this feels like a pretty targeted political attack. They're asking for collaboration, but they only ever yell at me. They only ever yell at the city. They only ever yell at progressive politicians. Yeah, this, this regional homelessness thing was supposed to be a collaboration between all of the cities in our county and the county itself. There was a breakdown that people at SBA and people like Barry Barfield lay at the foot of. of Mayor Brown in Spokane, but This was also on, it's, it was at least on, the project was on life support when Mayor Woodward was involved, and she's a conservative. There was, yeah, there were some struggles with it mainly that jail was one of the big pillars of the housing plan, or where they planned to put people. And service providers, especially progressive service providers. service providers or people with lived experience of homelessness pointed to that as I think one of the quotes from a past article was jail cannot be our housing plan. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, I was also trying to get at this heart of are these people trying to, these people that go on these walks, are they trying to help unhoused people? Yeah. Are, is this politically driven, and if so, what's the politically salient point here? Why is this so focused on Brown? And, I was really trying to do a fair job of encompassing all of these viewpoints. Cause like we've talked about, there is a lot of complexities and nuances here. Not objective, but fair. Well, we should say that Gavin Cooley, before he started this job with SBA, was The chief financial officer of the city for both, and that's a nonpartisan, non appointed, I guess it is technically an appointed role, but that's not, he didn't get elected to that. So he's neither. He's never been a politician, he's served under both Republican, or what would be conservative and liberal mayors. And he was on Brown's transition team. He was on Brown's transition team. But it also seems like his, his hire was pretty strategic on Stone's part, because he one of the things he said to you was like, I'm a Democrat, I'm a Democrat, I'm a Democrat. And so it felt at least to me, and knowing Gavin a little bit from, from the past, it felt a little bit like. There's clearly been an attempt to make this seem like a bipartisan association, but also just the way they talk makes it Even more clear that it's not really a bipartisan initiative. And the way they're having conversations about what language can they use that will be more appealing to progressives. Yeah, it's, regardless of what you think your party affiliation is, you're coming from a pretty conservative lens when you're trying to figure out how to reach Progressives. Yeah, that's a symbol or a sign of that. Yeah, and there was a pretty interesting literary metaphor But I think we can circle back to that later after we touch on The story ran on Sunday by our colleagues Alexander Duggan and Emery Denman at the Spokesman Review about a different newsletter this one written by local developer Sheldon Jackson, so This is not tied to a, I mean, Spokane Business Association's been around for less than a year, so that's a new, it is at least in some sort of association. This is just an email that Jackson started sending out. He had been, he's been a developer in town for decades, but he first entered the public imagination, or at least I was first. first became aware of him in the early years of the pandemic when he started driving around, especially this, when, as our housing crisis deepened and more unhoused people ended up on the streets in the early part of Mayor Woodward's tenure, he started just driving around checking in on places. And I've, I caught some of these emails early on and they were pretty. careful with their language in those early years and he was changed since then. But he started off just by sending them to mayor Woodward another local conservative Person, Chad Wendell who's now long, no longer really associated was also part of these conversations. Police Chief Craig Meidle was in on these it was just basically a one way email from Jackson to a bunch of elected leaders that eventually included city council members as well. But it, it's gotten a little bit more Is unhinged an okay word to say? Unruly. Maybe I mean, I've had a couple of these emails forwarded to me and these aren't like when you get a polished newsletter like let's say you get the SBA newsletter, right? Like it's really nice and pretty. You can't see who else it's been emailed to. It has type hierarchy, yeah. Yeah there's like nice logo design and sometimes it's even just like a PNG file that they've designed and attached to the email, yeah. This is scrolling through 400, literally, this is not an exaggeration, 400 email addresses to get to the body of Sheldon's email. And then sometimes people will hit reply all, so then you have to scroll through it again to see their response. It's I think somebody Nobody taught my man how to BCC people? Yeah. Yeah, somebody in the article that this Spokesman wrote said that they they joked that they got carpal tunnel just trying to get to the body of the email. So it's a little bit more unruly. In some ways, it's a little unwilling. Most of the people on that list have asked to be put on it. Like journalists, or activists, organizers, developers. But whether they want it or not, Jackson, CC's, a bunch of politicians on there. I think the early emails were like going out to 20 people. The spokesman article clocked it now at about 400. And then like you're saying, I think it also gets Forwarded by other people to other people. So I think the number that it actually reaches is a little higher. Yeah. And that also makes them a matter of public record, which I think is interesting. Any email sent to a politician becomes a public record. Or any email sent to a city email server would be a public record. So even sending it to a city staffer. Yeah. I thought it was funny, City Council Member Paul Dillon told me that sometimes he'll respond to the email to either address claims in it or provide more context but he has to be really careful about responding to the email because all of these other politicians are CC'd in the email list, and so if he hits reply all, he could be violating quorum by discussing city business. It would be technically a public meeting, yeah. Yeah. So he has to go in and individually remove at least three other council members. So he is not accidentally creating a violation of quorum by responding to the email. So tell me a little bit about the content of these emails, Luke. Oh, well, How well did you read the story? I power skimmed. Well, so. You should probably just do it. Okay, so the lead of the story is this interesting narrative about a mugging that happens downtown. Right, yeah, this is a wild story. And according to Sheldon Jackson's email server at the time, a woman had been walking to work at River Park Square and she was dragged into an alley. And she was mugged and this was so scary and so bad that the downtown Spokane partnership was now like Recommending that everybody walk with a buddy and if you don't have one, they might assign one to you, I think there was i'm like working with a loose memory of this the details of this email and that would be shocking and If it had actually happened, but it did not actually happen. It did not happen. It was not the truth. It was essentially the end result of a game of telephone of a local law office, some employees overhearing something about maybe a mugging that had happened in the past. It was literally a Telephone chain of like somebody said something and then Version of telephone where the what actually gets said is gets less and less accurate over time as you go And it's not just people like jackson who are reprinting misinformation. This happened a lot in especially in the early days of the crisis there were I would say, without outing people, progressive, homeless, care coordinators who were amplifying, I think, and I think in both of these characterizations, I think it's okay to assume goodwill, even if the outcome is negative. If people are getting mugged and dragged into alleys in downtown Spokane, I would want to know about it. I would just want to make sure that that was actually correct. Likewise, if people, because of a lack of shelter are freezing to death in dumpsters, which was another story that I heard years ago. And that became this big topic of discussion around the problem is so bad, we need, it's whether or not the story is true, it's indicative of a problem. And that was another another conversation that we had. For a long time when we were fighting over when as a city when we were fighting over Camp hope and whether it should stay open and what we should do instead and how how we should house people But yeah misinformation is bad regardless of where it comes from. Yeah, and so that's the argument That, I mean, you touched on the argument that Sheldon's making. So he, first he goes dark when he finds out that this is misinformation. And he is I'm going to stop emailing people. You guys are putting me all at risk. And he gets mad at the people who, the source of the information basically, right? Right. And then he does an about face and is well No, because this, whether or not this was true you could all believe that it was true, because this is, this. Doesn't it, doesn't it shine, doesn't it seem plausible in light of what a situation we're in downtown, yeah. Yeah, and so, this is like pretty close to what we all see every day. So, I think the quote was, it may have, it might have been wrong, but not far from what we deal with every single day. And this isn't the first time misinformation has been spread on Jackson's email server. There was also, a lot of misreporting on crime response times from police, from specifically one business owner who sent an email about Oh, this horrible thing happened in front of my coffee shop. And the cops never showed up. The cops never showed up. And just like 95 percent of the details of that were completely false, according to police reports and even the phone call that the business owner made. So, it's turned into this loud chain of, and it's not always misinformation. I've got to say, sometimes they, cite the true statistic about overdose rates going up. It's scary. It's bad. Cooley also cites that statistic pretty frequently. But where I think the difference between Gavin's email and Sheldon's email is that one time, Cooley did send out an email that got some stats wrong. Right. And in his next email, he immediately sent out a detailed correction, and was like, I'm sorry, this was my bad, here are the actual numbers. Sheldon's take is well, you believed it, because it felt true, and, this is, this is a really big problem. And, I think he also doesn't note yes, the overdose rates are going up, but in general, crime is going down in Spokane. And I think that's a stat that a lot of these people really like to ignore. And then there's also the idea of the self fulfilling prophecy, right? We tell this story of downtown being bad and scary and full of people who want to hurt you, And not a place where there are thriving businesses and wonderful service providers who are doing what they can to ensure that people don't die. And people, yeah, maybe unhoused people are congregating around here because they're trying to access services so they can get off the streets and so that they can get medical care. I think if you tell the other narrative of, it's dangerous out there, it's the wild west, you might get mugged in an alley. That's maybe creating this self fulfilling prophecy is, is the, the quote that maybe people shouldn't go downtown and then, downtown businesses are going to have it worse because people don't go because they're scared. I have honestly both with Gavin and with Sheldon and just a lot of this conversation around the Spokane is dying or what, or curing. Spokane. It wasn't sp, it was Seattle is Dying and the curing Spokane, the Spokane version of it. Spokane, which was SP cured by Larry Stone. Right. And is it like, yeah. Do you want. it to get worse downtown for business owners, because if you're creating a situation, I mean, I come from a North side family many, many jokes from my dearly departed grandfather about, getting a nosebleed driving up the South hill or not being able to find parking downtown. There are just a lot of folks in our city who don't spend a ton of time downtown. If the only narrative they're getting is how dangerous it is, do you really expect that to change? And we do need like everyone in our city to love our downtown area. I don't really know the, it doesn't, especially for somebody like Jackson, who is a landlord, a commercial property owner who has a bunch of retail spaces. I can see why, and the person who got the police call times wrong is one of his tenants in one of his buildings. So it's on the one hand, I could understand why a landlord would be worried about an individual tenant leaving. Right. Or, or their business going so poorly because of whatever problems they perceive that there's just no more rent coming in. Right. That would impact their business negatively. But what if in addition to that, nobody ever wanted to rent your space again because they're so worried about this perception of crime downtown. That's, it feels like you're cutting off your nose to spite your face. Yeah. And it's hard for me. I think about these, I grew up in a really small town. Homelessness looked a lot different there. And I come here and, I was very much in the Gonzaga bubble for my first couple of years in Spokane. I didn't come downtown a whole lot, mostly because I didn't have my car and I didn't really know how to navigate the bus system. Actually, Luke and Val taught me how to navigate the bus system. But Changing lives every day. Now that I spend a lot more time downtown There have been, I can count on one hand, the amount of times that I have felt scared walking alone downtown, and most of those times have been really late at night when it's just really empty and I would probably be scared regardless, like just a little anxious about walking back to my car at 2 a. m. But every other time, like I walk, I walk Downtown to get around around council meetings every night at Monday on Mondays and I've had people come up to me and ask me for money, but that's not a threat That's just somebody telling you that they have a need When I've said that I either can or can't help that need like nobody's ever gotten aggressive or angry with me Which is not to speak for everyone else's experience, but I mean it doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen very often yeah, and I live in a neighborhood that is not downtown, my house has been broken into, and my car has been stolen. I feel less safe in the neighborhood I live in than walking around downtown by myself. Curing West Central, or, oh no, this was Curing Logan Neighborhood. Yeah, Curing Logan Neighborhood. It's a college neighborhood, like it's, anyways, I also should say that I had a conversation with I guess he actually is a developer because he owns a couple of properties downtown, but he's mostly an architect, Josh is song of, of HDG. Their office is right there on, I think it's third and Stevens. You've probably seen they, they usually put like big graphic sayings on the side of their building. He was talking about how, and this has been very much my experience. Like I. Okay. A couple months ago, I took a separate, a different walk downtown with in the morning with Ben Tobin, our photographer friend who just has been doing this for seven years. He thinks if he's got his numbers right, just walking almost every day, it's most, it's a mental health practice for him, but he's taking photos of, of. Downtown Spokane in the morning both the people and the architecture and so he and I went out and I Had a couple interactions with unhoused people at 6 in the morning when people were trying to spend doesn't take people's pictures without their consent yeah, and in one situation like somebody's dog just ran up to me to get petted and it led to a really beautiful kind sweet conversation with this dude about his dog whose name was Polly and he always He named him Pauly because he wanted treats so bad. He would call and say, he would always say, Pauly want a cracker and give him a treat. And, and this week, just last week, Josh Tolt was telling me a similar story. He's I've been, we've just been having conversations about what's going on downtown for a little while now. And Ben's been part of those conversations. And Josh was like, I think I got, I hope I'm not telling this story out of turn, but he's I think I had gotten a little desensitized from working and living downtown. I don't know if anything had really happened to my priorities, but it's just like I got so used to seeing people sleeping that I stopped saying hi, I stopped checking in, stopped saying if, seeing if they were okay. And since we've been talking, I've started doing that again. And one thing that I've noticed is whenever I bump into something, like if somebody happens to be sleeping in front of my door when I get into work in the morning, I just try to gently rouse them. Every single time, it's not like I'm worried I'm gonna, somebody's gonna lash out or be violent or stab me or something. Every single time, people apologize and move on. So, I, I really do think, not to inject my own opinion too much here, and, and this isn't the, the solution in a hundred percent of cases, because there are real people who have been violently attacked. I have had, I have had, I've been in some violent, potentially violent situations myself, so I know they exist. But for the other 98, 99 percent of situations eye contact and a high is probably whatever, the best way to dispel whatever situation you think you're getting into, as opposed to treating every single person as a potential vector for violence against you, I think. Yeah. Quick update, Gonzaga Bulldogs are ahead of the Georgia Bulldogs, 85 to 62 with about two, three minutes and 22 seconds left in the second half. So I'm going to say the Zags are punching their ticket to the second round, Erin. Please don't ruin it. I mean, 23 points in three minutes would be. an unbelievable collapse. But I am still knocking on wood. All right. You, we wanted to talk about, there were some, some highbrow classic literary illusions in both of these stories that I was proud of ours and happy to see in the other story. So we, what was our, what was the illusion you used for Gavin Cooley's Crusades, maybe a little loaded of a term. They used to call it the 5 a. m. crusade. That was actually the first draft. It lasted for one email and then it switched to the 5 a. m. crisis walk, but it's not too loaded of a term, I don't think. If it was used once, yeah. But yeah, he, so, when he was talking about this, and like, how he went from being ostensibly a Democrat donor, Mayor Brown transition team member to working for one of the biggest, if not the biggest, donors to her political opponent who has spent a lot of money on anti homeless rhetoric. Right. Uh, Larry Stone's been spending tens of thousands of dollars, including on that Curing Spokane video. I heard anecdotally that Curing Spokane video was over 60, 000 because I knew some of the people who produced it. He also owns the old Trent shelter that he was renting to the city for a pretty high rent for them to use as a congregate shelter. So, a lot of connecting, Madame Webb situation going on here. Yeah. But I had asked him, like how do you go from point A to point B? How do you make this argument that it's not political? Why are all of your emails so maybe aggressive or targeted towards the mayor and not necessarily the county when a collaborative effort would require both? And it all seemed to come down to that regional homeless authority that we talked about a little bit. And he viewed Brown as kind of the, the sole, the final hatchet to that. And she took some responsibility for that and told me that she was, the first She thinks that there were other issues and that maybe other people would have, but she was the first one to do it and that kind of killed it. And so he, it keeps coming back to this regional homeless authority. And so eventually I'm like, Gavin, it sounds like the regional homeless authority is your white whale. Would that be accurate? And he, spent about six minutes of my recording explaining to me why yes, that was, a pretty accurate descriptor, although he did admit he hasn't read Moby Dick in a while. So maybe he doesn't remember how badly the whole White Whale situation ends. The person hunting Moby Dick in that, in this metaphor, doesn't end well for him in the book. And so I don't know if he wants. To be associated with Captain Ahab. But he did say he hadn't read it in a while, so maybe he doesn't remember the full context. Maybe he forgot that it's a tragedy. I don't wanna yeah. Yeah. And maybe it is a tragedy. I don't know. Yeah. And the spokesman piece was actually titled Tilting at Windmills. Which is an allusion to Don Quixote. Yeah, so famously Don Quixote fights windmills that he thinks are dragons. And this literary reference has really been testing the limits of people's reading comprehension skills in the last century. I saw a comment on the Facebook post of the spokesman's story that was like, These windmills are real. Basically being like, whatever You're pretending the windmills are fake. Yeah, and somebody responded Yeah, the windmills are real, but they're not the dragons that Don Quixote thinks they are, or the giants, or whatever the monster is. Yeah, the whole point is that That's the whole point of the story. And it's, it's the whole point of the metaphor of like when people say tilting at windmills, it means you're like, you're attacking something that you think is a dragon or an ogre, but it's just a windmill. Yeah, and the reason why we It's titled the segment Good Cop, Bad Cop, was that I saw today a tweet from Councilmember Paul Dillon's council account, so this is a matter of public record quote, Sheldon Jackson told me he was playing the bad cop, so Gavin Cooley from SBA could come in and be the bad cop. The good cop. Cooley told me he couldn't read Jackson's emails because they were so bad. How people in this story separate their lives from their words is the strangest part. End quote. And he was linking to the spokesman's story on Sheldon Jackson. And so I've just been thinking of these two figures as where they are in opposition to each other. I think it might be more of a spectrum and less of a two sides of one coin situation. What do you mean by that? I guess I spent, and maybe it is just that I spent a lot more time with Gavin Cooley. And, he looked me in the eye and he told me that this is important to him because of what has happened with his family. And I think that Cooley is a lot more careful with his language. Seems to think that what he's doing is oriented towards a greater good. I don't know, maybe they are two sides of the same coin. Cause I guess Sheldon Jackson, they talked about, also had a pretty traumatic past with addiction. And it's just hard. People are, I think, always going to be more complicated. then any journalist can capture in a story. And for me, it's I think, I think I look past Cooley to Larry Stone, the person who's enabled all this. And for me, it feels like in just their sort of personal bio, but then also the parallelness of how they've been dealing with this, this. situation of quote unquote visible homelessness is very, very similar. Like Larry Stone and Sheldon Jackson, their, their interventions seem very, very similar to me. The, the primary difference is Sheldon is, you're mainlining his direct words every single day when he sends out these emails to, to his 400 people. Stone has always been a behind the scenes guy. He's done maybe one interview for the Spok for the Inlander over the years. He used to actually be a Democratic donor until 2019, I think. And it was a, a spat with Ben Stuckert that began his shift. Well, and also he saw a homeless person standing near an ATM one time. Yeah, and that's in the, that's in that Inlander story. So, so one time a homeless person at an ATM made him uncomfortable. And he is, so he briefly stepped out of the shadows to try to tell his own story in that, in that piece by our friend and colleague, Nate Sanford I don't think it went well for him. And so he's, he's receded back and chosen, and I actually think for his purposes, if he wants to make this seem like a, a bipartisan initiative or a more, I think he chose the right person in Gavin Cooley, but I do, it does feel like Larry Stone and Sheldon Jackson are very, very much aligned in there in the intent they have for, for this work. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah, so that was our, that was going to be our first segment. It's ended up taking up almost the entire show. No, it's good. It's important stuff. We were going to briefly talk about the Michael Baumgartner town hall that you also went to that was pretty wild and is now I've seen, I don't know if it was actually on CNN, but it was certainly on CNN social media earlier this morning, the, A really, really raucous crowd. Oh, it's made the rounds. Mary Trump on her YouTube show used clips from it. It's going TikTok viral. This is the anti Trump Trump, right? Mary Trump is the cousin of Donald Trump who has basically built a media career for herself talking crap about her cousin. Yeah, I've seen it all over as well. And it's Pretty fascinating how our freshman congressman Michael Baumgartner, not to be confused with Baumgarten we are not related. It's not even the same name. If you monsters knew German, you would understand. It's not the same name. But he then went on the Jason Rantz show, which is basically like the Seattle's Sean Hannity to talk about how these, this was a coordinated left wing attack at trying to make Whitworth, I'm sorry alluded to Whitworth having coordinated with leftist groups to give tickets out. From what the Whitworth staff told reporters, they, released 500 tickets to the public and then they set aside another 200. 100 of those went to students and the other 100 went to the Rockwood Senior Center, which was like next door to Whitworth. Literally a senior center that touches Whitworth's property and is probably like within walking distance to this auditorium. And. It's, that was just the most kind of galling thing to me. It's if you, actually, and this is, come up in conversations with friends is that, that level of disruption, because it was really, I mean, you, you knew better than me because you were there. It was like an extremely disruptive environment. Is that politically smart? Does it actually get us anything? I think these are all fine questions to ask. And if And I think it would be, just the way that Baumgartner is like, just leaning on those tropes that I really got sick of in 2020, when it was like, Antifa busing, what Ozzy Kanesovich was saying about people The, the black folks in Spokane, or just the communities in Spokane, the, the multiracial communities in Spokane that were protesting after the murder of George Floyd that these were bussed in, they were crisis actors, these are not Spokanites that's a long history and it's actually a racist history of saying these are not our black people. This, this goes all the way back to the civil rights struggle. It feels very parallel to that for me, and it's really disappointing from a freshman Congress member who, the, started off the conversation by saying, I represent all of you, even the 39 percent that didn't. That was actually a piece of your live tweet. And I think it was referenced in the subsequent story that you wrote that was really fascinating to me was how he started off the conversation talking positively about I am going to be the representative for those 39 percent of people who didn't vote for me, vote for me in like a magnanimous way. And then by the time we got to the press conference, it was very much That room was full of fringe leftists, and most of eastern Washington isn't like that, But the town hall that he had in Ritzville, which again, is not exactly the center of Antifa's universe, it's a tiny little farming town, and where the, the, the only public transit that I know of is the Greyhound bus that stops a couple times a day at the Zips, last time I took that bus, That's not a, that's not a conservative bastion, that's an extremely, or it's not a liberal bastion, and that was also pretty raucous. It was. I do have to, you know I saw some names, I read the spokesman's story about the Ritzville Town Hall, and I saw some people quoted there that I know live in Spokane and do leftist organizing, so I think that there was, like I don't think he's entirely wrong in that there was some organized opposition, but I think it was more so like grassroots groups being like, Oh my gosh, we know this town hall is happening, set an alarm on your phone so you can make sure you get a ticket. If you don't get a ticket, maybe you can go to the Ritzville one. But the people that we heard from at this event, like they reserved a certain amount of questions for students. So like half of the questions nearly were from students, one of. The ones which I included in my story was a pretty impassioned plea from a healthcare student who was like what are you going to do to protect healthcare? And not about reproductive health rights, more like my job is going to be contingent on Medicare funding, Medicaid funding, this is how our rural healthcare system works, yeah. And then another question was from a German immigrant who was pressing him on what he intends to do to protect people in his district from Trump's immigration policies. And his answer was actually, well, first he asked who in the room voted for Trump. And then he said that he thinks the Wash, keep Washington working act, or he's going to do whatever he can to make Washington not be a sanctuary state. He was basically saying it would be better if local law enforcement actually did participate and collaborate with. With federal immigration officials. So it was wild. It was a wild event. Wild response to the event. And a wild start to a new congressman's tenure. Yeah, he did keep saying, I've only been here for, was it 55 days? I don't know, he gave like the day count. Yeah. Kept saying that You knew who I was when you voted for me. I'm keeping my promises. I don't know why everybody's so mad. Ha ha ha. Yeah, that's fascinating. All right. Well, we, I'm sure there will be a lot more to talk to about, about this Congress, this president and our relationship to it. That's going to do it for us today though. Free Range is a weekly news and public affairs program presented by Range Media and produced by Range Media and KYRS Community Radio. Catch you next week. Yep. Thank you, Erin. See ya.