Hey, it's Luke. Yesterday on free range, I think we're kind of getting the hang of this thing. We, we talked about two major topics that are kind of not sexy on the surface of it, but I think extremely interesting and important, First. the past, present and uncertain future of Spokane cops, not Spokane police, but Spokane COPS community oriented policing service, a longtime volunteer organization that gets money from the city to help provide supplemental services and community connection, to benefit the larger public safety environment and to support the Spokane police department. It's an organization that's been around almost my entire life. you might take it for granted. you might think it's an actual official part of the publicly run police department, but it's actually a private nonprofit support organization. It's one of those pieces of infrastructure we don't really ever think about, or think very much about, most of us anyways. I know I certainly don't. and now the city council is wanting to take a look at whether the relationship the city has with that organization should stay the same or should change. Topic two, Aaron Hedge, talks about Larry Crowder, the soon to be former CEO of Spokane Airports, his impact on not just the airport we all fly in and out of whenever we take a trip, but also the economic development that happens in the area around it. and one of the things that sets Larry Crowder apart, is his focus on airports, not merely as a public service or as a port, you know, a place to get people from here to there, but as an economic driver and economic engine. and there's a pretty robust and interesting debate about whether focusing that much on the economic development portion of what airports provide to us Led to a de emphasizing of other really really vital things that you would want an airport district thinking about And this is important not just as a post mortem of Crowder's long 14 year tenure as the CEO of the airports, but we're going to be picking a new CEO soon. So there's going to be a changing of the guard and the community has a decision to make about whether we want that hyper focus on economic development to continue or whether it might be, it might make sense to change tack. Then at the end, 'cause we're still trying not to figure out how to make this thing happen in exactly 55 minutes. 'cause at that's the amount of time we have. We do a rundown of four important meetings that happened this week. a board meeting at the Central Valley School District. Valley city council's decision to further criminalize homelessness. Spokane city councils, indefinite postponing of their parks levy and the public hearing and the public hearings that Spokane transit authority had over their connect 2035 plan, which Aaron Sellers wrote about earlier this week, It was a lot of fun and like I said, I think we're starting to get the hang of this live radio thing Hope you enjoy it. Have a good weekend. Bye Hope you enjoy it and have a Really hope you enjoy it. We had fun making it this time. We're I think i've crossed the threshold of you know Nervous anxiety to having fun may have may have crossed that rubicon this week. So I hope you enjoy it Have a good weekend Welcome to Free Range, everyone. You're listening to KYRS, Medical Lake, Spokane. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. Back for episode three. I am Luke Baumgarten, an editor at Range Media, here in Spokane, and I am joined by my co host, City Hall reporter Aaron Sellers, and reporter Aaron Hedge. Two people who have differently spelled names that are very inconvenient for radio, phonetically identical. So, hey, Erin. And hello, A A Ron. I would like to request that I get to keep my name, and he gets to be Hedge. Wow, okay. I can call you Sellers and Hedge, and I probably will. Hedge is my name, that's alright. How are you guys doing today? We're all frantically typing up to the last second to prepare for the show, but other than that. I have spent my whole week frantically typing. That's kind of the job of being a reporter, but it really isn't it? Yeah. Steady state. Steady state. Yeah. You're a little under the weather hedge, but you feel like you're bouncing back and you're definitely ready to do some radio. I'm really happy to be here, it's been a bleak couple days in my dark apartment. I honestly think coming off sickness improves your radio voice. I mean it's a little, it's a little smokier, a little sultry. I'll try to keep it. Alrighty, so, first topic today, we're talking about two things and we're gonna do a little civics roundup. We're kind of, we're still playing with format here a little bit, two big topics of discussion and then we're gonna, with the remaining time, do a speed run through some, general city hall news, or not city hall news, but municipal news, community news broadly. First up, COPS, Community Oriented Policing Service Budget, not the Spokane Police, but the Spokane COPS, which is a non profit, community policing service. It's been around for a long time. So, Sellers, Spokane Cops has a kind of an interesting back story. The story, has a, Interesting backstory for you specifically. Yeah, so I want to say it was about a month ago actually Hedge asked me to come into his journalism class at Gonzaga and teach students how to source stories from meeting agendas. So we kind of did this this exercise where I had them read the Spokane City Council agenda ahead of class and Pick out an item that they thought was interesting, or that they wanted to learn more about. And then we looked at it and figured out Okay, who would you need to interview to write a story about this? What would the angles be? What are the questions you have about this? What would the community's vested interest in this topic be? A fun little community exercise for burgeoning journalists. It's some experiential learning. I like this. And kind of, honestly, the sort of thing we talk about all the time in our editorial meetings. That's what we do. Yeah. And then, I put them on the spot, and I cold called Council Member Jonathan Bingle. Oh, I don't think I heard this part of the story when you were giving me the rundown. Best part. Yeah, I he okay, it wasn't cold call for him. It was cold call for the students. I had asked all of the council members if they were available during that time period. And only council members Bingle and Cathcart, who actually are the representatives of the district that Gonzaga is in, were available during the class time. And then Cathcart ended up having a meeting come up. So, Bingle was on just waiting for us to call him up and we once we picked out our item he didn't know in advance which item the students were going to pick. So I guess it did kind of put him on the spot too. And I popped him on speaker phone and asked the students to come up and like, all right, so we brainstormed this list of questions. Ask him, and then, depending on his answers, ask any follow up questions that you would need to know to write up a short version of this story. It kind of surprised me that one of a part of this, that these, students at Gonzaga came up with was this community oriented policing thing. Yeah, and I looked at the agenda and I prepared to talk about three other things that I had thought that they would be interested in, but this contract renewal to me at the time, I didn't think it was super controversial. The city has contracted with cops for a long time. At this point, I hadn't heard any rumblings about that changing. But the students picked it out, and they were like, this is interesting, we want to know more about this. And now, it's turned into one of the biggest stories of the week, as the city prepares to pass a budget that would not include that five year contract that COPS asked for. And at Monday's meeting, I heard hours of commentary on the issue. The room was the busiest it's been in months, full of people wearing the like, black, fuzzy vest with the COPS logo emblazoned on it, who were all signed up to talk. Yeah, this is fascinating to me, because And maybe it's the framing of the college kids who are young and maybe not even from Spokane wanting to know about this thing, because Spokane Cops, Community Oriented Policing Services has been around for so long, as long as I've been sentient, and I don't even think about it. I come from a law enforcement family. I'm pretty sure, I can't quote myself on this, I wasn't able to check with them, I think my grandma actually volunteered with one of the northern cop substations when I, like 20 years ago, so I think of it as just part of the landscape, and so I don't think I would have picked it out of an agenda either, sellers, but maybe for those who Maybe just in the same place we're at where it's just sort of the background. What is com what is, backing up here for a sec, community oriented policing in general and then what is Spokane Cops itself? Okay, yes. So, in general, community oriented policing is a broad strategy that relies heavily on community involvement and partnerships on police presence in the community to address local crime. So, what that might look like in is like a neighborhood resource officer that lives in this neighborhood, is present in this neighborhood, is available to offer resources to the community and is like a part of the community that he's serving or that they're serving as opposed to being, a separate and maybe scary entity that comes in and imposes laws and you feel like you're going to get in trouble or like your life might be in danger. Instead, it's just somebody who lives there and provides services. And one of the arguments I've heard over the years of proponents of community oriented policing, especially in a modern era, is that, especially in a place like Spokane, cops are usually in their cars. Whereas in, in some, and it might, this might be an idealized, historical version. I'm not making a case for whether this was ever true or not, but the idea is cops used to walk a beat through a neighborhood and you would know the your local officer. And so it was less about, there was just a natural community orientation to policing that maybe has been lost in an era of patrol vehicles and fewer cops and large sort of patrol areas. But then there's also the Spokane Cops Organization, which is a specific kind of an, and sort of orient organization of community Yeah, so it's a specific non profit here. And if you've seen the little, they're like kind of, a dingy yellow they're these little yellow cop shops around around Spokane. You've probably seen them on their website. There's like a map that shows exactly where they're at in the city. They spun up in 1992 in response to a community tragedy the disappearance of two elementary age girls. One was found dead sometime later. Murdered and the other girl was never found. And this specifically happened in West Central, which is going to be kind of germane to the current conversation. Yeah, and so it spun out from this conversation of okay, how do we keep our neighborhood safe? How do we protect our children? And they've been contracting with the city for a while. I actually couldn't find exact dates on how long they've been contracting with the city, but I didn't have much time to pull it together, so I can double check that later. But they're staffed mostly by volunteers. And they do neighborhood watch patrols. They will come dust your car for fingerprints if it's broken into. They do police patrols. Bike registrations. So if your bike gets stolen, it's like registered with the city. So if it's then turned in later, they know who it belongs to. And same with other items. Like you can get like a ID number for like your laptop or something. And they also do code enforcement reporting, so they'll walk around the neighborhood and see where there's code enforcement violations and call code enforcement. And one of the things that I thought was interesting is that they do identity theft education. So at the council meeting, one of the volunteers was talking about how an elderly woman had walked into one of the cop shops with this notice and was like, I'm being sued for this. And they were like, no, this is a scam. This is fraud. Let's walk you through how this is fraud. So they offer these kinds of services. I provide that service for several of my family members. So I have to say that fraud, identity theft and fraud, catfishing, online stuff, that is a pretty useful service. Yeah. A lot of us are doing emotional labor in our respective families. They're volunteers too, just for their community. And so, so they're doing some of the, like the fingerprinting especially is labor that maybe would fall under the responsibilities of the Spokane Police Department but you know, there've been frequent complaints about understaffing or needing to prioritize other things besides property crime, which lots of people have lots of feelings about. I'm not making a value judgment one way or another, just stating the facts here, stating how people feel. This is cops is. Cops, all caps is like hypothetically the answer to that question of the less responsive responsibility or like easier stuff that just time consuming can be taken on by a volunteer organization and save the city some money, right? It also and I wasn't able to run this down looking at their most the so So, Spokane Cops is a 501c3 federal non profit looking at their most recent tax return. It looks like the majority of their money, it's probably true that it's less expensive for a volunteer to collect fingerprints than it would be for a uniformed police officer to do fingerprints. It's also true, and that probably saves the city money in aggregate, it's also true that the majority of this private non profit's budget. Comes from city money that gets passed on. And it pays for some leases. I think they either own a couple of the buildings or they're based out of like. Buildings that the city owns. I'm a little fuzzy on that. But the contract pays for their leases and it pays for their executive director's salary. And then I think three other employees, one who might be like like a CFO or like somebody that's like right under the executive director. And then two part time victim advocates. But don't quote me on that because that's like working off an interview from like a couple weeks ago. So. Why are we talking about, if this is a thing that's been around since 92, it's 33 years old, or approaching 33 years old, why is this a topic of discussion now? Yeah, so, like we kind of talked about, they've been around for decades, their shops have served as these unofficial break places for SPD officers. They take on labor from SPD. Their city contract was up for renewal this fall and they asked for 475, 000 a year for five years as the sole source provider, which means that there isn't a competitive bid process where other groups can apply to do the same thing. So it's not going out to what's called RFP or request for proposals. If it's labeled as a sole source contract, that means This is the only group that the city is going to be contracting with for these services. We're not making them compete. We're just choosing them and we're sticking with them. And that's, especially for that amount of money, that's very uncommon for public funds to be, just dispersed via a sole source contract, even something like downtown Spokane partnership, which is a very similar setup where the city is paying money to a private nonprofit to do the work that they do. There is technically an RFP process every couple of years to reconfirm that downtown Spokane partnership is the organization that's going to oversee that. It's never been done. competitive, or particularly competitive, but it does exist. This doesn't even have that. Yeah, and, I'd have to go back through the last the contracts have been for multiple years for a while, and I'd have to go back, but I think it's been sole source for a while, and one of the arguments for that is that they're Isn't any other groups doing this, but that doesn't mean necessarily that there wouldn't be a group that maybe is doing similar work and wants to expand that wouldn't come out of the woodwork and apply for this contract. And so, the contract was on the agenda to be approved by city council, but it got deferred last minute at a briefing session and pulled off the agenda. And then mayor Brown. Her administration has signaled that they are not interested in a sole source five year contract with COPS. They're not interested in making room for that in the budget for a few reasons. And this has kind of spurred this flurry of activity where COPS volunteers came to this council meeting on Monday to beg council to make room for them in the budget or pass a contract with them. People are curious oh, if this contract expires on December 31st, Like, how they're not going to be able to pay their leases, do these, most of their budget is from the city, do all of these services just go away right before the new year? What is the plan? Is the city looking for a replacement? So there's all this kind of confusion and flurry of activity around this and an uncertainty. About what's going on here wild. so You obviously were surprised by the students interest in this and you were there for this public testimony that was given. You've also been talking to some volunteers. They're, pro cops, former elected officials and critics of the program. So maybe we could just do a quick pros and cons of what people say are the, what's good about this program and why it might need to change or why we might want to look at a different provider. Okay. Yes. So quick clarification. I haven't actually had a personal one on one conversation with any volunteers yet. But I did listen for two hours on Monday when they all signed up to talk at the budget hearing. So I have heard the many different. reasons to support cops. But after listening to their testimony and having kind of a nice background conversation with former council member Karen Stratton, I think I got a pretty good sense for what supporters say the benefits of the program are. The big one is just that it saves the city. a lot of money. These volunteers are taking some of that Tiki Tac labor that SPD would hypothetically have to do, or it wouldn't get done if they don't have officers to do it off their plate. So like fingerprinting car break ins this is just some of the stuff is like little stuff that is Important or could make a difference for somebody, but you know if an SPD officer is having to choose between spending time doing traffic patrol on our dangerous streets or responding to a 9 1 1 call about an overdose or a break in versus Going to fingerprint somebody's car those other things are more pressing and important, and so this might get backburnered for ages. I think it's fair to say people are worried about violent crime, but property crime is a lot more frequent, and when you hear people talking about how upset they are with public safety and law enforcement, it's often property the perceived lack of follow up or the inability to actually, adjudicate, or, get some positive resolution for property crimes that people are often complaining about. Although I will note that property crime is down in the city. So there's been a lot of talk about property crime and a conversation about whether it's just that reporting is down or if crime is down. But the data shows that the reporting is down. Property crime reports are down. Anyways, it saves the city a lot of money. The other big hypothetical benefit is in the name. It's community oriented policing. When we heard a lot about police reform in 2020, a lot of that conversation was around, how do we change models to make people feel safer and actually be safer? And a lot of the models that were pitched looked a lot like community oriented policing. We keep us safe, we do our own watches, and this does follow that approach. model. The volunteers usually come from the neighborhoods they do patrols in. That lets them build rapport with people, present like a less aggressive front. It's more of a in community, for community kind of vibe. Like the guy that's doing the patrol, you're like, oh, that's my neighbor Dave. I know what Dave looks like. I know where he lives. If Dave screws me over, I can go to his house and talk to him about it. Okay. Another benefit. That are a couple of smaller things. Those are the two big ones cost and like in community But volunteers highlighted a couple of smaller benefits. They help people with random problems that police don't have time for and they can be the first place that people call with issues that are non emergency, but still need attention. A guy was talking about a woman who was trying to find a translator to help her make a crime report. She only spoke Chinese and she was having a hard time. Like she called the police and was having a hard time helping them understand what she needed, but she was able to show up to the cop shop in person and somebody was able to eventually help connect her with a translator. Like they had the time to take her seriously and sit down and figure out what she needed and connect her with that. This is similar to like community health workers and stuff too, where it's not necessarily, the most important thing is that the people trust whatever organization they're going to, whether or not the, so translation services, which are a huge problem for, folks who, you know. For whom English isn't their first language, if they trust their neighborhood, the cop shop, that might make it easier for them to report things. They also represent a safe location to do transactions. Somebody literally mentioned Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. This is a place where you can meet somebody to buy stuff off Facebook Marketplace. It's safe. They, you can do custody handoffs for the same reason, and they work with probation officers to meet people on probation. This is parental custody, not inmate custody. Yes. Okay. Yes. So we're talking about, yes, divorced parents. It's oh, I don't get along with my ex. Yeah, we need like a neutral location to do our child handover. Got it. Which, this is a literal example a volunteer gave. I'm not making this up. And then also they said that they work with probation officers to meet people who might be on probation in their own neighborhoods instead of making them travel prohibitive distances. So somebody could meet with their probation officer at the cop shop, and that's a designated location that they could go check in that's a lot closer to their house and in their community instead of, And with things like when re, people are reentering society after being incarcerated, they don't always have cars, they might have to take the bus, that, those might, those are real limitations to reentry. And so, again, not making any value judgments about whether Spokane Cops, the organization, is doing the right work. This is something that I think people, Who might even be skeptical of maintaining this particular contract would say is like it's good to make it as easy as possible to, for somebody who's re entering to see their parole officer. Okay, so what are some of the cons? Yeah, so if you heard me talk and you're thinking, Wow, COPS is perfect. I don't know why we didn't just sign another five year sole source contract with them. I will say, the cons list is maybe a little bit longer. One of the reasons the mayor's office cited for not just sort of auto renewing the contract was a lack of clear metrics. And yes, it's pretty much impossible to measure how many crimes have been prevented. Like you can't be like, you can't prove it because I walked around the neighborhood. There was eight crimes that didn't happen today. That's just not something you can say. Before I walked this block, people were looking real shifty. And then when I stopped walking the block, they weren't looking shifty anymore. They disappeared. Yeah. That's not, you can't turn that into the city is like proof that you're providing value. But the city is saying hey, we haven't gotten reporting from this organization with that we've been contracting with for decades as to like, how many people they've helped, how many folks have used victim advocacy services, how many of these like vehicle fingerprintings have resulted in convictions. These are all questions that there hasn't been any serious or measurable data points presented to show whether or not this agency is worth working with again, is what the city is saying. Like we just want. And I think this is specifically coming from Maggie Yates and Kevin Hall, the new police chief, is saying Yeah, I'm the new guy in town. Let me start to question some of these things that we've been doing for decades. He says he's all about data and metrics and effectiveness in policing, and he's I haven't seen anything. That has shown me that this is the most effective use of our money. We're running a little long here, but I did want to kind of speed run through these criticisms cause they're super valid. What was the next one? Yes. So lack of competition for the contract because it's been sole source for so long. No other agencies. And you talked about feeling safe and that being like, one of the benefits. Not everybody does feel safe in the cop shops. Verla Spencer, the executive director of The Way to Justice, which is a local non profit law firm, told Eliza Billingham at the Inlander that communities of color don't feel safe or welcomed by cops. The direct quote was, I've never been able to walk inside of a cop's shop. to be able to receive any services, let alone have I ever heard of any black or brown folks ever having any good luck with any of those places. So not everybody might feel safe inside these spaces. Yeah. This maybe walks the edge of a value judgment, but I kind of got that vibe at council of some of these sentiments that people were expressing of Oh, I walk the neighborhood and I can just tell somebody's not from here or somebody doesn't belong here and it's my job to keep us safe. Like I can see how that would result in some folks not feeling safe. And I want to say the room was extremely white. The volunteers that were in that room seemed, and I don't have numbers, I didn't sit there and count, I didn't ask people their backgrounds, but like it, the room did look disproportionately white when it came to volunteers, so I can understand how BIPOC folks might not feel represented or safe in those spaces. One of the other criticisms you mentioned was that this, the services are unequal, which is, this is, this happens with like school districts and stuff too, where it's not every neighborhood is as committed to this. West Central seems like they have a very, like vibrant, three in one little radius. Yeah. And maybe that, so maybe the services aren't equally distributed, if a lot more, maybe black and brown folks live in East Central and maybe that's just not as well developed of an area. There was the single biggest con you heard though. And it was also brought up by the students. What was that? Yeah, so the students were looking at the COPS website and they were like what's the vetting process? What's the training? How do you get chosen to be a volunteer? Because if you're being asked to handle sort of this offloading of police labor, You're meeting with people or talking with people at some of their most vulnerable points and the vetting Mechanisms aren't really very clear. It's not obvious whether or not background checks happen or like Things if they ask them about their political beliefs or if they believe in excluding services to buy poke BIPOC or queer people. And so the students were asking me about that, and asking Jonathan Bingle about that, like, how are you deciding who's a volunteer, and then once they are a volunteer, how are you training them to make sure that they're not causing more harm in these moments or conversations with vulnerable people? And we don't have the transparency if this is you can, cops are more transparent, they have body cameras, you can, public records like police reports. They, because they are part of the government, there is a transparency and accountability mechanism built in. Cops, C O P S, not part of the government. It's a private non profit that's contracting with the government. And it is a lot gets government money, tax money. doesn't have the same transparency rules. Yeah, not the same transparency or accountability. So you might have somebody who doesn't have training who causes harm and there is not a clear metric to hold them to standards or, discipline them or ensure that harm isn't happening. And I think there's a pretty clear example of this exact situation. Yeah. This is where we bring the hedge. did some reporting on. Yeah. You actually know one of the volunteers who is very active in the COPS organization, right Hedge? Yeah so I was doing some reporting for Spokane Faves about this organization called Tactical Civics, which is it's a national organization that's been flagged by I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center as It's an extremist group in some states, not every state, um, but the coordinator for the Spokane County chapter, which is a fairly new chapter in the organization is a volunteer with COPS. Her name is Carrie Krusewick. She's And just briefly, tactical civics seems kind of generic as a name what does it mean? But you, one of the things you reported in the story was that So, what Tactical Civics is trying to do is basically almost establish a parallel justice system outside of the official justice system of the state to establish things like militias and grand juries as like the highest law of the land, so it's almost like constitutional sheriff stuff. Is that right? Yeah it's the same, it's in the same like philosophical vein as like the government that's closest to the people is the highest government which is like. Wasn't one of the big things that they don't let Muslims join tactical civics? Yeah, so the organization, one of its foundational policies is that Muslims cannot be members of tactical civics. So you might feel one way or another about whether people should be able to form militias in America, right? That's a topic that has been going on our entire lives, especially in eastern Washington and north Idaho where we have a lot of militias. But that's a pretty actively exclusionary rule that, again, back to people's feelings of safety, if a Muslim person were to walk into a cop shop, then, and whether they know or not that a person who is part of an organization that explicitly prohibits Muslims, that could be, obviously that's exclusionary. Yeah, it would be an interesting fact in any background check for for a cop's volunteer. Yeah. Yeah. And so yeah, I was wrapping my reporting up for that story. I noticed that that Carrie Krusewick, the the Spokane County Chapter Coordinator for Tactical Civics is a volunteer for COPS. And I don't want to say anything bad about Carrie. She very kindly and sweetly declined an interview. But, and she was nothing but nice to me. But but yeah, it was very interesting to see a member of that organization also being a volunteer for cops. So we're going to keep following this. We need to move on. But When will we know what's going on with this contract resolution? So, I was like, what's the next step and what should people be looking for? Council could approve the Mayor's proposed budget as early as December 2nd. Likely it will actually happen on the 9th or the 16th, but they're trying to get the budget approved in early December. They're going back and forth on edits. So council is like, Oh, we want this. And the mayor's okay we'll maybe add it to the list, but we have to cut some other things. So they're like in that negotiation process right now. And we'll know then exactly what's going to happen. I have heard rumblings that the plan may be to go with cops for a shorter, cheaper contract so that services don't go away cold Turkey on December 31st. But then that would lead into a competitive application process that It could allow other service providers to apply to run some kind of community oriented safety service. And again, this is just rumors. This is rumblings. We will know for sure when we see that final draft of the budget and it gets voted on. We don't have any explicitly planned coverage about this in the future, but I can't imagine us not covering this at some point. At least a little bit in civics. Yeah, we're going to talk about this more. Alrighty, that's segment one. Went longer than we expected. Story two. This is another one that's a little bit under the radar, but I like, I'm really enjoying this. We kind of, we're pulling this together in the middle of our weeks right now, trying to figure out how we even want to do this radio show. And I kind of feel like we landed on two pretty interesting things to talk about because they're a little, they're both a little bit under the radar. This one, Larry Crowder, the longtime CEO of the Spokane International Airport is leaving. This is not news. This was already reported. And on the topic, or on the face of it, maybe not super sexy, Aaron Hedge but potentially, I think it's important, so. Crowder's the CEO of all the Spokane airports, plural, which means Spokane International's the big one. It includes Felts Field. You also thought there might be a third airport. Did you ever figure out what that third airport was? I haven't named it yet. Okay. We're working on that. Though, there's at least two and maybe a third airport. There might be airports we don't even know about. Who knows? But, this is a really, it's a, it's sort of a, not the sort of position, Crowder is not an, a massively public figure, although he is very prominent in certain circles. He was in those circles, kind of economic development the airport community very prominent. And the airport itself is, through expansions and not just the expansions of the terminals that we've been seeing, but the expansions of the services around it, including things like the Amazon warehouse. The fact that is proximate to this airport is one of the reasons this Amazon facility is put where it is. This has become A very vital and increasingly important part of the economic development landscape in Spokane, across the board, but especially on the West Plains, Airway Heights, the west edge, the western edge of the city limits of Spokane. So, and from what I understand, Hedge, That comes largely due to the shift in thinking that was brought by Crowder's leadership style. So maybe we can start quickly with some background. How did Crowder's tenure change the airport? So Larry Crowder came in on as the CEO in 2011. So he's been there about almost 14 years. But the airport it's owned through a partnership between two public entities, the county and the city of Spokane. Larry Crowder he ran the airport as a business. Bringing in these, massive projects aimed at boosting the local economy. I think the biggest example that's like mostly attributable to him is the Trex expansion of Terminal Sea, which is a $150 million expansion at the airport. Says we'll bring about 1200 jobs to the area and generate $300 million. It's a big deal. And he's really vocal about this kind of thing, both in interviews that he has done, including one with County Commissioner Al French where he said SIA has enough room to grow in perpetuity. He's also brought this up in congressional testimony at the federal level. Yeah, federal congressional testimony. Both, yeah. And I've been looking into the airport in, in, in the past. Regarding some water contamination out on the West Plains. And during that reporting, uh, I talked to this guy named Bruce Beckett, who's a, he's a lobbyist for airports at the legis at the state legislature, and he told me that Crowder is, quote, known and respected around the state and the country as an innovative thinker about how airports can generate economic activity. And yeah. So, just to be, like, just real, these are publicly owned entities, at least ours is, and most of the airports in America are publicly owned, and on the one level it's it's, each of these airlines is private businesses, obviously the airport is a business itself. But it's not so much about whether it's like doing commercial activity. It's really more about the orientation of this public service. Like it's a port district. So the conversation is, should this feel like a public service or a public utility or should it really feel like a private institution? Business where the decision making is not necessarily focused on a wide variety of public goods or potential public goods, but specifically around the public good of economic development. Is that about right? Yeah, that sounds right. Crowder has said that he wants airports to operate as as a business, and he's bringing that to the Cincinnati airport. It's part of a larger conversation, yeah, it's part of this larger, much larger conversation about American airports that's really fascinating. The United States relies on them more than most other countries because the coastal population centers are separated by this vast, relatively empty area which is somewhat rare for a country. We have about a third of the world's airports, so as far as other countries are largely moving to When you gave me that statistic, I just want to pause on that. We Yes. America has, the United States specifically, has one third of the airports in the world? That's correct. Wow. And the thing about a big expansive land is that, if you've ever been to Europe, you can train pretty much anywhere pretty easily. It's easier to take a train to most cities, even across countries, than it is to take an airplane. It's hard to get from New York to Spokane on train. It takes 45 hours, so that's one of the key differences of why we have so many more airports. It would just be, it would just, and yeah, so, so we need the airports and it would be really hard to privatize them. They're not profitable. The overhead is too high for the profit motive basically, right? So they need public funding to stay open, which then creates these other benefits like. It's easy, it's somewhat easy for me to fly, as a person, as an individual living in Spokane anywhere in the country or whatever, with a connecting flight usually through Seattle or Salt Lake City or Minneapolis or something. But it also then entices the kind of economic development we're talking about. Yeah, and to be clear most of that public money that they get is for infrastructure and development it's, the airport operations, at least at Spokane International, are completely generated internally they don't get any of their operating budget from the city or the county, but they are owned by the city and the county. So it's the public funds are coming for these capital expansions and stuff like that? Or other? Yeah. Okay. Roads I would imagine if they were to establish a new tarmac, there would probably be some public funding involved in that. Both federal and state. But the day to day operations are largely paid for, or entirely paid for, by the various airlines that fly out of there? It's through mostly parking fees and rent fees that they charge to vendors, and also tarmac fees for the airlines, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so Yeah, let's talk about. So that's obviously the Crowder's focus on the economic impact. Potentially leaves some other areas like less talked about, and one of those is a huge part of your reporting that you've done on the West Plains, which is the PFOS contamination that happened partially as a because of forever chemicals leaking from both Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport. Let's just talk about like how a hyper focus on economic development might theoretically lead to some of the decisions that were made by the airport board to not talk much about the contamination that happened until they were forced to. Yeah, I think and they were forced kind of through a public records request by a concerned citizen who gave their well test results to the Department of Ecology, which is now forcing the airport through state law to, to clean it up But yeah, I think it's kind of a classic manifestation of this tension between economic activity and the burdens that activity places on the physical world. And this gets down to like pretty fundamental arguments about Capitalism, which only accounts for part of the ledger in economic activity, the benefits to the producer and the consumer. So any effect, good or bad, that falls outside of a transaction like a big example, obviously, is climate change, is not part of the picture. And, we don't know why Crowder and any of the airport board officials chose not to disclose this contamination but them not talking about it does fit that basic pattern. Yeah, just to be clear for people who haven't been following up on this, the Spokane International Airport had a report in its hand that there had been leaks of forever chemicals that come from the sort of, the jet the sort of flame retardant you would use if a jet were ever, a plane were ever to catch on fire. Jet fuel is extremely flammable. Obviously, it's how these massive, metal cylinders fly through the air. It's super flammable and they're propelled by this material. It requires a specific kind of flame retardant to put the fire out because it's such a hot, fast burning fire that flame retardant historically, not anymore, but historically contained. PFOS, which are forever chemicals, those forever chemicals. This is an emerging science, but it's increasingly clear that and the federal EPA is recently ruled that there is no safe amount of PFOS to have in your body. There used to be a threshold and now the feds have said no, no amount of PFOS is healthy. The Crowder and the board knew that the International Airport had contaminated private wells and the city of Airway Heights water supply, among other things, or at least contributed to the contamination as recently, or as early as 2017. They didn't actually disclose it until a private citizen did a public records request for the report, which only landed what year was that we found out about it? She filed the the records request in 2022, and Ecology initiated its investigation in 2023, spring of last year. And so we're not saying that any, there's, the fact that everybody was so focused on economic development was the reason the airport decided to the leadership at the airport decided to do this. But But again, if you're focused entirely on economic development while you might also as a public entity, a public utility, have other duties of care to the people that live around the airport and other things, if you get too single minded about economic development, it sort of becomes a conflict, a potential conflict of interest around matters of public health as well. If you are so laser focused on, if you're so laser focused on economic development, are you giving adequate care and attention and weight to potential public health impacts? And that's the criticism that a lot of the people who are suffering from this contamination, people who drink water from private wells out on the West Plains, which is an unregulated water source and doesn't really have an established way of getting these people clean water they see this is a cover up, and they think that they think that it's motivated by, by, business development. Of course most of this contamination happened before Larry Crowder came to the airport. And it was federally mandated to use this AFFF foam this fire retardant. And so, it's On a level, it's not necessarily the airport's fault, and less so Larry Crowder's fault, but the fact that he chose not to tell his neighbors about it, It's not the airport's fault that they used the chemicals. Yes, that's correct. What is, what's under, sort of, discussion here is whether it was their fault that they covered it up for five years. That's right. Yeah. You're working. This is I should have said this at the beginning. That was kind of our first preview of a story coming up. You're working on a story about that. It's going to be out with a holiday weekend. We hope next week, but maybe the week after. But we're working actively on a story to kind of run some of those things down. We got to move on to our last segment in a second here. But what the early reporting you've been doing anything come up to you specifically about something you're excited to talk about? For readers to listen to, or read. I think he So, Larry Crowder did an interview with some folks at the Cincinnati airport where he's gonna become the next CEO after he leaves here and the timeline on that isn't clear as far as what I've seen. But he said, he told them, airports should be run as businesses rather than utilities. It's less a public service than it is a way to generate economic activity. And that's what he's been saying. laser focus on for the whole time he's here and He's gotten a lot of recognition for this He's won a lot of national awards and he's served on some very high level Important boards and he's well known around the industry for that work and that's that's the surface level legacy but I think people on the west plains are also going to remember the contamination I was just quickly looking at the difference. So Cincinnati is obviously a much bigger city than Spokane. So this is, he's moving up in the world of airports. One of the things that I found interesting was the economic development for the Cincinnati airport has an estimated 9. 3 billion of economic impact. Do you happen to know the economic impact that they say they give for the Spokane international airport? Good. I don't have that. I don't have that figure off the top of my head, but I know the Trex expansion by itself is expected to generate $300 million annually in economic activity around Washington state. So it's not it's not small it, okay. So assuming Google isn't lying to me, it's about $3 billion. So this, the Cincinnati airport is, that sounds about right. is three times as big in terms of economic impact as Spokane. But one of the things that's fascinating, because we're talking about land use, we're talking about, when we're talking about economic development of the West Plains, where nothing has previously existed, largely, it's a lot of land out there, a lot of rural land. The Spokane International Airport has 6, 100 acres that it has available. A lot of that is still undeveloped, so there's no way our airport is 6, 100 acres of space. Compare that to the Cincinnati Airport, which, with its 9 billion. of economic economic impact to that region, they only have 7, 700 acres. So part of what, that's a testament to what Crowder has done in Spokane to sort of secure all this land. And, this is previously undeveloped land, so it probably might be easier to do than it would be in Cincinnati, but part of this economic drive involved sort of securing land that, that could then be developed. That's right. And in tandem with that, like working very closely with the aerospace industry for example, yeah he wanted to bring those folks in and there's bigger relations. They're trying to establish a cargo railroad through the West Plains that will bring cargo to the airport and expand it out. Footprint, which is already larger, much larger than it was before Larry Crowder. So our transit advocate fans have been asking for light rail out to the West Plains. We might get it for cargo before we get it for for people. I'm really looking forward to that story, Hedge. I'm sure our readers will, too. Alright, finally, we're gonna, with the few remaining minutes here, we got a little civic news municipal news civics roundup. Yeah, so, every Monday, I read through Thousands, this is not an exaggeration, thousands of pages of agendas for the local municipal government meetings of each week. And we have a couple highlights for y'all, a little roundup of some of the biggest pieces of news coming out of municipal government meetings. For those of you who don't know Civic exists, KYRS. org. Dot org slash show slash free range. Something like that. Something like that. You can just find our show page on k yrs.org and we will have a link to it. That's right. And then for. Those of you that do know about civics, we're at Thursday now, so most of these public meetings we talked about on Monday have actually happened, so yeah, what happened to some of them? That's great, because we know exactly what happened because we cover the decisions in advance and don't always know how they're going to shake out. So, four big things that I pulled out as highlights Central Valley School District passed a resolution and a letter. They approved a letter to send that basically asked Washington State and the U. S. Congress to ban transgender athletes from sports unless they compete under their assigned gender at birth. So the decision, and this is important because the decision Individual school districts don't get to choose how they relate to trans students and other students of difference. That's set up by the state office of public Superintendent of Public Instruction, right? Okay, so in this case, the governing body is the WIAA, which is the Washington Interstate Activities Association. Athletics Association? I think activities. And they govern, it might be athletics, but I think it's activities. So it's sports, but it's other, yeah, extracurriculars stuff. I was a knowledgeable all star. I was also a knowledgeable kid. You wouldn't know it now. That's not true. So they decide the rules for sports participation and currently their position is that they point to Title IX and they say that we can't do discrimination based off of gender or sex and you can play in whatever on whatever sports team best aligns with your gender. Their position's pretty simple. CBSD can't ban trans athletes from competing at their school. They can't. Ban trans athletes from competing against them, but they can pass this resolution that gives a very clear signal that they do not support this, that they are not okay with this. Of course, they're framing it in this very protect women kind of way that leaves trans women out of that conversation. Very similar to the conversation we're seeing nationally. So it's almost odd. There's no likelihood that this would, this letter is going to spur any change at the state level because Washington is pretty committed to this inclusion, or? Probably not, but there has been this conversation happening where at some of these governing bodies they've changed the structures to instead of A lot of times there's votes for things that are given by schools. And I don't know if this is specifically WIAA, but the other organization that governs schools, it's like WASDA or something. They take positions on stuff and then advocate. And it used to be that you got a vote proportional to your school district size. That changed recently to each school district getting a vote, which means that it has gotten wildly more conservative. Because of the amount of rural schools, and so Kind of in the same way that the House of Rep Representatives is generally less conservative than the Senate, which is, a lot of small states get the same voting rights as big states. And So, there has been a trend, I've noticed, of more conservative school districts passing resolutions and letters with nearly identical language. Mead passed a resolution with the exact same title. So, they're clearly sort of copy paste, and there were some on the west side, too. College Place and Eastmont a couple other schools passed very similar resolutions. Gotta wrap that one up. Spokane Valley further criminalized homelessness. They made it a misdemeanor to be camping on public land. And they also changed the definition of camping. Used to be that you had to have camping paraphernalia, like a dent or a sleeping bag, to be considered camping. But they took that part of the definition out. So now if you're just like sleeping on a public bench, that's camping and you could be arrested for it. City Council indefinitely postponed their parks levy. Yeah, they've been kicking that one down the road for a while. They originally proposed running a levy to fund parks improvements across the city, and they originally proposed this like in February of last year. Wow. And then it's gradually gotten punted for various reasons. To the behest of the Sorry, we got a, there was a random flashing light but they, this time the parks board voted to ask them to postpone it because they want to pursue a partnership with Spokane Public Schools where they would run a joint levy or run two levies separately that would then, be used to do a like slate of improvements. Lastly, the story you've been following pretty closely. The transit authority had public hearings on their connect 2035 plan. Yeah. And that should be just wrapping up like right about now. They had their meeting this afternoon. Usually I go, I'm going to have to figure out what to do now that we did this on Thursdays, you might have to find a sub for me on STA days, but yeah, they did a presentation of this big strategic plan that kind of lays out the future for STA TA for the next 10 years, and this was the last public hearing opportunity for folks to weigh in and share their opinions on the proposed plan, what it included, what it didn't include, what the priority and timelines for these projects should be like, which things should get done first. Yeah, so those are some of those four biggest things that happened. Clarity on that soon. Okay, the, to the, to everyone listening, especially perhaps the person who just randomly called us out of the blue in the in the studio here. Do you have questions about local government? Are you calling because you wanted to take issue with something we just talked about on air? Please send us an email instead. Yeah, wondering who to complain to about an issue in your neighborhood. Any and all of these things, and especially the person who just called, if this was like an actual attempt to contact us, send us an email at freerange at kyrs. org with any of those questions, and we'll get back to you, and we'll try to cover them next week if they come up. Freerange is a weekly news and public affairs program presented by Range Media, and produced by Range Media and KYRS Community Radio. This is KYRS, MedicaLake, Spokane. We're probably going to have a pre recorded episode next week, so we don't hear from you until then, or We'll be past Thanksgiving, so if you celebrate happy holidays, and we will see you live in two weeks. I'm Erin, that's Luke, see you later.