Hey, it's Luke. Welcome to Masterpiece Sleep Deprivation Theater. this week on Free Range, Aaron Sellers and I have been unexpectedly reporting balls to the wall on a story we are very excited about. And because this is often the case with journalism, especially investigative journalism, the more excited you are about a story, the less you want to talk about it until it's actually out because it's big enough that other people would want to scoop you. But we were working on this big story kind of unexpectedly and spent basically every waking hour from the two days leading up to yesterday's radio show to 30 minutes before it happened. Doing pretty much nothing but that. And then we were like, wait, we got a radio show to do. What should we do? Luckily it's December. There's only two weeks left in the year, roughly. So when I do a year in review show what follows and you'll really hear it in our voices. When you kick over in a second, what follows are two sleep deprived little bear cubs doing their absolute best to run through. Hundreds of stories we wrote over the course of 365 ish days, let's say 350 days, and trying to do that without string too far and even remembering what we wrote in 55 minutes before. You run away though. before you delete this podcast. It actually, it's pretty fun. It's pretty fun. It's the most off the cuff. We've been on this show and. For those of you who might've listened to the previous incarnation of this more produced version, less live version of this podcast. And certainly anybody who's talked to me about the struggles of producing a non live podcast and my weirdo perfectionism, this is going to be a big departure from what you've heard out of your boy, Luke and your friends at range to this point. And you know what, 2025 is going to be the year of letting go and letting God, And we're just getting started a little early. It's pretty fun. It's brisk. We're going to clock this bad boy in at 52 minutes. And honestly, to be serious for a moment, it helped Aaron and I both really reflect on the metric shit ton, the mountain of work we did this year at range. It left me, I got a decent night's sleep last night. So this isn't just the emotion of sleep deprivation talking. I feel really proud of the work we do. Obviously listeners like you are a huge part of that. Our readers are a huge part of that. The Spokane community and their supportive range is a huge part of that. Not going to get sappy, but I just want to say we have always been and continue to be proud and thankful to be a newsroom headquartered in Spokane, Washington, and that pride and thankfulness grows every year that we still get to keep doing this work. So thank you for listening. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy. We spent a lot more time on the beginning of the year than the end of the year. So, uh, I hope you enjoy listening to a year in the review that really ends up being the first two thirds of the year in review with some brief mentions at the end as we're about to get kicked off the air, quick programming note. We're going to be back with a normal episode next week. We're going to do something the week of Christmas, and then we're going to take the next week off range since 2022 has always taken the final week of the year off to rest, recuperate, reload, and get ready for the next year. We're going to do that again. I think this episode is going to get replayed on the radio. There will not be a podcast the week after Christmas, but we will be back in the new year. All right, without any further ado, Range Wrapped, the Range Year in Review, coming up. Got it. Hey, it's Erin. You're listening to KYRS Medical Lake Spokane. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. How you doing, Erin? We just spent literally every waking second together for the last six hours on a reporting project, so I feel like saying hi to you feels a little weird right now. I know, I'm not tired of you yet, which is shocking, maybe. But yeah, I'm actually it's nice to hear because I wouldn't be offended if you were tired of me. Okay. So this week we are going to, we have been on a super intense reporting odyssey that we're very excited about, cannot say anything about yet because it's the sort of thing that in reporting parlance we could get scooped on and we don't want to do that. Not assuming any of our colleagues are listening right now, but we're tip other people off that we're coming either way. We want to avoid a big one. It's a big one more on, to come on that, but we decided to riff this hour on our sort of like favorite stories of the year, but maybe more like a chronological review. We're a little early for that, but with the holidays coming up, it seemed like a good time to do it. Yeah. One of the things, broad strokes, as we were in, the last 30 minutes before we hopped on here talking this through, one of the things that really struck me is there were, time is a flat circle, to quote True Detective And our colleague, Valerie Osher, who thought that she invented that saying. Valerie Osher, who, only watches visual media in like TikTok length increments. So it's definitely not only TikTok length increments. It'll be like the side by side shots of somebody knitting and then like clips from a TV show. Exactly. So the TikTok itself is a two screen experience. And there's probably a third screen that you're holding in your head. So all the love in the world, all the love in the world. So definitely not listening, not watching a lot of. Long form prestige TV may or may not even know that true detective existed, but simultaneously invented both like the true detective concept, which was also a Nietzschean like existentialist philosophy concept of the eternal recurrence of the same. I think the quote was. Time is a circle, guys. And Luke and I looked at each other with excitement about Wow, did you finally watch True Detective? Or did you just, or did you just literally invent existentialism from First Principles That's one of my favorite memories of the office year in review was Yeah, a lot of joy. A lot of work happens at the Range office and a surprising amount of joy happens too, I think. So Aaron, did you have any sort of broad strokes as we were doing our quick review of the year in review before we actually jump into the physical, the actual stories and while I'm pulling up the posts The time is a flat circle thing. What does that mean to you? We had a bunch of stuff that we were talking about at the beginning of the year that we're still talking about again in different formats, but it all just keeps coming back around. As a city hall reporter, primarily, there are some stories that are just going to happen every year, no matter what, every year they have to appoint people to boards and committees. Every year there's elections of some kind. Every year they decide on the rules that govern them. And every year they talk about a budget. So all of that. stuff is always going to be recurring. But as we were, Luke and I truly have been holed up for the last 48 hours. I think texting as late as 2 a. m. and then every other text is no, I have to go to bed so that we can get up. This is the benefit of working in media that you don't worry about committing some sort of labor violation when you're, but it was a reciprocal texting. It wasn't like one of us was keeping the other one up. I don't, I hope not anyways. And this is after I spent 14 hours at sea. It's been a week, but I was thinking about that and the story. And again, we can't give away anything about this, but I think that I can say that in generic terms, it is a labor rights story. And as I was thinking back over, My year of writing, and I wasn't a journalist before this, I wrote a little bit for my college paper, but as I was thinking about really my last year as a journalist, all of my favorite stories that came to mind were labor rights stories. In that way, we're got a little bit of recurrence there, too. If I'm Exhausted and truly dragging it out to the end of the year. And also, I am working on another story that I am incredibly excited about and incredibly devoted to and will likely rank as one of my favorite stories of 2024, 2025. It could come out either, next week or the week after. It's got to go through some legal review, it's important enough that we got to get the lawyers involved. Yeah, I think we are going to be, as we review the year, we're going to be talking in circles a lot, I think. There's a lot of recurring concepts, like with our colleague who's in California. Colorado. Sorry, Colorado, Aaron Hedge. Did a lot on PFOS, Forever Chemical Contamination, that story kept coming up. These are incremental stories, but a lot of, not a lot of movement, so we're still talking about a lot of the same stuff. And I think it shows dedication. This guy is a part time reporter, and he has been chasing, Every PFAS story he can find, going through documents, and you can see as you're scrolling through, the 11 pages of stories we published this year, each little step of oh, he found something new here, he was able to get something new, and just building this lengthy and complicated story through the last year. That's absolutely right, and I think As we were about to get into the cyclical nature of the news year, but I think one thing that from a range perspective does feel like we grew and progressed. One of those pieces for me specifically is hedge is actually going to be full time next year. So those of you who appreciate his environment reporting, his reporting on the West Plain specifically, his reporting on Christian nationalism in the far right in both North Idaho, Central Washington, and here in Spokane. That's a progression. It's not all cycles. I also think that, to your point about labor reporting's been near and dear to my heart because I grew up working class. I still think, I'm probably economically not working class anymore, but my brain is still very much wired to the struggles of the working class. And I think, whenever I'm thinking about the way Also, You're working if you're working and you have to work to survive your working class You might I think you're like upper middle class probably I don't know and I'm not upper but I think I'm middle class I do think that Yeah, there is a, if you're working for a salary and you're not, making passive income, off of whatever that's one definition of working class. The other thing is are you, as you're, are you a frontline service worker? Are you struggling to pay your rent or, there's, there are both sort of economic and cultural, ways to be working class. And I personally want the working class to be as big as possible. So I embrace all definitions. But to that point, I think. It's always been an aspiration that RANGE would be as much for working people as humanly possible, which, with all due respect to places I've worked and places, media establishments that I truly love, working people are not usually centered in stories and Or in pay conversations. Yeah. And That's been our aspiration. And I think, and it's been a quiet aspiration of ours. And I think the course of this year, a lot of the work you've done Sellers and then, the outcome of the last few months, like we were talking about with the rent discussion the other week and the outcome of the election, there just seems to be some fundamental, and I'm now I'm speaking about national media where it's just we don't get the working class. There are like some fundamental misunderstandings in our society about who even qualifies, who's allowed to be a part of it, and who, in the, when we're talking about working people of color and working people across difference, like who is even allowed to vote for which party. There's just like this assumption that, Poor people should be rank and file automatons of certain parties that may or may not actually represent their interests, and so one of the things I think we are really passionate about is not In any way being political about that, but really leaning in, and certainly in 2025 and for the foreseeable future, in my opinion, or my hope, into like really surfacing, really owning a broad sort of missional thing about we are here for working people, we are here to surface their stories, we are here to help them. Y'all fight for power and recognition and for better lives in the small way that we can here in Spokane. And hopefully, hopefully that becomes like a beacon to other folks who have similar feelings across the country. Yeah. I think as a city hall reporter, I have been trying to think Covering the sort of horse race of politics is not something that appeals to me. And it is a hamster wheel that just keeps going no matter what. And that's what I'm reminded of when I look at this cyclically. But then I also look at the focus of these stories and how we've decided what angle to use when it comes to city government stories. Yep. And making government. Accessible and understandable and showing people how they can have a voice and an impact in these systems is, making the government. for working class people, or trying to help people understand how they can do that. Before we get too far into the stories that we want to talk about I think you're about to say the thing I was about to say. Go ahead. Which is the, we're gonna try for the first time, maybe, to take collars. You're not allowed to swear or anything, so be in your best behavior, because we're going to Please don't get us in trouble. We also have a dump button that we're supposed to use, that I think we might have to use for the first time if things get a little spicy, but what's the phone number again? To your right, Luke. To my right. 509 747 3333. We're going to be talking about our favorite story, or we're just going to be doing our year in review. If you had a story that really resonated with you, you happen to be listening right now, you're listening to this live. Whether it was ours or from another news outlet, we want to hear what was the news that stuck with you this year and why. Absolutely. So yeah, feel free to call that number once again, 509 747 3207. 3807, and I will try to I've worked the phone once in our very first broadcast. I'll try to figure out how to work it again, and we can, you can be, you can join the conversation, as they say. And I will try to remember to repeat that number every 10, 15 minutes or so for folks that might be chiming in. Great. Alright, Jan January 2024. Do we even remember? I turned 24. It's incredible. I'm not gonna say how old I turned. 43. First story of the year was actually This Is Us circling back in the new year, which was a story about the Liberty Lake What was it again, Erin? The Liberty Lake Library? Is that right? This was a hedge thing, yeah? Oh no, this was just our civics. We weren't going to talk about that one. Okay, the first story that I have us publishing was on my birthday, January 4th. If you're stealing my identity, there's a piece of information for you. Oh. And it was called, We're in a Humanitarian Crisis Right Now, and I Don't Want People to Die. Which was a direct quote from a city council member at the time, I think, or maybe one of the service providers. And, about the track shelter and 37 people in the, obviously, it's January 4th, so we're talking about the dead of winter. So cold. Getting for no reason we were able to discern, just ejected from the shelter in the middle of the night. The winter. One thing that sticks out to me about that story, that was when we kind of fire drilled. So I got a tip and I was trying to run it down in like a short amount of time, get something up, because, it's important. You don't want people to die. And so if you can get the news out quickly, maybe you can pressure people into not making the same decision. And I remember I turned the draft of my story in, and I had written about how a woman who had been kicked out of the shelter abruptly didn't know where else to go. So she walked to a Denny's. And I turn my story in, I'm frantic, I'm tired, and Luke goes. Which Denny's, though? Which Denny's did she go to? How did she get, did she walk? Was it the bus? And tell me which Denny's so I can track out on a map exactly how far it is from track. And I'm like, I had ten minutes on the phone with this woman. You think I asked her which Denny's she went to? But it was such a good question, because it would have made my lead better. Yeah. I think we assumed it was the closest Denny's. Even, I don't know that we even put it in the story, but I think no matter which Denny's she went to, the closest Denny's was, like, two miles away, or something like that. Yeah. And this is a story that won't beat time as a flat circle because we won't ever be writing about people from TRAC getting kicked out in the cold again. Because TRAC is no longer a shelter, yeah. And I think the city killed its lease with TRAC. I'm pretty sure Hut, Aaron Hut, the city spokesperson sent out a press release saying that they just bit the bullet and bought their way out of the lease so that they're not hemorrhaging money for a giant warehouse out on Trent that they're not using. That is definitely not, habitable for humans and no longer houses human running water. Yeah. All right, so that was my birthday No, I do remember Jimmy crying on the phone with you at 8 p. m. I had ordered my cell phone take out from Wisconsin Burger and then got stuck in a traffic jam. So by the time I got there, my food was cold and then I got back to my house and I was like settling in to eat my birthday dinner and you call me and you're like, but which Denny's was she at? And I just burst into tears. Oh man I swear I'm not intentionally terrorizing my wife. My writers, when I, when, as an editor, I ask questions like that, but it definitely happens sometimes. Did I even know it was your birthday? That's a great question, and I think that if the answer is yes, that maybe makes you worse. I think Yeah One day later one day another story about committee and board assignments on the City Council Specifically, this is if you to this is a hundred percent of time is a flat circle Yes, if you heard us do a lengthy discussion last week on board and committee assignments and whether or not district one was getting left out of key you board's key representation. Last year, they definitely were, they were not given a seat on the Spokane Transit Authority board despite having arguably the largest ridership. There's some questions here about how exactly the data is collected. District one, which is represented by the two conservatives on the mostly progressive city council, just brief review, is also by most metrics and probably by a decent margin the poorest district in aggregate in Spokane and so the argument was and still is about When we sideline Conservatives are we also sidelining the poor? Writ large and so yeah, that was a story It was a story a year ago, and it was still a story a week ago and just brief update I know we're trying to stay away from city government stuff, but Council Member Michael Cathcart, a conservative, a representative of District 1, was seated on the STA board, which is the first time a District 1 representative has had rep on that board since 2021. And Jonathan Bingle was seated on the Spokane Regional Transportation Council? Commission? SRTC. So they received representation on both major transportation boards. About a week later in early Jan or still in the second week of January here, we wrote a story, Surviving the Snap, about the cold snap. Again, as, as long as track was we should this is just starting with our colleague Carl, a couple years ago, talking about the work that he did at Camp Hope around the heat waves that happened. And we've tried to, when there's extreme weather, or even inclement weather, to focus on our unhoused neighbors and what they're doing to survive literally in, in the weather. So that's another kind of perpetual time as a flat circle, as long as we have the crippling housing crisis and sort of the, what a, what, like a Twitter pilled Person might call the poly crisis of housing in Spokane where it's a little bit mental illness. It's a little bit drugs. It's a lot, we get, we can debate about how much of those things directly contribute to homelessness. There's certainly a symptom of it, but the symptom of all of the increasing on unaffordability of life in America and specifically in Spokane. This is not going to be, this is not going to be a super light hearted year in review, I know, I keep scrolling up and peeking and I'm like, wow. It's not getting much better. We really write a lot of bad news, which is feedback we've gotten. And every so often we try to do something less depressing, but, we've got some stuff coming in the new year that's going to be less depressing. We might be able to Pull off some games potentially and stuff like that. We're talking, we're not going to, we're not going to scoop ourselves. And we also can't over promise, but we're taking some steps to try to have some happier news in 2025. We also, I think we also made that intention in 2024 as well. That might've been our new year's resolution. And you know what, here we are with lawmakers should wait and see before banning toxic PFAS on January 17th. Yeah, that was, we Yeah, that was an Aaron Hedge article about the airport CEO saying, yeah, let's just wait and see if the poison, we should ban the poison that we all know exists in our water. Let's just wait. Let's just sit on it. And I don't remember exactly. I'm sure we'll get to it in the timeline, but this was pretty soon before. The federal EPA, the Environmental Projection Agency, said, You know how much PFAS is safe? Zero. Zero detectable. There was a trace amount of PFAS that was, the science is still emerging on just how and in what ways PFAS is toxic. And those are like, Forever chemicals that sort of stay in the groundwater, which are, in a million different things, including like the Teflon in your nonstick pans, but in the case of Spokane and on the West Plains of our county firefighting chemicals, the retardant that you use specifically for airplanes. So there's, there have been there's a contamination basically north of both of our airports, Fairchild Air Force Base, and the one we all go to fly places because of the drills that when you. Basically, trained to spray these in the case of a plane fire. All right, we gotta move faster. We're still in january. You are right and we are what do you want to do next? Yeah, the near the end of january I wrote a brief story on just like political battle lines on the spokane transit authority I was really in my Wow, all government is just theater kids being dramatic era. It's all a power struggle. Everybody's playing chess. And a couple, a little bit after that, right at the end of January Hedge had a story about Spokane Valley Mayor Pam Haley nominating three people to the planning commission for that city, not for the county or our place, but for the Spokane Valley's planning commission without interviewing any of the candidates. Yes. And then this was the beginning, I think, of our coverage of a man named Al Merkel, who for our Valley residents listening out there is already a legend, I think, in his short time on the counter where every month there, I think city manager presents a financial tally of just how much money Merkel has cost the city. Because of the various inqu like, ethical inquiries and stuff? Ethical inquiries page freezers, social media stuff. They had to change the layout of their work area because they said he was harassing staff, allegedly. So all of these measures, and then I think they were trying to Tally and this gets a little complicated right because they say he's asking for things that are pointless like he's asking questions that are pointless, so I think there's a tally in there of staff time of Merkle sending staff off on what they call rabbit holes I think there's something pretty valuable about somebody asking Questions even if we might or you might think that are stupid the fact that it's not inherently easily Understandable means that there's some transparency issues And I think he has, you can, we can we can debate the legitimacy of some of these requests, but some of these things are about government efficiency and just are we actually doing what we say we do as a government? And we're not officially taking a position on Al Markel on the show. No, because this is the man that just sent out a press release asking. But we're not explicitly not taking a position on that in general, just merely noting that he is one of the. Intentional or unintentional funniest characters in a black way? He drove around in the Merc mobile. Which was just like side by side. That was like painted orange. Like a side, like a motorcycle? No, like a side, not a four wheeler, but oh yeah, like the sort of off roading. Yeah, like a buggy. Like a buggy with signs that said vote for Al Merkle. And he had a Oh, a megaphone, and it was just like blasting vote for Al Merkel as he drove around. Not even in his district, not even in the area. He was over by the Inlander taking an interview with our friend Nate Sanford, and he arrived in the Merc mobile. One day later, February 2nd April Fool's Day, is that, or is that Groundhog Day? It's Groundhog Day. It's Groundhog Day. Because April Fool's Day actually happens in April. In April, yeah. Quick fact check there of myself. Disruption, decorum, defiance. Erin, this was the first piece we wrote about, not about the Israel Palestine conflict explicitly, but the intense, months long disruption that happened at Spokane City Council around what to do about Spokane's how Spokane as a city responded or didn't respond to that crisis. Yeah, I remember doing math for that story, which Anytime I do math. it in the, yeah. I don't know. I can't, for some reason that's not coming up on my page, but I, yeah, I went through all of the meetings in the year and marked just like every time people use their testimony time to talk about Israel or Palestine or how what the impacts were in Spokane. And it was a pretty significant portion of time. Yeah, I'm scanning the story real quickly to see if we, because we counted them all up and I can't remember if we put it in the story or not, but it was hours. Hours. Yeah, this is true. Yeah. All right, and then in the next couple weeks of February, we spent a bunch of time covering the legislative session. So the state legislative session, writing about big bills and tracking them through like how a bill becomes a law, how you can contact your state legislator. So just giving people the tools to know what was going on. That was Valerie Osher and Aaron Hedge were writing that sort of nuts and bolts stuff while I was tackling a big story on a bill being debated in the legislature that would have paused hospital system consolidation, which is a fancy way to say mergers. And what the impacts of that were largely, it has a big impact on access to reproductive health care and gender affirming health care because a kid that went to lobby, I think they were like five 15, 16, they use this metaphor of all the big hospitals are gobbling up all the little hospitals And then they all have the same policy around reproductive care. So you can't go anywhere else to seek right additional care and this is not exclusively the case, but the a lot of the debate was around ostensibly faith based, even non profit hospital systems sometimes. I think Providence is an example of this. Yeah, and they had some pretty restrictive rules around how you could whether or not you could terminate pregnancies and under which circumstances. One of the sources I talked to was a woman who was told that her Pregnancy was extremely high risk and was going to kill her, likely, but she was not at the point where if you don't do this now, she will die And so her options were really limited. She either had to wait until she hit that point or go to Planned Parenthood or go to a private hospital where she would have had to pay like 9, 000 out of pocket. And I had a personal friend who chose not to go on the record for this story. And so I don't want to give too many details, but was literally a doctor at a hospital. who lost a child, but, was still inside of her, needed to have the fetus removed, and her employer made it impossible. Just about as hard as you could physically do, even though the fetus was beyond non viable, it was already, dead. So that was a really stunning example of we've spent so much of the last year focused on the Dobbs decision and the Supreme Court. Explicitly taking away reproductive health rights. But this is an example of where just like bureaucracy and not necessarily capitalism, cause we're talking about nonprofits here, but just like the market, nonprofit industrial. All right. This is your reminder that if you have a favorite news story from 2024, you can call us at. Luke, your beanie's in the way of the sign. 509 747 3807. We're gonna have to speedrun through this and I'm as much of a culprit as anyone here. We've done a lot of stories in the last couple years about the politicization of various boards, especially school boards, around what in a quaint past was like critical race theory, and is now largely, mostly about queer and trans issues, curriculum and library issues. Aaron Hedge in the mid February wrote about Central Valley School District Board opposing queer curriculum legislation that the state had passed to basically be more inclusive for queer and trans kids. We started our overly ambitious people's priorities project that really taught us not to over promise and under deliver. That was supposed to be like seven stories in two weeks and it ended up being like seven stories in seven months. Yeah. Yeah. The whole idea there was, and I, and honestly to, back to the whole working class angle we were talking about earlier, it was not, it was in, Attempt, overly ambitious attempt, but a valiant attempt, an honorable attempt to talk with normal folks who aren't in positions of power necessarily or who are very close to community about what they wanted out of the Spokane City Council. And I think we learned some interesting things. We don't really have time to dig into it. We could spend probably two shows on everything that came out of that series. But yeah. It was a really, it was one of, as I think about how we grew as an organization over the year, that was, I think, one of our early attempts to try to center normal folks and not people with, that try to lift voices of people who don't have power, as opposed to, always talking to people who already do have power. Then I think one of the biggest stories of the year, one of my favorite stories of the year, and one of, I think, one of the most important stories of the year in February 23rd, was your story, Sellers, about, it was called, anecdotally, we're seeing more dead people, which was a weird sixth sense reference, but it was about Everybody seemed to agree that there was a fentanyl crisis, an overdose crisis, a fatality, people were dying at increasing levels, but nobody had actual data. So we had this entire community of service providers and government officials who were saying, So many more people are dying than usual and I took them at their word because everybody was saying it but nobody knew exactly how much so you want to talk about what steps you had to take to just run down and honestly, I don't want to toot our own horn and I don't want you to get too big of an ego because I don't think either of us have a problem with ego, but it really did it. force or shame the city and some of our other leaders to actually start tracking things. I, in my opinion, they should have been tracking all along. Yeah, I think there's one sentence from this story that sums the whole thing up between February 13th to February 21st. And incidentally, more than two months after we had reported Spokane County was canceling its opioid task force, Range contacted 14 people across eight agencies and organizations to try to understand if comprehensive data exists, and if so, how one could get up to date accurate data on the actual number of overdoses, fatal 2024. I literally was just calling everybody I can think of getting bounced around. I called the Spokane regional emergency communications. I called the police. I called the fire department. I called the Spokane regional health district. I called, I think the coroner's office. Yeah. And then I was just, it was frustrating. Every time I thought I'd get something, it would be different numbers than somebody else had. And at the same time, the Spokane City Council was trying to decide how to allocate funding and what to do about this thing that they were, like, hearing was deadly and bad and dangerous. But again, they had no data about What was happening, where it was happening, who it was impacting, so it was nearly impossible for them to make educated decisions about that. Right. Right after that we wrote, I think, one of, one of our first labor stories of the year, but also. This is one of my favorites. Yeah. It was called Dancer Revolution, and it was about a bill working its way through the legislature that would have, that gave rights to dancers dancers Yeah, you want to talk about that briefly? Yeah There's a group called strippers or workers that are making the case that dancers in clubs are workers just like everybody else and deserve the same kinds of worker protections. There was a lot of practices, and specifically in Washington, which you think of as like ostensibly a progressive state that is good for workers, it was not and like still isn't a great state for dancers. People will travel dance or go to Oregon because some of the regulations around Like alcohol and policies and stage fees, all these terms that if you're not familiar with this world, so you might know nothing about make it not very financially profitable to dance here and zoning restrictions across the state make it really hard to operate a club here. And in fact, there is not a single strip club in Eastern Washington now you have to go across the state to Idaho. So I talked to, dancers about their experience and there were some incredibly sensitive stories because some of these policies led to sexual assault or harassment and people not getting paid for their labor. I think this was in a previous story you wrote about this or maybe a subsequent story, but this is about more than just strip clubs and whether they're morally or ethically cool or not. And there are fine, conversations to be had about this, but the reason this is a really a worker's rights story, and this is one of the things that one of the more powerful things that came out of your reporting around this, Aaron is like, a lot of these folks are moms. Some of them are single moms. And you can say that stripping is good or bad from a moral or ethical standpoint, but a lot of times it's this is what allows them to make enough money in a relatively short amount of time to like actually spend time with their kids. It's what allows them to then not have to spend as much money on childcare. In addition to the, it's good to have your parents around when you're developing. I'm not trying to shame anybody who has to work or whatever, and that's not what we're trying to do, but there's real, like parents want to spend time with their kids and this is a choice folks are making. In a lot of cases to just be like I'm a stripper so that I can, For my family, yeah. Soon after that this is a kind of a nerdy one that I just want to pause on briefly, but from caucus to convention, Aaron Hedge wrote a story about the kind of labyrinthine nominating process that the Spokane County GOP takes to eventually. Basically how the Republican Party in our state nominates its at the statewide level and it how it goes from like county level all the way up to other things and seemed like a small story. It didn't seem super important or it just seemed like a run of the mill story. But One of the things that I've always appreciated so much about how closely Aaron keeps his head to the ground of his, his ear to the ground of what's happening on the far right in, in Washington and Idaho and in our area in general is that this ended up becoming part of what allowed This weird coup that, nothing much came of it, but SemiBird was this fringe govern gubernatorial candidate who ran in the governor gubernatorial primary, who was very kind of Trumpy, but he was also a person of color, he was from the Tri Cities, nobody put much stock in him, and ultimately he didn't make it through the primary, but he was also, his followers, through this weird labyrinthine process, and partially the fact that the GOP convention was in Spokane this year, was able to get the Republican nomination for governor, even though he had basically no chance of even making it out of the primary, because of how, right wing forces in the state Republican party were able to game the system and eventually, Get him through as their nominee After that I had a run of seven stories right in a row, which this is really making me realize how much I work I wrote a story about the state mandated indigenous community seat on the spoken regional health This is a big one That's still unfilled and comes up frequently in conversation in these spoken regional health district meetings and in other issues They're making these important decisions and they're It's still not an indigenous person sitting in that state mandated seat. There are arguments about why that is, which we covered in this story that I do not have time to explain the nuances of, but it's definitely a big issue that we had heard from community members was frustrating. I wrote another story. about not having enough shelter beds in the cold for people. You wrote us, I'm going to speed this along here a little bit. Sorry. We're like 20 minutes left. You wrote a guide of how to Narcan, which actually we got some blowback for this story. We were just trying to be like, Hey, if you are a person who feels comfortable and, you, maybe you're not. Because there was this opioid, or there is this opioid crisis, we thought it would be useful to help people understand how to use Narcan if you see somebody overdosing or God forbid you have a loved one who overdoses and we got some weird blowback, almost like we were enabling drug use. It's really like we're just trying to save lives, harm reduction it wasn't a time but it was surprising to me that there was a more negative response to that than I expected. Billing process for nonprofits where they have to front their own money and then reimburse the city, which can be really hard when you're asking small nonprofits to take on risky labor. Specifically. Yeah. Small nonprofits, um, policy plagiarism, which comes up multiple times this year. There's a kind of Washington trend of right wing, More right wing school boards just plagiarizing each other's policy decisions on issues like queer and trans kids and then just copy pasting and running that through. It happens a lot at CVSD and Mead. Yeah, and this is something I started writing about in Mead almost three years ago, so it's still happening. Arpa funds and what we plan to do with it. Aaron Hedge found a pile of the gray fire that happened the previous year. The devastating fire out in Medical Lake that burned down so many homes. He found a pile of rubble that was still smoldering. It hadn't been put out yet, which is pretty, months later, pretty crazy to think about. Yeah. My love letter to Val Ogier, who moved up here from California and was blown away by the fact that we had bikini barista coffee stands. So I wrote a story looking at the ledgers, the lingerie, the labor structures. It's like people have written about the kind of controversies around them constantly, but nobody's actually asked the questions of What are the economics of this? How much do people make? Is this a good decision financially for people? Is it safe? And so I just went and talked to baristas about what it was like to work there and did it make financial sense? And a lot of them were students who were like paying their way through college via lingerie coffee shop. And I think that's rad. Yeah. I had a lot of friends in college who just worked, mostly female friends or female identifying friends who worked in bars, because it's you can make good tips, you don't have to work that much. It's, it rhymed and echoed with the stripper story, and actually there was, part of that story was about how there is a bias, as weird as it sounds, in bikini baristas against hiring former strippers. Yep, which is a story I wrote later. Yep. We got better data on the opioid crisis, which I think is why you said that story is pretty impactful, is that like a month after I wrote my data story we got better data, and organizations started publishing and communicating and presenting data on deaths to the City Council every month. I think it's fair to say that as a direct result of some of our reporting, some of our friends reporting, and other people reporting. We ended up making things more transparent and informed for people in power. On May Day, or after May Day, but in honor of May Day, we, our, our beloved intern Pascal Bostic and you, Aaron, did a little photo essay about the Workers Rights March that Latinos in Spokane organized for May Day. That was fun. We're, now, I think that was our, one of those examples of a, sort of an uplifting, heartwarming story of community community solidarity. Later on in the month, we got another Trent Shelter contract extension. I don't even want to talk about that one. The beginning of what became a series and a long running issue of vandalism of the Pride crosswalks across Spokane, that, again, we don't really have time to get into this, but that was a continuing saga, basically from this The article was in May. It lasted through the entire summer and into the fall. Hedge's great story about Jacob Knight at Mead School District. Yeah, that's a really great one. About a beloved teacher who within months, who grew up going to Mead and became a teacher in the Mead system, who was also a, we spent a lot of time editing this one. It's a really brutal story. Who became the teacher in a particular grade. I can't remember what grade that a lot of parents with. Kids who were struggling asked to put in, this is a teacher, they asked their kid to be in his class because of how compassionate what he was and how he had this uncanny knack for bringing kids out of their shell and helping kids who were struggling in school find their place, culturally and turns out. One of the reasons Jacob was able to do that so is that Jacob was a closeted gay man, and when he came out, he was in a straight relationship when he was beloved, and when, within a year of him coming out as gay and beginning to The district paid him half a year's salary to resign and not sue them. Yeah. After some things. It was, yeah, it's a really brutal story. And so careful in the words we use about it, because every word we use in the story went through legal review like three times. Yeah, it sure did. It was also the beginning on a weirder note. Soon after, three days later, we wrote about EWU potentially becoming a polytechnic university. We still don't know what that means and how it's different from a normal university, but that's something we're dealing with. Basically, eight months later as well and then back to strippers a few days after that when that was when you did your story about the closure of Deja Vu. And where people actually go if the only strip club in eastern Washington is closed, what economic options are left for dancers? That's one of my favorite labor stories. Yeah. More vandalism of the crosswalks. As was in end of May, Sean Foyt, the eternal recurrence of the, everybody's favorite Christian nationalist praise pastor who probably Did as much as anyone else to losing torpedo to Torpedoing, former Mayor Woodward's reelection chances was back in Spokane, as he often is. Shortly after he announced that he would be suing the city for their 2023 Denouncement of then Mayor Woodward, which hedge also covered. And I had forgotten how much of a lag there was in this, but. But we were talking about the opioid crisis, the overdose crisis in January. It was not until June that Mayor Brown actually declared the overdose emergency. This is true. We did another attempt at levity. We shared some queer love letters for, Pride Month, I believe. Yeah, and our interns Holly Van Voorhees and Pascal Bostic wrote an accompanying piece showcasing 2SLGBTQ plus history in Spokane. There was like a history exhibit down in the pavilion that they wrote a beautiful story on. So this is another really wholesome one. We partnered with the community school, which is a project based high school. I think when I was in school, this would have been called an alternative school, which would have had parentheses derogatory in it. And one of the things that's been so beautiful about our partnership with the community school is really I, as a kid who, 20 years later was diagnosed with ADHD, I really could have benefited from a project based school. I would have really thrived in that environment. I think it wasn't really an option for cultural reasons where I went to school and watching these kids basically spend an entire semester or an entire unit, I don't know if it's a full semester, they call them, they break things down into units, they're studying journalism And critiquing journalism, we started doing this a couple years ago where they just came, we came in to talk about our work and the spokesman's come and the inlanders come over the years. It's been a really cool community thing, but these kids are more engaged than some of the college kids. I, we come in and talk to just hitting Us hard on bias and why are you covering this and not covering this and this year we ended up Publishing a bunch of the stories they wrote at the end of that section Not only we worked with them to craft these stories. We came in multiple times to do Idea generation and how do you see So, like source things and how do you decide who's quotes to prioritize? I sat at one of those desks with the little spot for your binder for the first time in 25 years probably and you did a ton of work on this project as well, Erin. Yeah, we picked like the top 7 or 8 stories that were the closest and we gave them a professional edit and worked with students in art and published them on our website. We created a PDF and eventually it's going to get printed into a little newspaper. I think it is printed at the community school. Ok, we just haven't picked up our copy yet. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, it was a very fun thing. It's a project I hope we continue doing in the future because, the children are the future. I got really invested in urbanism and traffic safety for a while there. I wrote about adaptive design strategies, which are cheap ways to calm traffic and protect bike lanes. I wrote about traffic fatalities and Mayor Brown committing to traffic safety measures. July, we, yeah, some safe streets. Oh, is that what you were just talking about there? Yeah. Yeah. We did those Query Love Letters throughout the month of June. We covered the heat wave, how to help what it's really like out there on the streets. So Hedge and I wrote a couple stories in conjunction. He went out and interviewed frontline providers. during the heat wave, and I collated resources on where to help. Just before the 4th of July, Aaron Hedge wrote a story called Operation City Bleeders about a man named Louis Arthur, who's, I don't even know, we don't have time to adequately describe Louis Arthur. To even open that can of worms. Except that he is wanted by law enforcement across several states for just really petty and, disturbing reasons, like he recently popped up doing weirdness after a hurricane. He's probably most famous for destroying migrant watering stations across Arizona. He came to Spokane briefly and docks the city council, docks the city council and which some people who are I would assume because he's on the far right, people on the far right were camped outside of city council members houses. And then yeah, when. Months later, when the really awful hurricane happened in North Carolina, he popped up there again in the national news. We saw this on CNN or something, that he is over there causing trouble as well. So he's just a person who moves around the country leaving chaos in his wake. Okay, my favorite story of the year was Don't Leave Me Here, I Need Help which we published in July. I took a ride along with the fire department's behavioral response unit, which is this sort of alternative response unit that gets tagged on to go to mental health calls and overdose calls, and they have the ability to administer a drug called suboxone in the field, which helps put off overdose, or what's the word I'm looking for? The effects of withdrawal. Withdrawals. They can put off withdrawal symptoms, and then they can use that window of time where somebody is not having withdrawal symptoms to try to help direct them into services, whether that's mental health services or addiction services. And it was a really eye opening day. I worked really closely with the two members of that unit, and I followed one patient over the course of the day who we went out on multiple calls to, and a few weeks after I went on my ride along, I found out that this patient was still seeking care for their addiction and was still in the program, and was, by and large, one of the biggest success stories of this program, and I And not long after that we began what is a hybrid thing. And again, back to the conversation we had a couple weeks ago about our rent tool that we were trying to work on developing. We wrote about the, as the Spokane Regional Health District's consideration of privatizing its treatment services. There's only, there's 39 counties in Washington State. Only two of them have publicly funded services. opioid treatment services, us in Pierce County where Tacoma is. There was discussion starting in late July, or mid July, through it goes almost to this day around whether Spokane should privatize that work. And one of the, fascinating things about that is that in this upcoming legislative session, the state is going to consider actually rather than private, like privatizing like Spokane's considering, it's considering requiring all of the regional health districts across the counties to actually make their make public opioid services. So part of the rationale to at least explore privatizing was that Spokane was this weird outlier that was one of the few publicly funded treatment programs in the state. Now the state is maybe that's actually the way we should go. So they've held off on any further deliberation about whether to privatize because the state might actually mandate public services that they've already built that almost nobody else has. And with our last five minutes, we're, we've really got to go fast. I want to highlight. Okay. Thank you. Our edition of Lauren Pangborn, who is our new urbanism columnist and Lauren has written a couple of great stories for us in the last couple of months about density, urbanism, development, bike paths, transit, and just does it in this really lovely way that makes things so accessible and easy. We partnered on a story. About the top 10 dangerous intersections in Spokane. We were able to use like embeds to give you a tour of what the most dangerous intersections look like. And a hobby horse of mine point access block architecture that allows for better, cooler, more interesting, and more livable apartments. So making not just dense housing, but dense housing that's more livable, even for families, if you're into that sort of thing. And it's. Another range contributor, Daisy Zavala Mongagna. Yep. Wrote about the path to workplace justice for an injured undocumented laborer here in Spokane. And this was another one of those stories that took a ton of work, a ton of legal review. Six months of reporting and editing. And Daisy's a former student at the Murrow School who's written a couple Stories for us over the years, but she's actually a full time reporter on the southern border bilingual, and we really needed whenever we have a story about a farm worker or another laborer from a Spanish speaking country, we whenever possible, really use her to Because often when folks speak primarily Spanish, it's hard to even, go to the press with a story like this if you're, you're going to be talking to somebody who speaks a language you don't speak very well. So this is part of our effort to connect with folks at the ground level when, by coming, by showing up and, reporting in their language. And then, And honestly, that kind of brings us to our in depth election coverage that we spent two and a half months in together. We had some really big projects. We did four or five big projects this year. That's And then, Maybe there's a reason we're tired, Erin. Maybe there is city government coverage. That's closing out the year. Aaron Hedge did a really deep dive, more of an informational think piece on shades of Christian nationalism. And this is the thing that's, I feel really strongly about this stuff. But there are shades of this thing that is, basically leading leads to Trump's re election in no small part. And also potentially to this growing movement of anti democratic movements and movements toward, faith based government where maybe our democracy is eroded if folks who believe in this ideology get their way and not just treating it like a monolithic thing but taking the time to really understand the shades of this so we can all educate ourselves. That was in September. Man, I'm tired just looking at this list. So briefly we got one minute left What was your favorite story of the year? I don't even know if I can say. I'll tell you what I'm looking forward to, and I already said it, I'm just really looking forward to resetting in the new year and leaning into this, solidarity reporting and reporting across difference and writing about, and I'm also we've been restructuring ourselves. I'm going to spend. I created, it was the dude who started range with the mind toward seeing if I could even be a journalist again after about a decade of leaving. And I'm going to recommit to doing more journalism and not just building a business in 2025. And I'm really excited about that. Yeah. My goal is to just not burn out, keep doing the city government stuff, balance that with labor reporting and with the, we were talking a lot about community reporting and how our advantage is though. We are allowed to be community members Yeah. Who report on our communities. And that brings us stories. Think you're pretty passionate about that that people don't trust other news outlets with. And I'm excited to lean into that and to really tell these stories that are very delicate and require that level of trust and communication. Absolutely. And we are way out of time we're like exactly out of time. Are we? Maybe the thought 65. All right. So with that, we will be back next week, but this has been a heck of a year. Thanks for listening. And thanks for reading. If you read, if you're into that sort of thing this is KYRS Medical Expo can 88. free range is a weekly news and public affairs program presented by range media and produced by range media and KYRS community radio. Have a good week guys. Bye bye I'm Erin, that's Luke, see you later.