Hey, it's Aaron. This week on The Pod, Luke, other Aaron, and I discuss an unexpected nationalist rabbit hole I dove down. The contours of a new bike box program for people biking to City Hall. Spoiler alert, it's not all it's cracked up to be. And Sellers dives deep into numbers for the city's new homeless scatter sites, focusing on one that's opened beds for 30 medically fragile unhoused people at Westminster United Church of Christ. Some good news to leave the week with, and some other odds and ends. Okay, this is technically my third try, but I'm assuming you didn't hear the first two tries. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. I'm also having technical difficulties. It's Luke's first day back, so of course everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. I also have a new phone, and I'm driving a rental car for reasons we don't need to get into. I dropped these two off about ten minutes ago, and then I realized the other technical difficulty I was having is I haven't downloaded any of the parking apps on my phone. So I'm just doing a great job here, guys. But I am glad to be back, because I've been sick, and then it was the holidays, and then, as Aaron said last week, I had some boss coded stuff to do. And I kind of realized this has quickly become a pretty grounding part of my week, and I hope it is for all the listeners at home. It's kind of a way for us to talk about the reporting we've done, but then also the stuff we're working through. And we're going to be doing a little bit of that today as well, but We also got a note earlier today from at least one reader who said they're really glad we're on the, they might be rethinking that email after they heard the start to the show, but they're really glad we're on the radio, too. So how do you feel about it, Selish? Oh, I really like it. I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I'm glad you're back, Luke, but I had a lot of fun being in charge the last two weeks, so I'm kind of sad to give some of that editorial control away. One of the things I'm really starting to love is the opportunity, like I was saying a second ago, to talk about the news in development, which actually brings us to our hopefully semi permanent third mic, Aaron Hedge. Hey Aaron, how you doing? I'm doing well, how are y'all doing? Well, catching my breath, but other than that, pretty good. Yeah, Luke's trying not to just like pant into his mic. I think I'm, breath control. I'm pretty proud of myself. I do want to say, I also, I had a very similar note from one of my readers who said they were really glad we were on the radio. So, that's two. We have at least two listeners, which I'm sure is below the average for KYRS, but we're, you know, we're doing some on the, on the ground polling from listeners. But on the topic of in development stuff, I was running around Hedge, I wanted to chat with you to start. Running around this morning, and when I got to the office at 1230, you're on an interview, and the first thing I hear you say is, So I'm a straight white man. Are you saying I'm oppressed? Who are you talking to? Or maybe we don't want to say who you were talking to, but why were you talking to the person you were talking to? So I'm reporting on a story that I'm not going to give too much detail on right now. We're going to try to drop it on Monday. But this story that I've been working on brought me through social media to a guy who He's just a working class dude who lives in Spokane. Interesting, has a little bit of similar history with me. About my age. Was also in the Navy for a while in a very similar job that I worked when I was there. And this guy's kind of a, he's kind of a, He's kind of a gadfly in local government circles, not, he doesn't show up to the meetings so much as he's just has a very strong presence on, on this. He's an online gadfly, he just frequents the comment sections of posts on social media. Yeah, maybe, maybe gadfly is the wrong word, but he's just, he's a prolific commenter. I'm sure y'all have those in your life. I was trying to figure out this guy, and I don't think he's necessarily going to become a character in my story, but he made some posts on Facebook that I was very interested in that I needed to follow up on, and I found out a little bit about his history. He's had some run ins with With local law enforcement through some just some troubles that he had in his life. And he seems to be struggling a good bit. And he has some, he seems to have some, some anger issues towards specific individuals in, on, on the Spokane City Council. But also groups of people. Groups of people well yeah, so like, and groups of people that are represented on the council, including queer folks. And he's, he's a, my perception He's throwing around a lot of anatomical terms that I can't say on the radio during the part of the interview I could overhear. He's he's, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a He's, he's a deeply Christian man which, and I think that he, and I didn't ask him this specifically, but he seems to veer quite heavily into Christian, Christian nationalist views of the world and he, He made some comments about, like, specific communities in Spokane. Specifically, immigrant communities. Who he feels I asked him if he feels like they belong here, and he said, he said, you know, if they're here legally he's okay with them being here, but he made some comments about how, Their culture should not be represented in public spaces, in, We're not scooping ourselves to say that. We were chasing the story because like, the anti Haitian hate that we heard during the presidential campaign, especially in that town in Ohio, is, there was a Haitian celebration, and there was vitriol in Spokane around similar things, so part of what you're running down is the extent to which this stuff's happening. Yeah, essentially. So, so January 1st is Haitian, is the Haitian Independence Day. Right. And the city wanted to recognize that. And they, they held an event outside of the city council chambers in the Chase Gallery out there. Where there, there are frequently events that are dedicated to specific communities all kinds of different communities. And they, they had invited group that kind of gets resources together for, for Haitians who, you know, like, who, who've come here through often troubling circumstances and don't necessarily feel welcomed into the community immediately because, just because, partly because they're just not as visible as other communities, but also there's a lot of undercurrent of, of racism and When they posted the announcement for this event, the post on Facebook was sort of flooded with these comments saying that, you know, Haitians are not native to the United States, and we shouldn't be And the people had this false perception that we were spending, that Spokane was spending public resources to host this event. They just give them space outside of the city council chambers. They don't It's kind of like the Chase Gallery. So there's like art that's just And then sometimes they just, I've been to a couple of their resource fairs where they just let groups come in, set up tables, hand out resources, free food. I've gotten some like killer empanadas before city council meetings every once in a while. The I, I chatted with one of the organizers of the event and she, she talked about the food that they had. It made me really hungry. The Haitian food. Yeah. But, so, so, so this guy was one of the commenters, and, and I felt like I needed to understand his worldview better. And so, I reached out to him through a number of channels. It was really, it was actually pretty tough to get in touch with him, but I left messages a bunch of places, including on Facebook. And he finally called me back. And I just had, he, he gave me, he was very generous with his time, and he wasn't offended by any of the questions I asked. I think he probably knew that if I ended up writing about him, which I don't think I necessarily will directly, that he wouldn't, it wouldn't, like, he's not gonna be, you know, the central good guy in the story. We're not trying to platform those ideas, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And he got that but it got, the conversation kind of veered into ideas of, What makes somebody a natural citizen of a nation? And I had had conversations with some folks, some advocates for immigrants, and you know, they pointed out, and I personally agree with this, I don't think there's really any group here besides indigenous communities, the native tribes that were here when Europeans came here who are native to this area. But this guy, he had a very specific definition of it. He said, if you're born here, then, then you're a native. And if you're not, then you're not, and you shouldn't necessarily. I don't know if he would say it this way. The way that I understood it was, if you're not a native, then maybe you shouldn't have as much representation in public spaces. And he also said that, you know, seeing this, he's a straight white dude he He said that he felt like he was being excluded from this event, which was is not true. Like he could have gone to the event and enjoyed the food and caught up with some of the folks who were who were there celebrating the Haitian Independence Day. And it just, you know, it got into some some pretty deep and troubling. areas of like just where we're at as a nation and obviously this, this specific conversation mirrors a very troubling conversation that was had a controversy on the national level. During the presidential election, we all remember when Donald Trump, during the debate with Kamala Harris, was talking about Haitian communities in Springfield, Ohio. Well, and J. D. Vance did the same thing, since he's from Ohio, yeah. Yeah, and they talked about how they falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants were stealing people's pets and eating them. And J. D. Vance later doubled down on it, even when he acknowledged that that that was like, not true. Like, they know that it's not true. They still double down on it. And, I just think it reflects a really deep Undercurrent of racism in our society. Yeah. The guy that I talked to probably doesn't agree with that statement, but it was, it was, it was a really agree that it's racism. Yeah. Yeah. And I think when you, he said it was racism to have the event at all. Right. Because I think, right. The quote that I overheard him say to you that I wrote down was, I don't feel included when black people are celebrating Haitian Independence Day. There are no white Haitians. Which is actually just patently false. He said a lot of things that were patently false. I think I was like frantically fact checking and sending you, like, articles while you were on the phone with him. My phone was buzzing with Slack notifications from Aaron Sellers. No, it was, it was, It was very helpful, actually. But I just think it reflects that kind of ideology that if something is not about me, then it's excluding me. When it's actually like, no, something can center somebody else, and they are like, having it in a public space, and inviting you to engage, and learn, and meet new people, and be in community, and I think that that's a really beautiful thing. He felt excluded. Although he did say that he came to the meeting. So Well, I think, I think it, it really speaks to this moment that we're having and a lot of people use the F word, an F word that we can say on the radio, fascism, is that this guy, like, he's He, I perceive him as being unwell and I don't, like, I can't make diagnoses, but he just, he seemed like very worked up by a lot of this stuff, and he feels forgotten by society, and that's not, he's, he's a working class guy, he's a veteran It's not necessarily untrue that he is forgotten by society. Yeah, white and class people in general, I mean that was a huge, that was a huge narrative in the national election, yeah. The hard thing is, when, when you have to, He, he doesn't have any access to, The extreme wealth and, and, and the, and the wealth inequality that exists in this country that really creates the dynamics of those situations. And so the things that I mean, he is a business owner, though. And I don't know, I don't know anything about his business. It seems like a young business. I don't know, I don't even know if it's active. He has a website, but I don't know a whole lot about it, so I, I can't speak to his business, but he, he is a business owner. But he He, he, he doesn't seem to see the structural inequalities that, that I perceive in society. And it creates an environment where people like that, they need somebody to blame for their situation. And so who are they going to blame? You know, it's the people they see who don't look like them, who, who pop up in, in social media. And I think that that is like, I think that's one of the really scary moments of this moment that we're in in society is this idea that, you know, if you're struggling, you can blame the people that you see in the grocery store for your troubles who aren't you. Not the, you know, contrasted with the sort of Luigi Mangione, you know, the CEOs of the problem discourse that's happening a lot at the national level. I also think that one of the things that's kind of interesting to me is we, we were talking about sort of how, you know, we, national myths, national narratives are part of how power is created across the board. And since the beginning of time, this has been true, you know, this is Joseph Campbell, it's you said Yusuf Harari or whatever. You've all known Harari, yeah. All that's true, and then when you think about, like, the way the Divine Rite of Kings gave way to mercantilism, gave way to capitalism, it's like, that was a national, or that was not a national narrative, it was more like a, sort of a Western civilization narrative around, like, the way we organize ourselves is ordained by God, and then at some point These merchants who got increasingly wealthy were like well, I'm not the one running this, you know, like it's not God making this economy run, it's me and then, you know, that's how we got capitalism and there was hundreds of years of turmoil in there, you know you made a point that I thought was really smart that we're, we're in a similar, it feels like we're at a similar inflection point where The narratives that we've, you know, the, the dominant narratives of the, the, say the 20th century, especially the post war narratives of, you know, we're, we're, America is the, the peacekeeper of the world and we're the most dominant economy. Really not working for people, you know, in we've got an inequality that's worse than it's been since or maybe even worse now than even the Gilded Age 100 years ago. And that is leading to the breakdown of a lot of those narratives. One of the things that we haven't talked about yet that I was thinking about as I was running up here that was so fascinating is. You also talked to him about his, you know, sort of his religious position, like what church he goes to and stuff. And it's not one of the Christian nationalist, like really, really xenophobic churches. And what really struck me about that conversation was, is not that people can't go to different churches than their ideologies, because plenty of people do that, but that I have relatives who go to a very similar church to the one that he's talking about. And I actually have. A family member who was adopted from Haiti like 15 years ago. And so there was, there's a movement and my brother also was adopted from Mexico, you know, 30 years ago. And there was this movement in charismatic Christianity that was all about bring those, you know, those troubled souls who might not have God in their lives at all. Or they might be Catholic, which is basically the same thing as not having God in their lives to people, to certain brand of charismatic Christianity. And then, but bring them here, like for the love of God, take them out of Haiti, take them out of Mexico, take them out of communist Russia, take them out of China, bring them here. And now 20 years later, people go into the same kinds of churches are now saying, keep them out, keep them out, keep them out. And I find that really, really fascinating. Another piece that was super fascinating was. Loves Trump. Hates Elon Musk. Which is Nah, I wouldn't say he loves Trump. He just said he was voting for the lesser of two evils. Okay, I missed that part of the Trump, though. I was actually trying to do work at the time, so I was over, only over here, but, but the idea of that, there's also, we've already seen around immigration specifically, a schism, like Trump isn't even in office yet, and we've seen this, the, the H 1B visa fight already play out between basically the capitalists, the Trump capitalists, like Elon Musk, and the Trump nationalists, like who's Miller, what's Miller's first name? Stephen Miller, yeah. Stephen Miller, yeah. And that is. Not only is that playing out nationally, that seems to be sort of playing out in this guy's worldview, to some extent. It was really, it's really, and it's interesting that you bring up Miller there was, who's, you know, been a, like, there's been a lot of like, I, I think people are probably a little too flippant about applying the Nazi label, but You know, he, he explicitly, one, one of his posts on Facebook, and it wasn't well communicated, I had to really drag this explanation out of him. He posted a photo to Facebook with no commentary on it, of Just a black and white picture of a big Nazi rally. Yeah, it was, it was a Goebbels speech, a Goebbels speech. I don't know how you pronounce it. Yeah, Goebbels, I think. Yeah and he, I was like, I asked him like, why, why did you post this? And, and he told me, it's, he, he couched it as like, kind of like a warning, he, he sees He sees our current situation as being, like, very similar to the transition between the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Basically, yeah, American decadence is similar to the decadence they found in Germany between the wars, where elites were living it up while Working people suffered and that's what led, so he's, it was an anti, well it was an uncommunicated, but Theoretically anti nazi message he was trying to convey, at least according to him, right? But this is what he's saying to a reporter that he knows is recording his call What he posted on his facebook was just a straight up picture of a nazi rally After making a lot of racist comments, so I don't want to give this guy too much credit When I saw it, I was like, I actually texted some people, this guy that I'm looking into, like, I was just like, he's posted Nazi stuff to his Facebook. Yeah, I mean we assumed he was, it was a positive post. Yeah. Yeah, and according to him, like if we're taking his, his story at face value that's not what it is. He, and I, and I asked him like, you think Hitler is bad, right? And he said yes. Just like having to ask that question was really interesting. Right. But he did, he did have this like pretty, you know, whether he agrees with, whether he's, whether he agrees with Nazism or not, you know, he did, he did have this analysis that was really well thought out and, you know, and it, and it's that, that idea of decadence leading to, leading into authoritarianism. Right. And And so I asked him why, you know, why, like, like if that's the case, if this is analogous to our current situation, why would you vote for Trump? Right. And he, you know, he said he gave like kind of a banal answer to that. It was just like lesser of two evils. Right. Which wasn't, I didn't find it entirely convincing and I didn't think he had really thought it out very well. But yeah, it was a, it was, it was a, it was a fascinating little turn in my reporting that like, I, I'm not sure where it's going to lead me, but and I'm not going to write about it right now, but yeah, yeah, fascinating conversation. We're going to go to a break here in a second and then get on with the news of the city. But I mean, it, it's sort of also the last thought I have on this is a testament of like, you think you're writing one story and then you. You might be writing another one. I mean, the conversation we were having when, when we were coming up with the story is like, okay, cool. Well, I mean, neo Nazis, you know, North Idaho based neo Nazis walking around skinheads, suspenders, beating people up at punk shows. It's like, that was a feature of my, my like, adolescence and adulthood, like Nazis would come from North Idaho to Spokane to recruit at punk shows. Like that, I saw people get beat up in high school. That seems almost quaint now, given the, the, the way that the far right is moving from sort of, say, white nationalism to more of a Christian nationalism narrative. And if you take them at face value, it's because it's not about overt racism, or it's just, you know, if you're, if you take the critique of them seriously, it's about because they're concealing the sort of subtle racism of, of that movement. And so momentarily it almost, I almost thought we were going to be writing a story that put me back in like 1998 or something. But it ended up being a little bit more complex than that. And also maybe, because the idea was like, well, has anti Asian hate in an organized way come to Spokane? Which would be, you know, troubling and something we would cover a lot. It's hard to know because these movements are so diffuse. And in some ways it's not unlike the conversation that we're having nationally about ISIS and like, you know, the truck bombings, or the trucks driving through people in New Orleans. Like, the whole thing about, you know, Isis's new transformation is that they just sort of put the vibe out there and anybody who wants to sort of carry their torch can we find ourselves in a similar moment here where It may not be Organized but it also that doesn't make it any less troubling for the people who are on the receiving end of it It's it's the it's the supercharging of the meme it can travel Much faster now, and wider. And if you don't have to have an organized structure like that, it just gets carried in the ether. There's nobody to blame, there's no hierarchy to tear apart. I mean, I still remember when the Aryan nation was sued into oblivion for tax reasons. And that's how they ended up falling apart. On the one hand, it's comforting that there isn't, like, a big compound in Hayden anymore, where it's like the nexus of that sort of thought and action, but in some ways it's scarier because it's just sort of, it lives, you know, in the air, and we don't know where it's going to pop up next. That's right. Alright, we're going to go to a break and talk about, well, I mean, it won't be too much lighter, but a little bit lighter. All right, we're back. Okay, Sellers, you're working on a number of things, including a follow up to the Planned Parenthood story and we don't want to scoop ourselves on that too much, but I did want to let listeners know what's coming. You maybe did want to chat about it a little bit, or no. You want to leave it off completely? Ugh, I'm so torn, but maybe we just save that for next week. Okay, cool. Yeah, we're we're sort of winging it, and it's important enough on that one that we don't want to, we don't want to Nobody else seems to care that much about labor, so I'm not terribly worried about another reporter scooping me, but On the off chance. You know, I think we, we do want to be, you're right, there's not a lot of labor reporting in Spokane. I do think people cared about that story though. So I'm excited. It also landed around the holidays. So I think it's I think our follow ups will be, It's definitely in the ether. We're getting a lot of feedback about it. But you're right that there's not a lot of organized labor reporting in this town anymore. And there used to be. But what else have you been working on? Well, in the last hour, I have been sort of Passively doing some self interested reporting around the bike boxes outside City Council. I was thinking about this summer when I was writing about Safe Street, Spokane. There was sort of a rash of deaths of pedestrians or bicyclists in collisions with cars. And there was a lot of calls for ways to make our streets safer and ways to do that in a cost effective manner. And I remember this very warm press release I went to that Lisa Brown biked to, and a couple of the other city council members did, and they were talking about like, Ah, these new bike boxes, these bike lockers are getting delivered to City Hall, and they'll be, they'll encourage everybody to bike, it'll be great, more secure, safer. People's bikes won't get stolen as often. People's bikes won't get stolen as often. I recently got an e bike for Christmas, and I want to bike to city council meetings on Monday. But the boxes are all locked, and our columnist at Range, Lauren Pangborn, had the same thought as I did. Can I bike to a city council meeting? And, yeah. When she showed up, she said she went to the front desk to ask, like, for a key for one of the locks on it to put her bike in, and they had no idea what she was talking about. So she wasn't able to get her bike in the box. She had to roll her bike down into the elevator, and they just kept it with her, like, right outside the city council chambers. Which I don't know, I don't think that's the option I want to take. Right. But now I'm asking around to see like, Hey, we've got these great new bike lockers. Are they actually available for people to use? Right. Is there some kind of miscommunication? Yeah. I want to put my bike in a box. And if these are just for city employees, why did we do a press conference about it? It seems like, is it, I mean, we're signaling that we need, and I've, you know, I've recently started riding a bike more often most of the last year, and I'm parking the Parking and locking bikes is like the single biggest impediment. It's like actually easier to ride a bike around downtown than it is to drive a car, you know, theoretically. It's much faster, theoretically, to park. If there is infrastructure for it, but there's often not. I also want some kind of app that tells you where are, like, the hoops, or the things that you can lock your bike to. Like, where are the places that you can actually park and lock a bike. I do think somebody created a Google map. I should try to dig up that link. You should, that would be cool. We could make that public on range for any other bikers out there. In less self interested reporting news, I've been tracking some developments when it comes to homelessness sheltering. Just for, sorry, one second, because we're talking about alternative modes of transportation here. Aaron Hedge is a semi fanatical, I mean, single handedly trying to bring back rollerblading, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Do you ever commute on your Blades? And if so, how do you secure them when you get to your destination? Cause I haven't seen you rolling around the office. This is a really, this is a really good question. I'm also putting Aaron on the spot here. I cannot I can't commute, I can't commute to work. On my blades. You live pretty high up the South Hill, and there are some, there are some legitimate personal safety issues with trying to commute down the South Hill on blades, I would imagine. I've bombed some of those hills, not, not the really scary ones, but the even, even the more, the milder ones are a little worrisome around some of the curves on, like, maybe, like, southeast or, you know, but Grove, Hamilton, or yeah, Bernard would be murder. Oh yeah, no, no, I, I that's, that's a Death Wish Hill. But, to answer your question, as a, Self described, self described soul skater. And the movement is not just me. It's, it's, it's happening just for people out there wondering. It's underground. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not just me. It exists whether you see it or not. To answer your question, the way, so my, my, my blades have, which are broken right now, they have just loops and I, and I carry them on the loops and I put them Right next to my backpack. Wow, that's wonderful. Alright, sorry Sellers. I agree. Moving on to serious news, I just wanted to know how, how Spokane's rollerblading ambassador gets around. We need to be assimilated into the, into the Sustainable transit universe. I was gonna say, I mean, current co CEO, interim co CEO Carl Otterstrom always talked about Spokane Transit Authority as being, like, extending the range of the pedestrian. That's one of the things he used to say a lot. So you could, you know, get to those death hills, hop on the bus just long enough to get down the hills, then slide right back off on your blades. Get some Rollerblades, folks. We're gonna report back on that. You can't tell people to do that on the radio. Not for FCC reasons, but just for cultural reasons. Just joking. Actually, both. Alright, but on Serious News, what are you working on, Saj? Serious News, there's been the opening of a brand new shelter earlier this year, the city announced, well I guess not earlier this year, you can't really get earlier in the year late last year. Yeah. The city announced that they were closing down the Trent Shelter, which is a big ol warehouse out on Trent Ave. And which is now closed. Is now closed. Does not exist. The city has bought its way out of the lease. We are not paying Larry Stone money. Hang out in a warehouse with no running water, right? Sorry, there is running water, but only available to the employee. It's all of the unhoused people that we're accessing services. There had to use porta potties and showers that were not able to be accessed by people with disabilities. So that closed down. This is a sort of controversial decision in some ways because a lot of folks in homelessness services really disliked the model. They thought that it was inhumane. They thought it was unsafe. And a lot of unhoused people just refused to go. This is true. There was like multiple outbreaks of illnesses out there. It was pretty bad. But it closed down and the city did not have a clear replacement plan already functioning They had like a concept of a plan. They were like we are going to shift to a scatter site model We found an operator who was going to run these scatter sites and what scatter site is is a smaller shelter almost one that hypothetically would be able to be absorbed in any given neighborhood without a negative impact to that neighborhood. They're saying like, let's spread services out all over the city, and it allows you to get really hyper specific. So part of the goal was to break it down by populations, because different populations have different needs. So there could be like a small shelter, like 30 beds, where folks who had, you know, Disabilities could be served. You could cater the services to folks with disabilities, make sure everything was accessible. You could schedule out service providers or like doctors, street medicine teams to come in that were like prepared to serve that population. You could do one that was just for veterans and then you could have folks from VOA. Come in and, like, get people, you know, get their paperwork up to date. Basically, the idea was that it would allow the city to more effectively address individualized needs. Right. And more effectively use resources. Great idea. It's worked pretty well in some cities. And the scatter in the scatter site is they're just geographically spread out. Like, one of them's in northwest Spokane. There's, you know, they're all over the place, usually in in faith based situa like, the basements of churches. That's kind of been the thing. However, this wasn't up and off the ground at the time that track the Trent Center close, which was October 31st. There was a couple scatter site shelters, I think like between 30 and 60 beds, I want to say, but that did not replace the 250 bed situation at the Trent shelter. So folks that had criticized Trent for being inhumane also criticized this move away from it without a clear replacement as being inhumane. And there's a lot of, you know, there was, there was a lot of push pull there. It's, it's pretty complex. But some good news is that a new scatter site shelter has come online. It's a medical respite bed shelter. So everybody, there's 30 beds total and it's in the upstairs of a church in district two. So just barely outside of downtown, but like a stone's throw. You can see downtown from the shelter. And I went and toured it last, last week. It was really, really nice. There's. rooms with beds set up. One of the volunteers was like dragging all of the people who were touring to come sit on the beds because she was like, look, they're memory foam. They're so comfortable. And they were, they were, I sat on one of the beds. But the idea here is that everybody who accesses the shelter is referred by Providence or by a hospital. And even if a hospital refers them, they have to then go through Providence. So it's kind of just making sure that everybody who goes there has clear medical needs and has sort of streamlining that communication so you'd know what a person's medical need was. Yeah. Then, Doctors can come in and treat patients here. Folks can rest. Sometimes, you know, you've got something that really you just need to sleep it off, but you're not gonna be able to do that if you're living on the streets. Hope House, which is also now in danger of closing down, has a small number of medical respite beds, and the reason, and they have, I don't know if they still are, but when they were originally built, it was, they got a little money from the local hospitals because you need medical respite beds because unhoused people are really high utilizers of emergency emergency rooms. And so if all you're doing, or if what you need, you know, people do have legit medical needs, but sometimes, like you're saying, they do just need to sleep it off. And so transferring them to a medical respite bed is also a way to kind of clear out the emergency rooms. Yeah. There has been a little bit of controversy around this. The, the shelter is in the Westminster Baptist Church Sorry a. A quick note here on the radio. I said, Westminster Baptist. It's actually Westminster United church of Christ., Quick correction as you're listening to the pod. Thank you. which is right next to Lewis and Clark High School, which some folks have concerns about but part of the vetting process that goes into being referred to the shelter is making sure that nobody who is using the shelter is a registered sex offender. Right. And also there's no outside loitering space or like hangout space. space. Folks are pretty much cordoned to the church. They're in that upstairs place, the upstairs floor for treatment. And then I think if they want to hang out, there's like, there's a basement in that church and there's like the actual church areas itself, the property line of Westminster. So it's across the street from Lewis and Clark high school, literally across the street, literally across the street. And, but it's like, It takes up the entire lot, so it's like you could, you're on the sidewalk, there's, the, the church basically goes to almost the sidewalk, so it's not like they would be hanging out in a, in a yard or a green space, yeah. Yeah, and besides the concerns about the school, there was also this question of transparency. I mean, I didn't know that the shelter was opening until we got a media release and I'm, like, pretty up to date on everything that's going on with this. And so neighbors in that area also really had no idea that the shelter was opening prior to opening. And it sort of opened this philosophical debate and political debate in some cases. And when you say neighbors, these are businesses mostly, because there isn't a lot of residential over there, is there? There is some houses, there is a, like, Small amount of housing. A small amount of houses. It's it's in the Cliff Cannon neighborhood. At the very base of Cliff Cannon. I mean, by city lines, it is at the base of Cliff Cannon, and so it's, it's a partnership between Empire Health Foundation, which is the, like, contractor for all scatter sites, and then they do subcontracts out with the scatter sites. Jules Helping Hands is the sort of facilitator inside, the operator in partnership with Providence, who is handling, like, all of the medical stuff. And Westminster, obviously. The thing about this that I found the coolest, the Westminster Baptist Church reached out to Empire Health Foundation and the city, and was like, as a faith based group, Faith based community. We want a shelter. We believe in this. We want to walk the walk or walk the talk. And the congregation of, I want to say between 200 and 300, unanimously voted in support of bringing the medical respite shelter in. So the congregation is extremely supportive of it. I talked to a gal there who is a member of the congregation. She was really excited about it. She just said, you know, like this is what Jesus was about. We want to help people. We want to open our doors. Like the point of a church is to serve people. And if we can do that, we want to. But there's been a lot of push, pull and argument, both from the dais at city council and on certain conservative email listservs about. You know, Oh, we're hiding it from the citizens. The citizens didn't know. They couldn't, and EHF did come to a neighborhood council and offered a present on it before the opening of the shelter. The neighborhood council did not take them up on that because they said that their docket was too full for that meeting. They came anyways to answer questions if the neighborhood council had them. So there were some efforts to engage and they connected with the school too. But. Zeke Smith, the executive director of EHF, told me and a reporter from The Spokesman in a joint interview that, like, part of the reason for not publicizing it was that they didn't want coordinated backlash against it. And I, So the reason I was expressing skepticism about whether this is downtown or whether it's in Cliff Cannon, I like, I live in Cliff Cannon, it is a, one of the bougiest neighborhoods, I'm not, I was, I bought my house at a time when, But it's like, I live several blocks away from mansions, I don't live in a mansion myself, I live in what used to be it's a duplex effectively a townhouse You would have to hike up one of those hills that would kill Hedge to Rollerblade down to get within, you know, a quarter mile of any What I would consider a quote unquote neighborhood there is a small amount of multifamily housing Lower down the hill, but it's mostly businesses. It's mostly medical practices There's some churches over there and there may be one or two small older multifamily apartment buildings But it's it's really in a commercial center Westminster baptist is Really, you know, commercial space more than more than a neighborhood, in my opinion anyways, as a guy who's lived there for like almost 15 years. Yeah, there's just in the, at the government level, there's a lot of debate over how to equally spread services across the city. So no one neighborhood or one district is getting burdened by the potential negative impacts that may come along with the shelter. And again, this is a medical respite shelter. So I, I. The negative impacts that you sometimes see around shelters, I feel like are already kind of mitigated by the nature of this shelter. Some of the folks literally are like, confined to their beds. Yeah. It's not for emergency health care, but it's also not people who are gonna be running wind sprints up a hill anytime soon, necessarily. Right. And so there's been this, big debate around shelters and other service providers kind of being clustered in District One, which is the poorest district in the city. It stretches up north and makes up most of downtown. And so the point that politicians were making was like, this isn't in District One, this technically isn't in downtown, even though it's like, it is one block into District Two. And I mean, they are right that that is where the district line falls. Thank you. It's just been an interesting conversation to follow. I have so many mixed feelings about it. I mean I think about Catalyst, Shelter, and the insane amount of pushback to that from NIMBYs and this sort of question of where do we put shelters and the answer always seems to be well not near me. Yeah and I think that's my larger point because it's like you're right that it's, to me it feels more like downtown than it feels like Cliff Cannon just because of You know where the actual residential part of Cliff Cannon is And to your point, it was an attempt to get it out. It's it's It is close to downtown, but again, that is literally on my commute to work. I either drive or walk past Westminster every time I come into the office. And there is also not a lot, part of the problem, part of the reason for scatter sites in general is like, the second and division area where so many unhoused services and, Spaces have been is like that's where every then where unhoused people hang out. So the idea is we got to get them out of that area. They did a pretty good job or anyone. It was awesome that you know that the congregation opened its doors to this community because that is not where I have, you know, mostly I mostly walk to work and and I've seen a lot of concentrations of people that's never been in that area. And so it's like, it almost like it feels like they, the city did its best to take the feedback from the NIMBYs who were like, don't put it in the middle of my neighborhood and, and also like keep it away from where the other, you know, on where the other shelters are. It feels like kind of a sweet spot. And, but. There was still the concern that people were gonna get mad anyways, I guess. Yeah. I still think it's, it's, regardless of where you fall in that debate of, do we trust people to understand that this isn't gonna negatively impact them and throw a fit? Do, where do we value transparency and just dealing with the consequences of that? Cause I do think there is an argument to be made for government transparency and accountability. Right. Either way, I think it's a piece of really good news that we now have 30 dedicated medical respite beds serving the most vulnerable people in our community. I'm putting you on the spot here, do you know how many Scatter site beds total we have now. Are we close to replacing the track, the original track number? Well, okay. I, I do, give me two seconds and I can tell you I took screenshots at a presentation given on Monday that had these numbers. We are not close to replacing the 250 beds. We are at I also think engaging faith communities, and Hedge, I'm sure you can have something to say about this too, it's like, it's smart because, you know, regardless of what people Think about things in their neighborhood. People don't generally have a problem with the churches in their neighborhood. And so, you know, engaging with faith communities in a, in a partnership, I think is like, you know, Morningstar Baptist is in Northwest Spokane. It's like North of Audubon. It's, you know, it is in this, like the older, you know, mid century suburbs of Spokane, but it is a neighborhood. There's not a lot of commercial. It's just a lot of, a lot of fifties ranchers up there. And I haven't heard a lot of. community complaints about from District 3 residents about the scatter site at Morningstar. Okay, I have the answer for you. By February, Empire Health Foundation says there will be 205 beds in the scatter site model. That includes two shelters in North Spokane for 60 adults. However, those two shelters in North Spokane for 60 adults, I think, One of those, what's interesting about this is like, it is a little bit of creative accounting because some of these beds did exist before track closed. They're just now being funded through this scatter site mod and are being funded by the city. So like, Jewel's Helping Hands prior to the Trent Shelter closing had operated between 2 and 4, 000 beds. of those scatter sites, depending on any given time. Some of those are now funded by this Empire Health Foundation subcontract out, so they are considered in the scatter site network, but it doesn't necessarily represent An actual increase in beds. An actual increase in beds across the whole city. Yeah. But we have two shelters in North Spokane for 60 adults run by Jules Helping Hands. We have one medical respite site in Cliff Cannon for medically fragile folks. And that's the Jules Helping Hands Providence Westminster Partnership. One shelter in East Central for 50 adult men run by Truth Ministries. And then there's two that are in the process of opening that they're like estimating will be open by the end of February. That's a shelter in East Central for 20 adults seeking behavioral health treatment. And an expansion of a shelter in Chief Gary Park for families. And that is, they still have 1. 3 million dollars left to spend on shelter beds, so I think the hope is that eventually that network will get increased up to that 250 bed number, maybe even more. But yeah, it's a complicated conversation. I hope I didn't make too boring. I also have bad news for bikers. I just heard back from the city spokesperson, Erin Hutt. When I say I'm like actively reporting on the bike boxes right now, I mean like texting everybody I know to ask what the deal with the bike boxes is. And she said, They're currently going through a pilot program with just access for city employees, but the long term plan is to open it to the public. Our team is looking at a functional loan system and has been in communication with a company that manages an app based lock program, but still working through those logistics. It's truthfully taking longer than anticipated. That makes sense, because when I walked by there, I was like, oh, those are the boxes. That's really cool. And it's just basically the U locks, the bicycle locks, like, shutting off the door. I'm like, okay, so where are the keys? Where would I get the keys? It's clearly not for public use yet, it seems like. Yeah, and I get that. I'm just bummed that they made such a big deal about it at the press conference and then like both Aaron Hutt and Lisa Brown tweeted about it. It's like, look at the new bike lockers. Isn't this so exciting? And now I can't use them. I guess you can tweet about things. You can tweet about pilot projects. I would say you can even, you could even hold press conferences about pilot projects if you just really make it clear that it's a pilot project. I think people got their hopes up. Yeah, I texted Lauren Pangburn, our columnist, to tell her the same thing and she said, That's a bummer. Good ol government taking ages to do anything at all. Oh, burn. But, Hutt says they're really trying and she promises they're working on it. And it's better than what we, or a pilot program is more than we had this time last year when I started trying to ride a bike for the first time as an adult. And, yeah. Commuting around town, so that's good. We only have a couple minutes left. Do we want to talk about Shrek at all, or we might not even have time? Christ, that's even more complicated than Yeah, that's true. than shelter beds, so There's complications with the city's contract for Emergency communications that I think would take far longer than five minutes and we're gonna yeah, we'll talk about this maybe more next week But long story short, there's an there's a over like a decade old fight between the city and the county over emergency Dispatch for fire. Yes, so when you call 911, who pays for that? And who's managing those dispatchers? Yeah, and it's looking like Spokane just got kicked out of the, the city of Spokane just got kicked out of the system. And we're actively reporting on that. Yeah it is very interesting because the city's police officers were not a part of that system. So when you called 911 to talk about like, oh, I need, I need police services within the city of Spokane That was being handled by different folks than if you called and you were like, I need police services and I'm in the county, like I'm up in Meade. It's, yeah, I don't want to get into it too much. I've been getting press releases in my inbox all day from every associated body. Every, every governmental body in the county. So it's a lot to sort through that I fear. We cannot do justice, but I promise if you have questions about it, we will do our best to answer them. It's also really complicated because it involves taxation, and taxation that comes in to the county but is supposed to be spread around to the other various municipalities and stuff, or on be It's, it's stuff that can be done. It's taxes that are taken from various city residents to the county, and then for a county wide system. But whether or not that's equitable or not so even understanding it's complicated. And then, before you even get to the conversation around is Spokane paying too much, is the city of Spokane paying too much for the level of service it's getting? Right. And are they getting enough representation on the decision making board? I guess one question, and maybe you don't know this and that's okay, but with like the minute that we have left, if they just got kicked out, does that mean that if we call, if there's a fire in Spokane and we call 9 1 1, where does it go right now? Right now, it goes to Shrek. Okay, so it's still, it's not like If kicking out is like, you cannot, you can't play with our toys anymore. Okay. But because this is such a dire thing with people's lives. You can play with our toys until January 1st, 2026, and then we're really, really, really taking them away from you. So this is, we're kicking you out a year in the future. Yeah. Negotiations, done. No more talking about this. We're not negotiating. They have been negotiating back and forth, almost since Lisa Brown took office. Well, and they were negotiating about this during the Woodward administration, too. They were, they We have some questions about how to do fair appropriations of this tax that was collected that even Woodward and the county couldn't agree on. And Michael Cathcart is also, who's a, the conservative city council member is also a critic of Shrek. So it's, this is not a partisan fight with the conservative county and the progressive It's more city versus county. Yeah. Yeah. But not along partisan lines. Yeah. All right. Well, that is 3. 55. That brings us to the close of our show. It just goes by so fast, doesn't it? It really does. All right. So. We've got a show coming up right after us, and I have to drive to a celebration of the fact that I'm heading up to Sandpoint right now to celebrate the Sandpoint Reader, which is the first writing gig I ever, the first serious writing gig I ever had. There is a newspaper that started right before all the layoffs began that is turning 20, so not all meta journalism stories are stories of failure and suffering. So we will see you next week. If you have questions about local government or the news or how any of that works, you can email us at freerange at kyrs. org and we will try and answer them. Have a nice weekend everybody. See you next week. Bye.