Hey, it's Aaron. If you think the ins and outs of municipal government, like rule changes, board appointments and data management or boring. This may not be the episode for you. But if political maneuvering library, censorship and understanding the realities of homelessness rates in our city. Is more your speed. This is definitely the episode for you. I've always found it crazy how a decision the government makes can be fascinating or mind numbingly boring, depending on how you talk about it. Hopefully we hit the former chairs. Hi everybody, you're listening to KYRS Medical Lake, Spokane. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. We're joined today, Erin and I, are joined today by our colleague, other Erin, Erin Hedge. We're going to be covering a couple of topics today. Some potential rule changes at Spokane City Council, an ousting of a library board member in Liberty Lake, some early analysis of a regional homelessness dashboard that has actually some demographic data where we haven't had time to report out yet, but we wanted to talk about just our first impressions because it's a lot of things. folks who are experiencing houselessness that we have never known and we finally have it, so we're excited to chat about it. We do not have anything specific today about the closing of Dominey's Sandwiches, a legendary downtown restaurant, though I will say, despite growing up in Spokane County and living here most of my life, my love of downtown Spokane began with the massive sandwiches I ate at Dominey's and their delicious Sweet Hot Mustard. So that's truly an end of an era. To start though, Erin, we're going to chat about some potential changes to the Monday night city council meetings. Yeah. It could be the end of another era, the tradition of Monday night council meetings, which has lasted for at least 65 years. Councilor Michael Cathcart's office went back through the old Spokane gazettes available in the library archive. And his legislative assistant Shea was able to trace the Monday night council meetings. Tradition back 65 years So one of those potential changes would move Monday meetings to Tuesdays But there's a proposed list of other changes some good some bad that I thought we could talk about. Let's go for it Yeah, okay So first the date change council members in favor of changing the day say it would make child care easier There's a lot of holidays that happen on Mondays There's a lot of Spokane Public School District closures on Mondays And so many of the council members and the council staff that have to come to those committee and briefing meetings throughout the day have kids that they struggle to find child care for during these closures. But this would be a really big change and one that was proposed with very little constituent engagement. Would it make it easier or harder for people to come to meetings? We just don't know yet. And it does directly negatively impact one council member, Jonathan Bingle, who is one of the two conservatives on the council, both of which represent council district one, which encompasses part of downtown stretching up to the Northeast. It's got like the Hilliard area, the Logan neighborhood and stretches all the way out to where it would touch the Valley. So the Trent shelter. Was in District 1. And roughly speaking, the dividing line is Division Street. So if you're east of Division, chances are you're in Council District 1. If you're west of Division, you're Council District 3, generally speaking. Right. We got a clip of Bingo we want to play. Hopefully I've got it cued up. Hopefully I do this right. Hopefully it doesn't blast us out. Since he started on council, Tuesdays have been like a pretty well known conflict for him. His wife works Bingle talking about that. Now issue or something where they said, Okay, Jonathan cause I, it, it's not like I don't see benefits of Tuesdays, I, I do see the benefits, and it could make some sense, if they said, Okay, Jonathan, we want to shift it to Tuesdays, but we're not going to do it until the next election cycle, the next council, that to me is totally in play because now I know what I'm getting into if I run for council again, right? And it gives my wife and I some time to actually, work those things out. So the date change, though, yes, it would impact Councilmember Bingle. It's not the only big potential change in the rules. The Council made a lot of updates that would increase transparency and access to accurate information about what exactly they're doing and when they're doing it. So here are a couple of those updates. You would now be able to testify at committee meetings. So, the way that legislation currently passes through council, it has to be discussed at a committee meeting. If it passes committee, it then goes on to the legislative agenda, which is the Monday night meetings at 6pm. It has to have a first reading there, where they read it, they take commentary from anybody who has thoughts and feelings about that piece of legislation, and then it's not voted on. That gives it one more week in order to incorporate some of those potential changes that maybe would come from commentary. Somebody saying oh, this would negatively impact me, so maybe council members now have a week to make amendments to that piece of legislation. Then it would come back around a week later, they would take commentary one more time, and then it would be up for a vote. But, people, we've heard from folks that by the time it just makes it onto the legislative session agenda, it's already set in stone. People don't, things don't make it onto that agenda unless they're likely going to pass. And because public comment is currently only taken at the legislative sessions, it's a lot harder for council to change anything based on public opinion. Right. This would make it easier. You would now be able to come to committee meetings, which happen in the afternoons, currently on Mondays, potentially on Tuesdays, and they would take 15 speakers for two minutes each at every committee meeting, where you could offer feedback on legislation when it's more in that kind of incubation stage, more flexible, more fluid, more able to take changes without having to go through a complicated amendment process. And then the council would be able to incorporate your feedback earlier and more efficiently. So we think that this is, this is a change that is only going to increase the ways that the public can participate. Yeah. Just real quick. And we should say that these, these changes don't have to be passed necessarily as like a as an amendment. All across the board change. It may be that they decide to keep it on Mondays, but they would still change the committee meeting things, or is it going to be like all up or all down? Okay, so They would have to make amendments to the current piece of legislation that's been submitted. But you're likely right that it would not all of these might go through. Many of them, like this committee meeting testimony, it's not super controversial. I don't really see a world in which that change doesn't make it through, because all of the council members, regardless of political spectrum, spectrum all think that that's a pretty good idea. But yeah, this, this slate of changes that we're talking about might not pass carte blanche. It might be like, Oh, we're going to keep meeting on Tuesdays, but we are going to take more public testimony here, but we're going to cut it here. So like the, these are what they're proposed and what's on the agenda that would be up for a vote on this Monday, but there is still time to make amendments to it. So some things might get taken out or shifted around. Another change that I think is a particularly good idea is that they're going to make it easier for you to know in advance what's coming up by publishing advance agendas two weeks ahead of the meeting and simplifying the amendment process to ensure that the final posted agenda would reflect all changes. And I know as I'm saying it, that's a really boring sentence, but basically the gist of this is that they're going to give you a heads up two weeks. in advance. Here's the things we think are going to be up for a vote in two weeks. So if something's important to you, get child care, clear your schedule, plan on coming, or submit commentary in a written form. And then you can track it through better. So it's going to be like, have a clearer way of displaying amendments that are made to these things over the course of weeks. This was something that I know was specifically important to Council Member Klitschke, because She talked to me about it in a conversation a couple months ago as one of the things they really want to do to, yeah, make it more transparent and make it easier for people to come give comment. Yeah. And I've seen before where somebody shows up to testify on an item and it got amended at a briefing session. Something So it's like no longer, their testimony might not even matter anymore. Right. They're like angry about something. They talk for two minutes and then at the end one of the council members is like, Oh, point of information. We actually took this section out at briefing. So thanks for your feedback, but you're good, man. We fix it already. I called the council director Jacoby bird, and he told me that he has high hopes for even further improving this process over the next few years, optimistically in the next one year, but he, he wanted to give me a more realistic timeline, but they want to simplify agendas by integrating. like systems onto their website. So it would have Oh, here's an agenda item straight on their website. Here's a two sentence like plain word description of what it does. If this is important to you, click this button and you can sign up to testify on it for that item or to provide written testimony. And then if that item changed, like if it got deferred or if it got amended, you would get like an automated text message. That's like the thing you signed up for changed. So that's, I think that would be like bringing, bringing government. Website technology into like the 2000s, which is everything else is, usually we're like talking mid nineties tech here, right? I mean, currently sign up for it is like a separate Google form. People get confused all the time. They sign up for something they don't mean to testify on. There's this one guy that I think just signs up for everything. And so every time he gets. It's called up to the mic. They're like, Hey are you, it's your turn again. Are you, is the thing you're talking about Jermaine to the thing you're signed up for? And he's Oh, I thought we were doing this. They're like, no, that's later. So this is just hopefully clear everything up make it more efficient and transparent and things do shift, not like every single week, but there is a lot of that shift. So something that could like, let you know Hey, you wanted to come talk on this thing. We said we were going to talk about this week. We're actually moving this next week would be theoretically pretty helpful for people. I think so too another thing that I think is cool. There's now going to be an opportunity to You've always been able to submit written testimony to the council You can send an email to them if something impacts you you can call them You've always been able to do this But they're now adding an option cc like a specific email address on it And if you get that email sent in on time, your thoughts would be included in the publicly available agenda. So this would make it so that me, the media, or other interested citizens can see oh, 30 people submitted emails saying this was a bad idea. Those 30 people, they might be working class, they might be night shift workers, they might never have the opportunity to go to a Monday night meeting, and so you might never hear their voice. And even if a council member gets an email from them, that's still happening like quietly in the dark, a council member has the option to bring up whether they received that constituent feedback. But now you could get it in a publicly available agenda, it would be part of the public, the The public record and we just talked about the difficulty of people who work swing shifts or restaurant workers and stuff like that last weekend with Johnny and Sarah. And so that's pretty responsive. Yeah, yeah, I think it would just add a lot of accountability and transparency about how the public really feels about cities policymaking because One of the things that really annoys me as a reporter is, every time I call one of these council members and ask them why they're making a certain decision, they say I heard from constituents that it was important to them but it's are you just cherry picking the constituents that you know are going to say this is important to you? Because Zach Zipone on an issue I'm about to bring up is oh, This one constituent said that they want meetings on Tuesdays. And then I call Michael Cathcart and he's this other constituent says that they want meetings on Mondays. And that makes it really subjective. So we're talking about two opinions in a city of 225, 000 people, yeah. Right. Question for the journalists out there. Does this, would those email addresses, of where people send these from, would that be easily accessible to a reporter like you? Could follow up if there was a particular Note that you hadn't seen before and you wanted to talk to that person as a source. Do you think you'll be able to get access to that? That's a good question. I think that there is precedent for that to go either way with how public records work. Sometimes if it's a private citizen, they will redact those kinds of things. But other times with this, it's Oh, if I want my opinion to specifically be public record, your name already is not redacted. So I don't know what they would decide to do with an email address, but this would be helpful for like, When I'm writing something, oftentimes I hear somebody's name called to go testify, and I want to use their testimony, but I don't know how their name is spelled. Yeah, so those are the things that I think are particularly good in the rule changes, like largely non controversial. Alright, let's talk about the controversial stuff, because there is a lot of that, and it's very, people are angry, at least councilmembers are pissed. Yeah the change I'm most disappointed by is that they'll be reducing the amount of time that you get to testify on legislative items from three minutes down to two. So those legislative items are the things that are up for a vote that night. This isn't like open forum where you can talk about anything that's, To your heart's content. These are the things that are up for a vote and people already frequently run out of time when they're trying to explain to council members, how a particular piece of legislation would impact them. Somebody was talking about, like my family walks this piece of land every year. It's beautiful. I see X, Y, and Z. I don't want it developed. Yeah. Yeah. They tell this story. And, and they're already watching the clock that's on the wall tick down, trying to use their very limited time to make council members who may have no idea what they're living through or going through or experiencing, understand how these laws would impact them and their family. Right. Yeah. And by cutting another 60 seconds off of that, it would make it even harder for people to make themselves heard and tell their stories, I think. And these are not professional pundits or professional lobbyists, so it's ha I mean, the the times that I've given testimony in a former life as an arts organizer when I was trying to get more arts funding and stuff, it's I even practiced in front of the mirror, and it I still ran out of time, because I was like, okay, I got got this in exactly three minutes, and then so it's not it's not the easiest thing to do. Definitely not. The other big change, and this I think is the big one, a piece of legislation would now have to have three sponsors. And I, I described earlier the phase of oh it goes to committee and then it moves to legislative session. Right now you only need two council members to give something a stamp of approval before it can move on to the final phase. Right. So, two people. Two council members okay, we talked about this in committee, we want to talk about this at the evening council meeting. And then, it gets its first read, it goes up for a vote, and this is important because there's two council members from every district get voted. So we've got two council members on the council from District 1, District 2, District 3, and then Council President Wilkerson sort of represents the entire city, but we've got seven people on this board. Two from each, council district. And so, this would effectively make it impossible for people that, in one district, who really cared about something to unilaterally bring something forward on behalf of their constituents. Right, because the proposed change is to bump that number up to three, not two. And items don't usually fail. If they have enough support to make it to the meeting, they usually have enough support to pass, but that's not always the case. Right. And it just so happens that right now, the only two conservatives on the council are also the two representatives of District 1. So there is this kind of push pull between oh, is the progressive supermajority voting down conservatives? Are they silencing like the conservative opinion? In which case, Yeah, like it's a majority, that's what happens. But because those two conservatives come from the same district, there is this push pull argument of is this a game of politics? Or is this silencing the voices of the constituents of District 1 who elected these people? Or is this game of politics also silencing an entire district? Right. And currently, Bingle and Cathcart They can still rally to push legislation through committee and to the evening agendas. If just the two of them think something's important, they can get that on an evening agenda. And, hypothetically, maybe like 400 people from their district come down to that council meeting and use their three minutes each and convince the progressive supermajority that this thing actually is important to the people who live there, even if the progressive supermajority is we don't like this, this doesn't feel good to us. Right. They still had the opportunity to duke it out in public. But now, without a member of the five person progressive super majority essentially signing off, Bingle and Cathcart wouldn't be able to get a single piece of legislation onto the meeting agendas. So what's the reasoning for doing this? I've heard a couple things. The progressives have a few different reasons. Here's what council member Zach Zappone told me was one of his reasons for supporting it. Are we gonna try it from your computer or are we gonna try it from mine? Keep it on yours. I don't think mine's working. Alright, so here is Zappone. Oftentimes, it'll be like two people in a silo talking to each other. Whichever two that is. Not saying it's those two. But it'll often be two people talking and then introducing it. And not really communicating it out and, and trying to circulate more things so people know what's going on more. But Zach, doesn't this really just sort of force them to collaborate with you guys? Because it just, it does I mean, at the end of the day Right? At the end of the day, they have to realize that elections have consequences, and the makeup of that happens. It's the same with the federal elections. If a group wants to get something passed and they're in the minority, they have to work with the majority to get something passed. That's the reality of democracy. Okay, so that's what Zach thinks. Progressive Kitty Klitschke had a slightly different take on why it was important to do this. The point of getting three sponsors is so that somebody can't just blindside the whole rest of the council with some legislation that they're just bringing up to make a point because they want to have an argument. But it's also hopefully we'll make the legislation More baked by the time it gets out of committee. And I don't know, maybe I'm biased because I really don't like how fast we try to get things through most of the time, but we have had some legislation passed that really wasn't totally baked and then we've had to bring it back for amendments afterwards and changes and that's a waste of people's time and it's also embarrassing and I think that that's kind of what we're What we're trying to avoid is these more petty, spouty arguments and also bringing forward legislation when it's not really ready. And then hopefully it will also foster some collaboration between council members before they bring stuff forward. So that, that reminded me of the total context of the conversation I had with council member Klitschke that brought up also doing the sort of two weeks in advance for agenda items. She really hates how quickly they pass legislation and it feels like we just heard her say it. So being sort of maximally fair to the progressives on this, is it fair to say that if this, the intent of doing all of these changes would be to have more of that deliberation, including public testimony, happen at the committee meetings as opposed to doing it all on Monday nights? Yeah, I do think that is the The holistic argument that they're trying to make the sticking point that I always land on though is that I have been at council meetings that have gone until 11 because 40 people decided a legislative item was important to them and they each got three minutes to come speak on this and The way this works, 15 total people could testify at a committee meeting for two minutes each, so 30 minutes maximum of testimony on an agenda. And, and back to the previous conversation about whether or not people can actually make it to these meetings, it's, it's, Good that they're allowing these committee meetings to have public comment at them, but if they're still happening in the middle of the workday, then somebody who gets off at 5 p. m. would have to take off time off of work to make that happen. So it's, it's not exactly like a straight across trade. Right. And you heard Kitty talk about that idea of collaboration, and I don't have any pretty recorded clips from him, but I was texting with Council Member Paul Dillon about this slate of changes because he was in and out of meetings, and he told me that this change to three sponsors was actually his idea, and he wanted to spark more collaboration. He wanted, cross line sign offs on things, which is what we did. I think there's some fairness to that. I also think when you look at this piece of legislation that would change this rule, it currently only has two sponsors and they're both from the progressive super majority. So even on this slate of rule changes, they didn't like collaborate or cross pollinate or but here's what the opposition has to say about that. And it got a little bit fiery. Here is council member Bingle. What about the collaboration argument? Yeah, that's crap. And I hope that, that that's what goes in the article. Because, again, like I said, you're talking to me about rules, I don't actually know the version of the rules we're talking about. Because, they do not collaborate with us. They don't have to collaborate with us. Now, Zach and I have partnered on things in the past, sure. Right? Paul and I may partner on something in the future. But, on anything contentious There will be no collaboration on the slam dunk yeah, we're going to fund you sports. Of course, Lily and I are going to get together, right? And those are great things. And I truly appreciate her support and her leadership on that. And I think that's fantastic. But again, only contentious issues. There will be no collaboration. And it's easy to say, guys, just collaborate when you have a super majority, right? You have, you can have something pass on partisan lines. I cannot. I am forced to collaborate, you are not, and so it's, it's different, it's just different, it's obviously different. And of course, council member Zappone would again say elections have consequences, and I would normally totally agree with that. The thing that makes this really interesting and different is this geographic split that we have on our current council. Right. And I do think Council Member Cathcart gets to that. It's also pretty representative of whether they're going to essentially try to broadly silence District 1 from, from being able to bring ideas and policy that, that our constituents want to see. They are effectively making that impossible. There has been very little conversation on this. In fact, they just jammed it in the rules without talking to either Jonathan or myself as of going to this point. Three coast or the three sponsor rule, and they've got a super majority with five votes. And so the only compromising, or the only collaborating they have to do and frankly have been willing to do, has been amongst themselves. And so I believe that this will effectively end our ability to, to truly and properly represent our district. So we should probably move along a little bit soon, but. This may shock our listeners, but you are a human who lives in a home Aaron Sellers, and your home happens to be in District 1. So you're one of the constituents who would be impacted by this. So, setting aside your reporter hat for a second talk to me as a constituent of District 1. Like, how does this make you feel? Yeah, I have a complicated relationship with this, I had a hard time getting Council Member Michael Kafkart to talk to me at first when I took this job and I can't remember if we said this on air, but like when, when Lisa Brown beat Nadine Woodward and was the new mayor. The job I gave you was befriending both of your specific conservative council members to have that opposition voice in range. And it, it was a lot easier to do for Bengal than it was for Cathcart, right? Yeah and, and one of the tactics that I took was, I got a little frustrated, but eventually I was like, Michael, I am one of your constituents. I live in your district. I, I live in the Logan neighborhood. I face a lot of the issues that you say are important to you. You should talk to me. And, and now our relationship is much less contentious. I can text him about almost anything and get an answer and I, I do think that one of the advantages of this job has been that as a reporter, they know that I will always accurately represent them. Whether or not they accurately represent My personal interests or needs as a person is a little up in the air. I disagree with both of them a lot. I'm a renter. I've watched my rent climb quite a bit just in the last two years. And I think council members, maybe like Paul Dillon or Kitty Klitski or Lily Navarrete, do a better job of representing my needs, especially as a renter, and Cathcart and Bingle, were some of the lone votes in opposition against policies that did materially make my life better. And that's one of the, we were talking about this before we came on air, that's one of the kind of the weirdly beautiful things that I hadn't really thought about with this, the council district versus people having different affinities. It's You are directly represented by, represented by Cathcart and Bingle as a, as a resident of District 1, but we all have different vibes, some of, people in District 1 are renters, people are homeowners. And so it is an opportunity for you, as, all of us as voters to feel represented across the, the spectrum. Yeah. And also, I think They deserve to be able to fight for the people of their district, and they deserve to be able to have that fight in public, where constituents, like me, if I hypothetically wanted to take the night off and testify, can go tell them how something actually impacts them, rather than having this legislation die quietly in committee. And there have been things there is, we did our Politicraw, And one of the issues was that the bus route was on detour and was all of a sudden only coming once an hour instead of once a half an hour. And it got us, pretty behind schedule. And Bingo looked at me and made the case that this is why I should be on the STA board because this happened in my district. I had no idea this was here. I got a chance to look at this bus stop that's in a very weird place and like on an intersection that is unsafe for bicyclists. I got to see this is my district. These are the consequences that impact the people who live here. And I'm not on the SDA board. I can't talk for you and your interests in this district. And, regardless of whether it's Bingle and Cathcar and their politics, or Council Member Ziponen Klitzke from District 3, or Dylan and Navarrete from District 2, they should be able to bubble up concerns for the people of their district, things that might impact just one geographic region, like the moratorium in Latah Valley, or the 29th street pedestrian designation. Otherwise, I do think there's an argument to be made that it is effectively silencing a region. Unless those if it were to change and those committee meetings got drastically better attended and drastically more visibility I mean, we're at all these committee meetings usually But even you don't Probably two thirds three fourths and I attend virtually 90 percent of the time I go We got to move on two quick things that before we go when is this gonna be voted on likely next Monday? It was scheduled for next Monday I think it's possible it gets deferred based off of all of the arguments around this. Because we just threw the power of social media right before we came on. We decided not to change this entire segment that you just listened to for almost 30 minutes based on a single, I guess it was a tweet. It was an Instagram post. From Paul Dillon. From Paul Dillon, what did it say? It said, for those following this, Some meetings will still be on Mondays or something like that. So it sounds like maybe the pushback has resulted in meetings not moving off of Mondays. Not just because we're lazy and it was the last minute. We decided to still have the whole conversation because that's just one council person's social media post. It might, it might still happen, but it also I think is a really good conversation around how rule changes. That not everybody's going to take the time to dig into could really materially change the function of the, the office and how people are able to interact with it. Yeah, and also, do you think Cathcart and Bingle know that meetings have, are, are now just going to stay on Mondays? Did anybody communicate with them? I don't know, because I didn't get a text from either of them saying that meetings are staying on Mondays. They're at the, the, the whim of the Instagram algorithm, whether or not they're seeing Councilmember Dillon's tweet. Instas. I don't know. All right. So on that note, segment two. Aaron Hedge. Liberty Lakes City Council, we've, we've written about this a number of times. Liberty Lake is one of the places And uniquely, one of the non school districts that's been having some, a lot of controversy around its library, what sort of books should be in it, who and how should books be censored, should they be censored at all and something happened at the city council meeting the other day that we wanted to chat about. So why don't we start there, give me maybe a little bit of background on what's happened to this point, and then talk about the library trustee, Kim Gerard, being censored. I guess her term was up and was going to need to be re, but basically, they asked her not to return. Yeah, so this is a, it's the latest iteration in a years long series of controversies that started in December of 2021. When a Liberty Lake resident named Aaron Zasada. Challenged a book that was in the, the Liberty Lake Library called Genderqueer. It's the, it's the, it's the top book listed by the American Library Association that's been challenged in recent years. And it's, that's part of a bigger national conversation. But this kind of, it, it spurred this series of events where The library board of trustees had to clarify its policy to, to reassert itself as the final arbiter of what goes into the library and what basically what appears on the library shelves. This is a pretty nerdy, but unlike other Places like Spokane has a library district, so it's a separate body from the city. There's maybe some city funding and stuff, but the trustees of the Spokane City Library are not at the City Council of Spokane doesn't get to decide who is on the library board. Liberty Lake, though, is a municipal library, and they only have one location, but there's the, their city council has a lot more say over who gets to be a trustee on the library board and who gets to control the policies of the board. Is that right? Yeah, and I think that there, I think there are eight other similar districts in the entire state, so it's not most libraries are not like this. Yeah. But the conservatives on the city council didn't like that the trustees had taken control over that process. And last year, they instituted a new rule that gave the city council, rather than the library board, the final say of what appears on the shelves. Right. And This this trustee, Kim Girard who's a long time librarian, has 30 years of experience in the industry in school libraries and library administration. And people regard her as just knowing libraries really well, in and out. And they, the, the library expressed a lot of appreciation for her, her her trusteeship. They decided on Tuesday night that they were gonna vote her off of the trustees. And a couple of the conservatives on the council told me that it, that, that their decision to vote against her being on the trustees stems directly from that series of controversies and Gerard's advocacy for books staying in the library and for, Yeah, our story on this is going to be forthcoming, but we're so you're in the process of reporting this. You've been doing that today. So you were able to talk to Van Orman and Cargill. And I think we've got a quote that sellers is going to pull up here in a second. But yeah, give us a sense of, or do you want us to play the quote, play the clip first, or do you want to chat a little bit more? I just want to introduce so, so Chris Cargill is the he was one of the, the main drivers of that ordinance that gave the City Council decision making power of what appears on the library shelves. So he's a, he's a Liberty Lake City Councilman. He's a Liberty Lake City Councilman. He's also the founder of a conservative think tank called the, the Mountain States And that center has connections to Project 2025, right? Yeah, they were, they acted in an advisory role to Project 2025. A lot of think tanks did the same, but yeah, they were part of that project. Just trying to advance their ideas. And was Cargill specifically opposed to the book Genderqueer appearing on the shelves? Do you remember the context of that? If I'm remembering correctly I think that Cargill, the, the, the, the city council did take a vote whether to keep that, that book on the shelves. Cargill voted to get rid of the book. But that was a minority vote and the book is still on the shelves. Cargill's now the mayor pro, pro tem, meaning he sits in for the mayor when the mayor, Chris Kaminskis, when she's not there. She was not, she was not, yeah, yeah, essentially. She was not there on Tuesday and she had recommended Gerard for it. Do you think her, with the, how the vote shook out, would Kaminskis vote have done anything? Did she get to vote? What is their mayor? Because their mayor is like part of the council, right? Or do they have strong mayor? I'm actually not sure if, if she would take a vote on it. I know that she recommended Gerard, so it would, it would strike me as maybe a little weird, but I'm not 100 percent on, on how that works. But she wasn't, she wasn't there on, on, on Tuesday night, so she didn't get to see the vote. But yeah, I, I guess, so, so, Van Orman and Cargill both told me that, that they voted no based on, on this based on this series of controversies and, and we can play that quote from Cargill now if you want. My vote was based on the fact that I think we need new blood on the library boards and people who can bring new ideas. And it was nothing more than that. I think we've seen over the past year or two some of the challenges that the board has had with us and that we've had with the board as well. And my feeling was that we needed to have a clean slate on some of those issues and try to find folks who would be able to inject some new ideas into the process. Okay. And I think you're referring specifically to the debates over, first, the books that were in the library and then the, the city council taking over control of the library. Am I correct about that? Yes, I wouldn't characterize it as the city council taking control of the one we didn't, but yes, it is those particular issues. I wouldn't characterize taking control as taking control, but, but yes, other than that, I don't, I didn't, I don't quibble with your characterization. Right. So let's talk about, we've already talked about the background to some extent and the fact that that, that despite all this hubbub, the inciting incident, the inciting book Genderqueer, is still on shelves. Do we have any sense yet of what this means going forward? Is the, is Liberty Lake City Council gonna sort of start working their way into a much more conservative slate of library trustees or do we just not know yet? I mean, it's unclear right now that there is a conservative majority on, on the city council. It's four to three. And the sense that I got from the conversations that I had with with Van Orman, Cargill, and another, one of the conservatives, Mike Kennedy, was that they They, they, they want to have, I think that they just want to have more control over, over what happens. In the library, Kennedy said during the meeting, and I don't have audio of this, but Kennedy said what we don't need is competitors on the board. What we need is completers to help us move forward. When individuals come forward and engage in name calling or threaten legal action, it diminishes. And that was perceived as a, an accusation against Gerard for apparently having threatened a lawsuit. She spoke later in the meeting and, and denied having made that threat. Interestingly, I talked to Kennedy later on the phone and he said that he wasn't talking about Kim Gerard. And so I asked him Who he was talking about and why he voted against Kim Girard, if that wasn't the reason, if it was somebody else. And he said no comment on both of those questions. So the folks who were on the other side of this, the people who were outvoted the people who wanted to keep Girard, what did they have to say? Yeah, I think their point is that they, they are angry. They're still stewing over this whole controversy over the, over the board trying to, you know, clarifying that it had final say over what appears in the library. They're still upset at the board for that. And I asked Van Orman if that had any implications for future votes on board members, and she wouldn't comment on that either, but the sense that I got is, Cargill said, we need new blood and I think they kinda wanna, Clean house, it seems all right. We're looking forward to that story coming in the next day or so and Just continue following this stuff as we go along like this is an increasingly This has been an issue for a while, and not just at Liberty Lake, but in Meade and Central Valley School District, which also has some overlap with Liberty Lake and Deer Park actually school district as well, close to where I grew up. And it doesn't seem especially with the outcome of the national election, there might be some further things happening at the federal level. It doesn't seem like this is something that's going to go away. This fight's not going away anytime soon. Doesn't seem like it. Yeah, I think I think this is going to be a topic of conversation going forward for a while. All right, we got about 10 minutes left. We're going to go through a quick grab bag of various stories. We're gonna see how many we get through. We put them in order of our personal interest on things. We're just going to go until we run out of time. First up, we got this new, this dump, this tranche. I love the word tranche. I'm going to say it as much as I possibly can. This, we finally have a dashboard that has somewhat comprehensive data on our unhoused neighbors in Spokane. And we were just sort of clicking through beforehand Oh, this is interesting. This is interesting. So. Aaron, what was your, what was your, the first thing that stuck out to you in terms of what we know based on, and we're going to provide a link to this in the, on our website, which we'll talk about. The show notes. Okay. So the first thing that I noticed is that while Spokane is 82 percent white, according to the most recent census data I could find. Spokane's homeless population is only 64. 8 percent white, meaning that people of color are wildly overrepresented in the unhoused population here in Spokane. The dashboard breaks down some other demographics as well, by gender and age, and again this just came out so we don't have time to dig through everything and come up with what it all means, but that number seemed pretty stark to me when I was clicking through this. For example, I mean, black folks make up about 2 percent of the population in Spokane, they're almost 10 percent of the in house population, that was the number that really stuck out to me. And I can't remember via the census and, people count different things. So I don't even remember where multiracial falls on the spectrum in the census, but multiracial folks make up 13 percent of the in house population, which is, that's a huge number. Yeah. The other thing that really stood out to me was around emergency sheltering. So one of the things that I am constantly seeing in city council meetings. is just the sheer amount of money we spend on emergency sheltering, specifically the Trent shelter, just massive budget suck. And looking at this data and I mean, I think this is something we maybe intuitively knew, but this gives us some numbers to point to sure. Emergency shelter is extremely bad at doing. anything but giving people a roof for a night only 32. 9 percent of people utilizing emergency shelter exited to permanent or transitional, or I think just permanent housing. I'm not sure the dashboard broke down transitional housing. So part of what this dashboard, just to give a little bit of extra context is trying to do is understand how well this, this continuum of service, the system is. Big system is working at not just again, protecting people from the elements, but getting folks back into housing. And I think hopefully that over time, we're going to understand more about where the points of departure are to actually get in a productive way. So you can exit the shelter system, both just to go back on the street, into a tent or something or your car, or you can exit into a more stable and permanent form of housing. And this actually, this data does a pretty good job of breaking down like the, the broad spectrum of housing support. It's 10 categories from basically that emergency shelter thing to a somewhat permanent supported housing solution. Like you might find it one of the haven, the Catholic Charities Havens, right? Right. And there is some issues. Like I was actually talking to a homeless man at my bus stop this morning who was trying to get money for a bus ticket. I was like, Oh, I'm getting on the bus. Like I can just buy your bus ticket. And he was like, no, no, a bus ticket to South Carolina. Wow. And I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah, sorry. But he told me that his mom lives there, and he is looking to reconnect with her, and that it's warmer, and so he's just trying to get money to get back out of Spokane, but, I think looking at this data, if he succeeds in getting money to get back to South Carolina, this guy will just drop off the map of the Spokane data collection like he might have been counted as somebody who used a shelter And we won't know what ultimately happened to him because he just left the city and won't be like recorded in any of this data tracking. So I do think there's some questions about stuff like that when you're trying to account for the entire number of people who are unhoused, where they're going, what they're doing. There is always going to be a little portion of people who fall through the cracks. But having said that, and that's totally true, having said that though, this is, this data, it just at first glance is so much better than anything we had. So it's is it going to be perfect? Absolutely not. There's always going to be stuff like that. No, people, we And we actually, we've got to call in to the data manager to actually figure out a little bit more because we don't want to report any of these numbers as super hard because we don't know if, there's three, 3, 500 people in this system that I'm looking at right now. We don't know if any of those are duplicates or what because, again, this is, this is It's been frustrating that we don't have this information. It's also, though, I can only imagine how difficult it would have been to compile this information, because, I mean, we, the, the shelter system over, when they were doing the, the point in time availability for Are there even shelter beds available the last couple of years? Service providers couldn't even really keep that updated realistically, very well or frequently. We were constantly calling on people. It was like, Oh, Trent says it has open beds, but people are getting turned away. I can't, we did maybe three different times of running that down over the course of track. So we're like, I'm on a list serve where maybe the website would say we're full. We have no beds. But somebody from one of those shelters would email this listserv that's we actually have 10 beds tonight. You can direct people here. So there's all of these ways that information was just sort of slipping through cracks or not getting accounted for in data correctly. And I think that this is like a pretty phenomenal first step. It's a collaboration between both the city of Spokane and the Spokane regional health district. Totally. And as we go, I think we're, again, we're, we're going to chat with. The data manager of this is as soon as we can that it's the somebody who works at the Spokane Regional Health District, which again is cool that it's at the regional level because homelessness is not just a Spokane problem. It's a right, but the numbers are coming from the city's homeless management information system and are being so yeah, totally. That's largely because there are no shelters outside of the city, right? So at least hopefully at some point somebody grows a conscience and gets at the county and gets serious about. On how stuff, but one of the, one of the data points that I thought was really, really Actually terrifying to me was one of the, the, one of the views in this dashboard is about how long people have been at various stages of the system with the permanent supportive housing. So folks who might have mental health needs or addiction needs going to a supported facility like Hope House is a good, is an example of one in most of the Catholic Charities Havens where you've got caseworkers, people to help you through either your, mental health struggle or through your through an addiction struggle. You would expect people to stay in those systems a long time because it might take years to kick that those habits or whatever So those folks like the maximum time for those places was like 1, 300 days Which is like five years in some cases and when I this is a long time ago I'm recalling on reporting from two years ago when and when I covered the opening of Hope House. They said We expect, this is the Volunteers of America run that shelter, they said, we expect people to never leave. There's, that's part of the contingency that we are planning for is this idea that there are some folks who, who's either mental illness or, or some potential disability is so acute, we're not going to be able to find them housing. So some percentage of our people, we're going to need, we're expecting to be here forever. That's not the case with emergency shelters though, and there was at least one person, this is why I want to get a sense of the other data, that there was the maximum stay in a in an emergency shelter night by night, which is basically you, you don't have a fixed bed, you just come in when you need it, was 1867 days, that's like almost five full years that somebody was engaging with an emergency shelter service as before getting moved up the line. And again, I don't know how many people that was, but at least one person was in there for that length of time, which isn't just a tremendous, we've heard from so many different people that they don't even want to go to track for one night, let alone live in an emergency shelter situation for close to five years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to be spending more time reviewing those numbers. If you want to look at them yourself, if you search Spokane homeless dashboard, it is the first results come up on Google. We'll also be linking it on our show page on KYRS. And if you have any questions about the data, comments, thoughts, observations, things that stick out to you that you maybe want to hear us talk about, you can email those comments to us at free range at KYRS. org. I have one quick piece of info unrelated to that, that I want to bubble up. Okay. Right before I came down here, I was watching the recorded version of the Spokane Regional Health District board meeting. And a piece of news that I've been following for the last couple of months, at least since the summer, was this feasibility study that the Spokane Regional Health District was doing to determine whether or not it was a good idea to put in place. privatize their public health opioid treatment program. We did, we partnered on a town hall to do this, to get the word out and see what people thought. It's, it's been a big part of what we've done on, yeah, a lot of ongoing coverage. And for the last couple of months, this item keeps getting deferred. But they made a somewhat more permanent decision at this month's meeting, which was that they are going to effectively freeze it in place. It's not indefinitely deferred, but they're sort of, they won't hold any votes on it until the end of, I think, the first quarter of 2025. So they're giving it a couple months. They want to do data tracking and they're also, it sounds like following some legislation through state ledge that may in fact mandate that public health providers start doing opioid treatment services. So I need to look into that. That just got dropped on me in the middle of the day when I was trying to prep for this. If that legislation passes, that would be a massive change, not for Spokane, it would actually be, I think, what, there's 39 counties in Washington and only two counties do their Tacoma and Spokane. Yeah, Pierce County, Tacoma, that's, and then us. So that would basically require the whole rest of the state to conform to a model that our Spokane Regional Health District is considering getting rid of. That would be a seismic change for the state level, yeah. We do have three other things on our little grab bag, but Just really quickly, I wanted to say one thing. There were two fires overnight that didn't, we're talking about numbers of unhoused people in the thousands. I just wanted to point out that those numbers don't it's not an army of a thousand people showing up unhoused, it's one or two people at a time. And so, there was a fire at the Ridpath a couple days ago, and then there was a fire in the building that houses Boo Radley's And the Ridpath fire displaced nine people. We don't know how permanently. The Boo Radley's fire, I don't know who, how many people were displaced, but one person I know specifically, a person named Derek is on the street with his dog right now because of a fire that took place in a, I think these are all affordable housing situation. So these are folks who often Don't have anywhere else to go if they lose this housing. So it's, it's good to have the big numbers. We always want the big numbers to understand the population trends, but each of those data points as a person, and I never want us to forget that. So, that's it for us this week. Aaron, you want to play us out? Yeah. Do you have questions about local government? Are you wondering who to complain to about an issue in your neighborhood? Wondering which agency governs certain things? Wondering why something is happening or how much it costs? Email us at freerange at kyrs. org with your questions and we'll try and answer them next week. I'm Erin, that's Luke, see you later.