Look, I'll be blunt, Val and I didn't really have much time to prep for this week's episode, so you ended up with an incredibly weird mashup of topics, bike parking in Spokane, and an update on unionization efforts at Planned Parenthood. Three months worth of my reporting distilled down into one article and roughly 25 minutes of audio plus information that we pulled from our urbanism columnist. Lauren's newest piece. Enjoy. We're live. It's free range. Coming at you on Thursday. This is Free Range, a co-production of KYRS and Range Media. I'm Valerie Oser and the editor at Range Media and I'm here with City Hall Reporter Aaron Sellers. We have two stories to chat about today. One from this week and one from a few weeks ago that we haven't really had a chance to talk about yet. But let's get into the first one, which is more fun and positive. It's about biking from our urbanism columnist Lauren Pangborn. Erin, can you tell us about why your butt hurts today and what that potentially has to do with Lauren story? So I got a bike for Christmas. I love my bike. I love biking. And it's finally warm enough outside that I've actually been able to use my bike. Yeah. Unfortunately, I've discovered now that my bike seat is absolutely miserable and I need something different than the standard issue. Fair. I think that's a cannon event for any new bike rider is discovering that the seats are horrendous for everybody, pretty much, but especially for people with who are female. Yeah. The it was rough. I'm sore in places I didn't know that I could be sore. But you know what? Yesterday was a really beautiful day. Yep. The sun was lovely. Got the vitamin D got the vitamin DI managed to bike home before it was dark, which was great. Awesome. Because I realized since I got to the office that I was wearing all black, oh, that's in traditional baby goth fashion and it would've been wildly unsafe to bike home once the sunset. Yeah. So, so what do bike seats and bikes have to do with Lauren's story? Well, one of the things, so actually I'm gonna bring it back to a personal story. I had to go to the dentist Uhhuh to get some teeth filled and my car was in the shop and I was like, well, maybe I'll just bike to the dentist. And then I had this sort of panicked thought of like, oh no, what if there's nowhere the dentist to like block my bike up? And I Google Street viewed the dentist and I could not find anywhere that I might be able to put my bike. So I ended up having to catch the bus. I was like running a little bit late. It was a frantic experience. I would've been literally a four minute bike ride from my house. Oh my gosh. And that's what Lauren was getting at in her column, is that there are a lot of places in Spokane that are bikeable. There's bike routes, there's protected lanes. You can get there pretty easily. And yet once you get there, there's nowhere to park your bike. Which is a deterrence to people who might choose to bike instead of choose a different form of transportation with higher environmental impact. And so Lauren put out this column about Spokane getting 50 new bike racks. That's 55 0. Yes. That's a lot. Five zero bike racks. And also as a study hall reporter, I felt a little bit under informed here, and I guess it was a resolution that was passed the year before I started reporting. Okay. But one thing that, that Lauren pointed out that I didn't know was that now multifamily and commercial developers that meet certain criteria, she didn't necessarily outline it, but there's code now that requires developers to provide a bike parking. And one thing I noticed when I was looking for housing options, I looked at a couple of big apartments. And I was thrilled to discover that a lot of the newer constructions in Spokane have like a bike room built into their apartment or, bike lockers on campus, on the campus. And so I really do think that might be the result of spokane City Council's kind of urbanist mindset. Yeah. But I love seeing new bike infrastructure go up. Yeah. So that we can bike everywhere in Spokane. Yeah. I feel like Spokane is the most bike friendly city I've ever lived in, and that's, I feel like that's I'm proud of that, okay, so what, so the problem with our current bike rack situation is that not everywhere has a bike rack or even like a pole you can chain your bike to. And then obviously you can't take your bike in anywhere and you don't want it to get stolen. So, so can you tell me a bit about how we are getting more? Yeah. So that's a great question. I wanna say it was just like in the budget. And there is a process. For how to like, get a bike rack at your preferred location. They've already announced some of them. There's racks tentatively planned for near Heritage Bar and Kitchen near Brick West Brewing. Ferguson's Diner up on Garland Bellwether Brewing. Elliot's an urban kitchen. And some of those locations were selected by the city planning department. Because people submitted them. And they're still taking submissions. It looks like there's about 20 racks that have yet to be given even a tentative location. And even the first 30 announced are just tentative. So there is put this on our KYRS page. A form that you can go to request a bike rack at your favorite location. But this is part of the city's move to make the city more friendly for bikes. It's been a big topic of conversation just because there's been a lot of fatal car accidents in the last year, and most, many of those fatal car accidents have been against pedestrians or bikers. So in the last year we've really seen a kind of intense mobilization from the advocacy group I can think of is Spokane Reimagined, but there's also a lot of individuals who are passionate about this coming to city council, pushing for things like protected bike lanes. Bollards. Armadillos is our favorite. They're like little bumps that sort of make it uncomfortable for a car to drive in a bike line. And my personal vendetta that I'm still angry about, I bother the city comms person about this nearly every time we have an interview. But they put in brand new bike lockers at Spokane City Hall. Yeah. They're beautiful. I would love to be able to bike to a city council meeting and put my bike in a locker and then get it out afterwards. Well, one thing, unfortunately, despite announcing to the public that those bike lockers were for everybody, they're right now just for city employees. And most of the city employees I've talked to didn't even know they could use the bike lockers. What there is an explanation to it. Erin Hut, the city communications person, manager, director, I'm so sorry, Erin Hut, I have forgotten your exact title as I'm now live on the radio, but she's the big boss of communications at the city told me that it's because they're looking for some kind of. App or something where you can like check out the bikes, the bike lockers basically a better system than going up to the security guard inside city hall. And being like. Hey, can I put my bike in this locker? Yeah. Which is not really tenable long term. And they'd like potentially identified an app that might work. They're in conversations about that, but it's just a really slow process and it's really sunny and I want to bike to and from city council. Are there not bike racks at City Hall? There might be racks. I'm not a hundred percent sure. I was really excited about the lockers because they are the most secure form. Yeah. And my bike is an expensive bike. Yeah. And I really don't want it to get stolen. My favorite bit of city hall reporter lore is, Daniel Walters, the former city hall reporter at the Inland Yes. He's like Spokane Twitter. Famous for getting his bike stolen like four times downtown. Oh my gosh. Like once after a city council meeting. And I don't want to fall into the same tragedy that Daniel Walters has fallen into. Well, I think one way you could do that is maybe submit a form online very annoyingly and say, I wanna bike around city hall. I wanna bike lockers specifically. Yeah. I want something that's like the Fort Knox for bikes. But you can also, push it by just riding your bike to city hall and city council meetings and wheeling it inside with you and being like, well, you don't have a locker for me, so it's staying with me. That's true. City council member Paul Dillon told me that he didn't even know that staff slash city employees could use the bike lockers because he's been bringing his bike up to the seventh floor of city Hall via the elevator. So I definitely could just do the same thing. Yeah. And park it right down by the media table. Yeah, just park it and be, it's a really big bike. Yeah. Park it. Make a point. Yeah. Claim your power, Aaron. Okay. So, do you know how or what's like paying for the new bike racks? Is it just like it was just in the budget or is it like some special, pot of money? That is a great question. I. I'm not sure. I wanna say that it was just something that had been budgeted for this year. Like in the planning department's budgets. If I had to take a stab in the dark, I would say it might be safe Streets funding. Oh. But Lauren did not identify that in her piece, so I can't say with a hundred percent certainty. It doesn't seem like this is part of, like a special initiative. It just seems like this was something that was getting rolled out. Yeah. Lauren is also separate from her role as column, the SIT range. She's, I think the chair of the bicycle advisory board. Yeah. So she's usually the first person to know when the city does things that are good for bikers. Bicyclists, also known as the bab. The bab. Yeah. So, speaking of cost though, so, one thing that is important in like the urbanism, overall urbanism conversation of, bike parking versus car parking and bike riding versus car riding is the space issue. So, Lauren explains in her story that a single car parking spot typically requires 300 square feet of space, including the approach while one two bike locker has a 20 square foot footprint. And. In the story she talks about how much more expensive it is to even just build a flat parking lot. Yeah. The thing I was really struck by in there was that having a guaranteed parking spot for your like apartment can result in an extra $200 in rent because of course the developers aren't paying that cost set. They're passing the cost onto the consumers, to the renters. And that additional cost of, 5,000 to $20,000 for a parking spot in a surface lot is going to get passed on to renters in the form of extra costs in your unit. And, I've seen, like in Seattle, sometimes they will make it clear that they haven't built enough parking spots for each unit, right? So you will pay a fee on top to guarantee yourself a spot. And that I think at least makes it obvious that those costs are getting passed on to you. But in other ways, we might just assume that rent is what it is and not consider that. Maybe if your apartment building had built a bike garage instead of a service parking lot, your rent could be cheaper. And something that we delved into this in, in, Erin, I'm so sorry. This is very funny. Erin Hutt, the city spokesperson is calling me and I'm not gonna take it 'cause I'm on the radio. She heard you. She's like, this is my correct title, girlfriend. Ugh. I'm so sorry, Erin. Okay. So, we didn't dive into it, into the, in the story and I wish I had asked Lauren for this information 'cause she compared the price of this like two bike locker in like the locker itself is like 3000. And then estimating $2,000 per bike with the concrete or so, and then add like another thousand dollars cost for like labor and building the concrete pad. Right. But like one car parking spot in a surface lot costs between 5,000 and $20,000 to build. And then cost for a structured garage parking spot can cost $60,000 for a single spot in a garage. And I wish I had asked Lauren how much the, like you, the, the gold standard of bike racks, which is like that u upside down U shape how much those costs. 'cause those are also significantly cheaper than bike lockers. Right? Right. And that's what we're mostly talking about when we say that 50 bike racks are coming in to the city. Yes. They're like the little U-shaped. I think one of the, they are gonna be like, Lauren called them corrals. Yeah. And I don't know, this might be just me making an assumption. But I spent some time in Minneapolis visiting college friends. And one thing that they did to make streets more walkable, or one thing that I noticed there was that basically if you take a car parking spot and you throw like bars around it with an entrance spot, basically you're turning a car parking spot for one car into a corral for bikes with, these sort of two, two metal bar, like pen, almost like a grocery cart corral. Yes. And then you can just let lock your bike to the edge of it. So when you think about it, that might be like. 10 to 15. People that could park their bikes in this one spot that could previously only accommodate a car that could hold maybe six people. There, that's stretching it. That's a really big car. I've got a RAV4 maybe. I don't think there's six legal seats in there. There are five Lego seats in my RAV4. Okay. So that is, I think all my questions about the bike racks. If you, once again, we'll put this in our KYRS page, but you can request a bike rack and we'll put a link to the form on our page. Or if you look up the story on range media that form is linked there as well. So onto our next segment that has nothing to do with. Bikes that is significantly more upsetting. Yeah. So we started with a, at a high note. So, about two, three weeks ago. I don't know, time doesn't mean anything. You wrote a follow up story on a big story that we published towards the end of the last year about, I think it was the last time you and I were alone on the radio show together too. You interviewed me about that story. Aw, this is a Val Aaron mess around story type thing. Okay. So, you wrote a story late last year about Planned Parenthood and some what am I thinking? Efforts to quash unionization there. And that was in November, or was it in December? That was, I wanna say we published the first December 18th, I think. Okay. It was like the last thing we published before we left for Okay. Yeah. I remember winter break. Yeah. And yeah, so I spent about three months after that story came out. I mean, the second it dropped, I started getting emails. Text messages, phone calls, or like I would see photos, somebody would send me photos of like a text they received from somebody else at Planned Parenthood. Basically employees that really resonated with the story that hadn't talked to me originally or were maybe even too nervous to send me their name. But would just send me an anonymous text message saying that like, this story meant a lot to them. And. They had the same experience of being overworked and underpaid and seeing management employee union busting. Tactics in the workplace. Yeah. And sorry, just to backtrack a little bit. So the story we're talking about that published in December was titled The Mission Doesn't Pay the Bills, and it was about employees at the Spokane Planned Parenthood where considering unionization over what they characterize as low pay and bad working conditions. And the CEO at the time was paying, is paying, I think still, I don't know. Yeah. The contract didn't have an end. Okay. It was ongoing. So presumably is still paying. Four. I it's been a while since I looked at the story. $425 an hour to a union busting firm which is the equivalent of 17 medical assistants, hourly wages to persuade their employees to not unionize. And that was a story that Aaron uncovered while, reading about other union busting efforts across the nation. And so that, that story was really bringing to the forefront stuff that I had even heard from friends and acquaintances who either worked at the Planned Parenthood or left to have a better job at a grocery store, like, like, because they were so stressed out and underpaid. And so that is the story that we ran back in December. And so this story is three months later what is happening? Yeah. So there are a couple of big pieces of news. The first one isn't a thing that is currently happening, but is a thing that I missed in my original reporting. One thing I heard a lot was like, oh, there was an excuse that was made for the CEO of the. Roe v. Wade has recently fallen. Conditions are really stressful right now. And the, there are a lot of questions about stability of funding in the wake of a second Trump presidency because they make a lot of their money billing against Medicaid. And so it's like, oh, well there's all this, there's all this stress in the political landscape, so of course they're like locking down and being frugal. And of course people are stressed and maybe taking it out on employees. Like there was, I heard some excuses or like language around that and, but Roe v Wade fell in 2023, right? Yes. I wanna say 2023. And a lot of the. Stories we heard for were from like 2018, but it was also, in the midst of the first Trump presidency where there was a lot of, again, panic about Medicaid billing and reproductive care protections. So was the reasoning that like maybe they were getting some of the bad treatment was because of so much of that stress? I mean, this is like an excuse that I Okay. Heard made for Eastland. Got it. That like, he's probably just really stressed. Okay. Managing this Planned Parenthood amidst these conditions and it's like the financially frugal thing to do, to pay low in case things. So how. Much does. And we're talking about CEO of Spokane, planned Parenthood, Carl Eastland. Can you tell me how much he makes a year? I can tell you how much he made a year in 2023. Okay. We're getting this data from proPublica's nine 90 database. So the last filing we could find was from, and real quick, nine nineties are, sorry. I just want, you're like, we're now three layers deep and I'll have to come back to the original thought anyways. Nine nineties are the tax forms of nonprofits. So in the, sorry, 20 23, 990 I'm trying to find it in my story. Yeah. He makes $489,906 a year as of 2023. That's pretty frugal. Yeah. It's, we, sorry, I don't wanna go down another tangent because I wanna come back to the original thing I was talking about, which was the big thing I uncovered was that it's probably not just this recent stress because we found, I found a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood and Carl Eastland that was filed back in 2004. It ended up being an eight year lawsuit and in 2012 the woman who filed the lawsuit won her case. It was a discrimination case. The courts found that Planned Parenthood fired her. Because of her disability, despite claiming they fired her for performance issues. There was no record of performance issues in her file, and she was fired shortly after she told management she had a disability. I think it was early onset arthritis. I don't have a ton of details about this. Because basically the reason I didn't find it in my initial reporting was that currently it's called Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho. Oh. Back in the early two thousands it had a different name. It was like the planned. Parenthood of, I don't know, it's in my story, but it had a different name. Yeah. And it was just like a couple clinics in Yakima Tri-Cities area. Okay. And then there were all of these other individual clinics that were just run as their own separate affiliates. And those all kind of merged together into what we now know as PP Quinny. Huh. And so when I'd searched for lawsuits that hadn't come up, 'cause I'd searched for lawsuits against PP Quinny and I had searched for lawsuits against Carl Eastland, but I checked in Spokane County. This was a lawsuit that was filed back from the Tri-Cities. And what was so interesting about it was that not only was Planned Parenthood held personally liable or held liable. Carl Eastland himself, who wasn't even the CEO of the Planned Parenthood there before the merger. Oh. He was like the Chief Operating Officer, I think. Interesting. He was found personally liable and ordered to pay damages to the woman. I couldn't track her down to get more common. I ended up finding a couple court records and a couple of really old news articles from like the Herald, I think. Out near the Tri-Cities. And I spent a good afternoon calling numbers that might be associated with people who might be that woman. Never reached her. I tried to call a couple numbers associated with her lawyer, but I think that he has retired now. So that was no dice either. So what I learned, I had to pull from court docs in old news articles, but I did find it interesting that East Lynn's record of maybe employee mistreatment goes all the way back to 2004, which, 20 years before my original story came out. Things were stressful back then too. Things are always stressful. Yeah. So that was the first big piece of information. Yeah. The second was that there's another merger. So it's like a big full circle moment. The Planned Parenthood Peepee, Winnie as they call it, is merging with Planned Parenthood Mount Baker, which is up in Bellingham and has, I wanna say like three clinics, three to five clinics. Okay. So it's much smaller. Their last nine 90 said they had employees in the 50 range. Where Pp Guie had employees in the like 250 range as of 2023. And so they're merging the CEO of Mount Baker is retiring and Carl Eastland is now going to be the CEO of this new bigger PP Quinny. Interesting. And, so in, in writing about the, do you know when this merger is going to happen? It has technically already happened. Okay. It was a little murky. So they sent out like an email being like, oh, the merger is happening. On April 1st, I think was the date they gave, but then employees internally were laid off before that as a result of the merger. And the Mount Baker planned parent, CEO, like retired a little bit before April. So, like, the timeline's a little bit murky. But I think it's like official as of April 1st. Okay. And, how are the employees of both, I mean now they're one entity, but both entities feeling about this merger and how is it affecting their unionization efforts? Yeah, that is interesting. So I talked anonymously to a couple of Mount Baker Planned Parenthood employees, and they had mixed feelings about the merger. I first interviewed, I'm specifically thinking of one person who I first interviewed before the layoffs were announced. And she was tentatively optimistic in that she was like, we're pretty small. We don't have like. As much strategic development and long-term planning as I'd like to see, the Spokane Planned Parenthood is very financially healthy, like in the long run. This might be a good financial decision for us. However, she also said that Mount Baker had a lot of the same labor conditions that I'd heard about from PP GU employees, and in some cases it was worse. Like one person I talked to, never got a single raise in. I think they worked there for two, maybe three years. Wow. They didn't even get a cost of living raise. So they were making $18 an hour for the entirety of their time there. And if you know anything about Bellingham, it's also expensive to live. And so there was already some talks of potential unionization happening about Baker Planned Parenthood which means that, they might not be union resistant. They'll probably have a little bit of knowledge. The tricky thing here, and this is already what people were running up against in my first story, is that because PP Quinney was 11 clinics before the merger. They're 14 now. And those 11 clinics ranged from Spokane, Pullman, Yakima what's that little town on the wave from? Spoken to Seattle. Oh, that's starts with a WI don't know. They're like, yeah, they stretch basically all the way Walla. There is one in Walla, but that's not the one I was thinking of. They stretch all the way up to Seattle. And people felt really isolated from one clinic to another. But because they're all part of the same entity, employees across all 11 clinics would've had to agree to unionize. I see. So organizing was really tricky because it's like, how do you get in touch with somebody from the Walla Clinic. If you're from, or the Tri-Cities Clinic, if you're from Spokane and you don't wanna use, your company Slack or your company email, because that might be monitored. You don't even know if this person is friendly or potentially open to talking about unionization or if they're gonna turn around and tell their manager that you brought it up. There's all of these little fragments that are made harder because. The clinics are so geographically far from each other. Interesting. Now there's three up near Bellingham. Right. Which is even further away than the like three hour drive to Yeah. And so I think there's some nervousness about coordinating, about reaching people. That far across the state, but like now we're all one entity and Yeah. Maybe conditions over there were bad, but maybe actually conditions under pp Gwynnie are better. And so people who were previously considering unionization might be like. Well, I'm actually really lucky that things are a little bit better here now. And I don't wanna risk that there's like all of these competing dynamics. Yeah. And again, I only hear things from like two or three people. I hear it anonymously. I hear it in a text message sometimes. So it can be hard to figure out exactly what those attitudes are around unionization. And I have to imagine it's even harder for the people who are worried they might lose their jobs if they get outed as a union organizer or a union sympathizer. Has anybody from, this is going a little bit off a tangent, but still related. Since reporting this second story, has anybody reached out to you trying to connect with a union friendly person at another location? No, and I think it's because. The people I was able to interview from Mount Baker were no longer with Mount Baker. I see. And I think I did specify that in my story, that they were former employees. And so, and I don't even know ethically as a journalist, if I could do that, I would consider it. But I, I don't know that, like, especially because people are talking to me anonymously, I dunno that I could give one person's Oh yeah. Phone number to another. Mostly, I mean, like if like a union organizer in Spokane was like, Hey, can you give my number to whoever's the union from, and that I might be open to or more open to. But no I haven't, yeah. I have heard from folks who were union organizing, like employees of PP Quinny who were organizing that there may be. Maybe not that stressed about the merger. There, there may be some positive conversations happening. It's hard to say anything more than that because I don't want to overstep any bounds of things that have been said to me off the record. But yeah it's been an interesting story to report on, and I think this is one that's been really tricky for me because everybody's dealing with these really complicated emotions. I know in the first story, like the headline is, the mission doesn't pay the bills. And that was a really central idea for a lot of these employees that they loved the work. They loved helping patients. They really believed in what they were doing, and also they felt taken advantage of. They felt like they were being overworked and underpaid and that management could get away with it. Because they. Loved helping people. And so I think when you leave that environment, there's a lot of feelings to grapple with. One person I interviewed who did go on the record joy Peltier, she was in upper management. Actually, she was being trained up to be Eastlands successor when he retired. And she teared up on the phone with me, got really emotional and she was saying like, I knew, like I was meant to work there. Like, I still think of, we, when I think about Planned Parenthood, like that was my dream job. I was so fulfilled there. And then things got really bad really quickly. And she felt like she was getting pushed out or she was gonna get fired. Conditions were pretty toxic for her. Like she described, she got a pay raise and then it really was a classic example of golden handcuffs of being like yelled at a lot. And just expected to take things or take stressful situations or like being asked to do tasks. And then when she's like, well, I need your signature on this, or I need information from you. And then just not getting that and then being told that it's her fault. Like a lot of these really kind of mercurial relationships. And one of the things that I found really interesting about her story is that she's one of the only people I've talked to who ever got an apology from Eastland. She said a couple, I don't know if it was a little bit after she left, it might have been a year or so. Eastland took her out for coffee and she says he told her he was sorry for how things went down and how he treated her. And so she feels like she got a little bit of. Closure for what happened. But most of the employees that I talked to never got that closure. And I think, there's still, they're still in it, if that makes sense. Like they see the Facebook posts and they see what Piconi aspires to be, and maybe like the public face they're putting on. And it might be at the expense of employees. And I think that kind of dovetails into like my next question of something that, you found in your reporting and then that kind of hit me coming from my former life as as a Christian with more conservative viewpoints. But oh, I know what this is about to be so, these like issues and the issues of people getting underpaid at Planned Parenthood. But the CEO making, what is it? 300 to 400,000? Four 80,000. 480,000 year, this is total compensation. Yes. So salary plus plus benefits X, they call it like additional compensation. It's not always clear what that is. But yeah, 489,000. So you know that number and that figure is actually being used. And these conditions are being used by anti-abortion advocacy groups. So, one group American Life League Stop International put out a 2023 report. Weaponizing the discrepancy in pay between Planned Parenthoods. Oh wait, no, this one was between the male and female CEOs. So as part of their campaign against pre reproductive rights and. That, that goes back to you. And when I clicked on the link while I was editing the story of the report that Erin linked to, it's to this website called Live Action, and that is a anti-abortion. Anti-abortion propaganda thing, like, I don't want to call it a news site 'cause it's not a news site. It's specifically to work against abortion and reproductive rights. And I was like, oh my gosh. Like I know this website. I used to, read it as a, person who is deep into that lifestyle and that sinful lifestyle. That's what it sound like. And seeing it from the other side of like, okay, this is like when the conservatives are pointing out that your CEO is making too much and that there's a gender pay gap disparity that's bad. And it's harmful to the mission of what Planned Parenthood is trying to do, which is to provide healthcare to people. So on the total compensation so that this what is the discrepancy between the highest paid male, CEO and the highest paid female CEO of different planned Parenthood affiliates? Okay. Yes. So I, specifically all of the Planned Parenthood affiliates file nine nineties. And I'm about to get a little wonky about data here, but in order to decide which Planned Parenthoods to compare Carl against, we felt like the fairest. The fairest comparison was to look at a range of annual revenue that the Planned Parenthoods bring in. So we looked at any Planned Parenthood affiliate that brought in between 28 and $32 million of annual revenue a year. Okay. I think the Spokane Planned Parenthood was around 30. So we went basically like 2 million below and 2 million above. Okay. In the affiliates that fit into that box, which was seven seven affiliates. When you look at the gender pay discrepancy, sorry, I'm flipping through my slides. Carl was in the top three. There was the CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas. Ken Lambrecht is the highest earner, and he's actually the one that was specifically pointed out by the is it live action? Oh, it's actually the American Life League. Yeah. That did the report. But yes, so he's the one that was specifically pointed to in the, like gender pay discrepancy. Then the second highest earner is the CEO of Planned Parenthood of Pasadena. And some other the name is really long, it's like three other California cities. And she is a woman. And then it is Carl Eastland of Spokane. When you break their salaries down and adjust them by cost of living. The Pasadena CEO drops down to the third highest. So the two men, when you adjust for cost of living, and Luke would have to tell you exactly how he did this, because I'm so bad at math, but there is a cost of living calculator. That's like pretty widely accepted as being good. And I think we set Spokane at like one. Essentially like the cost of living in Spokane versus the salary and then adjusted everything else against, I see. I think is what Luke did, but Luke did it. So, explaining data is like torture to me. Luke is our other editor and publisher at Range. He likes numbers a lot more than I do. Yes. And Me too. Yeah. The other interesting thing I noticed when we plotted out all of these compensations was that the three CEOs that sit at the top so, Lambrecht from Texas, I think it's Sherry Bonner from Pasadena, and Carl Eastland from Spokane, those were also the only three non-unionized Planned Parenthood affiliates that fell within that spectrum of annual revenue. And so it's pretty obvious that if your Planned Parenthood is not unionized, your CEO is gonna make a lot more money. But in unionized Planned Parenthoods, the pay disparity is lower. The CEO makes less and, do you know, like how that ends up working out? Like is that just from the union's negotiating better contracts or better pay? Or is there like, I mean, I really don't know. All I had to work with was raw data from nine nineties. I did call the National Planned Parenthood. With a request for comment about like their, how they determine or whether or not they get any advisory say. Because I do know that each local affiliate board is individually deciding CEO e salaries, but I wanted to know if the national affiliate had any kind ofs advisory standards around how much you should make as A CEO. And I also wanted to know if they had any nationwide standards when it came to anti unionization efforts. Because when I was doing research for this, it wasn't just. The Spokane Planned Parenthood. That's filed contracts with Union Busters, Ken Lambrecht of Texas, actually successfully union busted in Texas. So there were unionization efforts down there that failed as of 2023 when I pulled the data from. That's so interesting. Thinking about the National Planned Parenthood not having a say in like the local affiliates, I think that's pretty silly. Like when you have, I don't know, this is gonna be a bad example, but like when you have the national McDonald's has standards for all of their franchises. And I feel like and there might be, I don't know. Yeah. They didn't respond to my request for comment, but I do know that the board ultimately decides what the CEO's salary is. So, that's really, and that, it's funny 'cause I just read a book it was called Rebel Cinderella, and it is about a a labor activist in New York in like the early 19 hundreds. And she was a poor, like super poor Russian immigrant working in a cigar factory. All this stuff. And then she like happened to marry this really rich guy basically. And and then the really rich guy, she and him actually ended up becoming like labor leaders, but she like took more on that, more of that role, but he like helped fund it until he got uninterested in it later on. Spoiler alert. And but in the book it mentions Margaret Sanger, who is the founder of Planned Parenthood. And she was a big labor organizer too, so, or she was big in the labor organizing of that time. And so to think that like. Planned Parenthood, and I know that Margaret Sanger is like not, the most amazing person ever. But she still had a big influence during this time. And so I think that the National Planned Parenthood doesn't have, any like anti-labor, like, like mechanisms to enforce things nationally is wild to me. It is. And I found, I'm sure there's more out there. When you search Planned Parenthood on Google News, there's a lot of things that come up that are not what I was looking for. What I was able to find was union busting efforts in Texas in Minneapolis and in Spokane. I'm sure there's more than that. But those were the three that I was able to find Mo the most extensive coverage. On, and it is interesting, there's definitely a national context to this. Right after my first piece came out, but before my second piece came out, New York Times published two pieces that were an expose on poor labor conditions and poor clinic health standards in affiliates across the nation. And there was like a wink nod, like one line reference to like anti unionization with like not really much detail there from the reporter. So I dunno if they also had a hard time getting people to go on the rec to talk about that. But I did find it interesting that, what people in Spokane are going through falls into this national conversation of what is the future of Planned Parenthoods. And if you're not prioritizing, cleanliness of clinics and patient safety and employee standard of, living wages, then like what are you prioritizing? Well, and it's even shown in their, the budgeting for Spokane, like Carl Eastland, the CEO makes more than the head doctor. For the plan for PP Winnie, like that is, which didn't use to be the case. Right. It used to be that the chief medical officer is essentially like overseeing all of these, as the one that's like to blame if something goes wrong. Right. Used to make the most money at PP Winnie. And I think that changed Makes a lot sense. Changed in like, it was like 20 17, 20 18 is when that switched. I'd love to hear from her about like how she feels about that. And because in my opinion, a doctor, like a real life doctor who saves people's lives should probably make more than a CEO. Yeah. And it was a mistake I made in my reporting. I just titled the graphs. So we also compared Carl Eastlands salary against the salaries of CEOs of comparable nonprofits or foundations, health foundations in Spokane. And, there was a small mistake I made in the data. I was looking at the, I was the CEO of Excelsior Wellness. And I marked that the CEO was a woman. The CEO of Excelsior is actually a man oopsies, but the highest paid employee at Excelsior is a woman. And she was a doctor at the time. I wanna say she might have also been the Chief Medical officer. And so I hadn't checked the job title. I just pulled the the highest paid employee is which Excelsior is this? Is this one? The wellness one? Yeah. Okay. So it's a mental health. Trauma-informed clinic in that case. And at. Chaz, I think. And the Chaz one I did catch. The chief medical officer also made more than the CEO in 2023. So it's not the case that for all of these, like health foundations or nonprofits, the CEO makes more actually in at least two of them, the highest paid employee was somebody with a medical background as opposed to a CEO. That's really interesting. And throughout your reporting, has there ever been a reasoning given behind Carl's pay? There is one. I can't say. Oh, there is also one that was given on the record. So one of the people I interviewed for this story was Carne Nielsen. Who was a former major donor, planned Parenthood. She was one of the big donors for the building. She also served on the board. And Carn was the board president during one of Eastlands big raises. And she talked to me a little bit. She said at the time they were really worried that Eastland was going to leave. And like he'd maybe expressed some interest in going elsewhere. And Planned Parenthood was at the, this cusp of, becoming bigger. There was. Like the merger was on the horizon, maybe? Well, yeah. I mean, I guess there has been talks about the merger, but I think at this point it was mostly like, we just got a brand new building. I see. Like we're, things are going well, we wanna keep this guy. And also like the political conditions are scary. So like seeking a new CEO right now. 'cause I think this was in like 2018 to 2019. And so she said she like green lit that first. Big raise that year. That was the year I think that his salary almost doubled because they wanted to keep him. She left the board the year after, so she can't really speak to why he kept getting big raises after that. Well, and I this is probably like some naive naivete for me, but what is the huge loss in losing a CEO? Yeah. Is it like, is he fundraising? Is he what does he do or what does a CEO do? I think this is the big question of labor in general. I guess that is a good question. To give Eastland credit where credit is due, one of the positive things about him that I've heard from multiple employees is that he has a very strong sense of vision. And long-term planning and has this sort of sense of ambition for, where PPE Gny started, where it's going. And they've had a kind of landmark few years. They ended up under East Lynn's watch, they ended up getting this like multimillion dollar grant from Mackenzie Bezos Mackenzie Scott, sorry. But formerly Mackenzie Bezos, and she's a philanthropist. Yes. And a star in her own right. We are not gonna do the girl ification of McKenzie Scott. Anyways, they got this big donation. We will do the girl ification of McKinzie. Scott wants to give us money. I'm kidding. Sorry. We won't. They got the new building. Right. And also on the flip side of that, Eastland is in some ways the face of the organization, right? Like his is one of the only employee names that is easily available on the website because of security concerns. And we have had security concerns and the pp like Yeah. Under Eastlands watch the Pullman ppe. Guity was Firebombed. Yeah. And so he is accepting a certain level of risk by being the public face. He is, I guess the one that gives media quotes, although not to me. Sorry. I think he just. We're back to the general question of what does A CEO do? And I think that's just making the hard calls. Yeah. I think a pretty easy call if you want my opinion. What's your opinion, Val? My opinion is that a pretty easy call slash you? It could be seen as a hard call to some and he could be a hero. Is if he took a pay cut and gave pay raises to his whole staff? Yes. That could be, some would say an easy call. Others would say a great cost saving measure is not hiring a union busting firm at the rate of $425 an hour. I could get paid 425,000 or no, sorry, $425 an hour to tell them that they want yeah. So. It's a pretty complicated. I'm trying to think if there's any other details in there that I didn't hit on. Oh, donors are pretty unhappy. Oh yeah. That was why I called Car Nielsen. To begin with was that she was one of two donors that we spoke with and one of five donors that we are aware of. That had calls into Planned Parenthood basically after my first story came out there. I mean, they have a lot of ostensibly progressive donors who were frustrated that they were potentially, I mean the contract is out there, the contract is public record. They did hire a union busting firm, so that's not like a he said she said situation. Right. And donors were pretty upset about that, including Shannon Smith and Car Nielsen. Sharon Smith. Sharon Smith, yes. Sorry, I was talking too fast. Sharon Smith Car Nielsen were the two folks that I talked to. Well actually Luke talked to Sharon Smith. He contributed reporting on this piece. Sorry, I'm a little all over the place. But. They talked about how like they called like employees. They still knew on staff. They called Carl Eastland, they called the board president. Nielsen actually wrote Planned Parenthood out of her will after she didn't get a response from 'em. This is a person who's donated like more than $200,000. Wow. I wanna say it was closer to 300. Yeah. Which is not to say that donating money entitles you to anything, but I do think that when you donate a large chunk of money to an organization based off of their professed public values and are continuing to donate, and then they're privately doing things behind the scenes that are maybe out of alignment with those values, it is a valid question to ask of, is my money going to pay a union busting firm instead of employees or patient care? And it did the funniest moment. In reporting this story, there's not a lot of funny moments. It was very heavy reporting. Sharon Smith described getting the board presidents Alberto Salana on the phone. And she was talking to him and then as soon as she mentioned that she wanted to talk about the union busting. He said that he'd have to call her back, and then he did not call her back. And then he did not take any of her calls when she called him. And she did not, he did not answer any of her emails. Wow. I found a phone number for Sya. I was in the newsroom for this. It was great. And I was like, well, this is old, so it might not work, but I'll give it a try. I just gotta give him a chance to comment. And I got him on the phone. And he said, hello? And I said, hello? And I said, my name is Aaron. I'm a reporter here in Spokane. And he said, what are you calling about? And I told him I was calling about I had some questions about union busting at Planned Parenthood, and I started to lay out the accusations that I was going to give him a chance to respond to. And he goes hello? And I'm like, hello? Hello? Eventually he just keeps saying Hello. So I hang up in case, good faith, maybe the call really did drop. I immediately call him back. He does not answer. I leave a message. I call him back two more times over the course of the afternoon. He never picks up, he never calls me back. It was very much like that Simpson meme of just like floating back into the grass. That is I'm picturing the parent trap scene where Lindsay Lohan is in the closet pretending that the phone is breaking up and she's putting like a little candy wrapper against the phone. So, well that is, yes, that's a good note to end on. That's less depressing. Think about Lindsay Lohan. Pretending to break up schedule? Yeah, so this is KYRS Medical Lake Spokane Free Range is a weekly news and public affairs program presented by Range Media Produ, and produced by Range Media and KYRS community RA radio. Hello.