The Incorporation Vote The City That Has (Almost) Everything

A map in the special pull-out section inside Thursday’s Valley Voice was incorrect. In the Edgecliff neighborhood, the sourthern boundary of the proposed city of Spokane Valley is 12th Avenue. The map showed the wrong street as the boundary. This correction was published on Saturday, May 13, 1995.

It’s June 1996, just more than a year after residents of the Spokane Valley voted to form a new city.

Highway crews are erecting a sign near the westbound lanes of Interstate 90, just before the Harvard Road interchange.

Spokane Valley, Next 7 Exits, it reads.

A curious, out-of-town motorist might wonder what lies beyond those seven off-ramps, in Washington’s seventh largest, and newest, municipality - population 73,000.

Quite a bit in 30 square miles, actually.

A trip down one of the ramps on the east end of town would land the traveler in the middle of the sparsely-populated Greenacres neighborhood.

There he could find horses, cows, chickens and ducks on the large lots and truck farms that dominate that area.

Getting off I-90 on the west end, he could get a taste of the Industrial Revolution among the gravel pits, rail yards and manufacturing sites of Yardley.

Exiting in the middle of town and traveling south would put him in solidly middle class neighborhoods like Midilome and Kokomo, where kids play basketball and roller hockey in the streets and driveways.

If he went north, he could do some in-line skating on the Centennial Trail or some fly-fishing on the Spokane River - single, barbless hooks only, please.

Commercial opportunities would abound on Sprague Avenue, the city’s main commercial corridor, from Eagle Hardware, where there’s “more of everything,” to the DejaVu nightclub, where the dancers wear a whole lot less.

Scattered throughout town, he’d find more than two dozen public schools, eight parks, a library, five fire stations, the county fairgrounds, a hospital and Seafirst Stadium, where the Spokane Indians play baseball.

But there’d be some things he couldn’t find.

Like downtown, because, frankly, there isn’t one.

The area now encompassed by the city evolved from several isolated townships and bedroom communities into one big mass of urban sprawl with no discernible center.

City Hall might be hard to locate, too. It’s probable that there won’t be one, just rented office space as city officials try to find ways to keep costs down.

There probably won’t be a zoo, because financially-strapped Walk in the Wild is likely to be nothing but a bad memory by then.

There’d also be a dearth of museums, colleges and skyscrapers.

But it’s highly likely that the motorist would remember where he is.

Because, without a doubt, there would be a reminder at every major intersection he passed: faded and tattered campaign signs left over from the year before that read: “Create Our Own City of Spokane Valley.”

ILLUSTRATION: Map: The outline of a city