Outsider embraces Spokane’s winter wonderland

Walking face-first into the snow, collar pulled high, cold biting at the ears.

Inland Northwest residents may have had their fill, but there’s at least one convention planner who will be disappointed if he doesn’t experience a little harsh winter this week.

Tony Sirvello is the executive director of the International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers, which will hold its annual convention in Spokane from July 5 to July 11. He and the association’s board of directors will meet Thursday at The Davenport Hotel to complete arrangements for the event, which he said will bring 500 to 600 members to the city.

Sirvello said the association’s convention has bounced around cities in the South and Southwest in recent years. Spokane will be a departure – one he said members will embrace.

“We like to go where we’ve never been before,” he said.

Sirvello is based in Houston, where temperatures last week reached 77 degrees. He said he has traveled to Spokane several times since the city was chosen for the 2009 convention. During a visit last April, he said, a late-season storm blasted snow horizontally through the streets.

“I was flabbergasted,” he said.

But undeterred. Sirvello said he turned down a ride from the Convention Center to The Davenport because he wanted to experience winter conditions unlike anything he’s experienced in a lifetime in Houston.

Sirvello said he keeps a miniature of the Riverfront Park red wagon on top of his computer monitor.

“I really fell in love with the city,” he said.