Column

Fish Lake Trail is, at least for now, a misnomer. But a pair of efforts are underway to make the trail reach the lake on one end and to connect the current trailhead to the Centennial Trail on the other.

If I look at one more final exam I’m going to go cross-eyed. That’s how the final week of school always goes, but usually it ends with me getting to shake the hands of my seniors before they walk out the door.

There may be nothing more creative than a Washington candidate entering an election for which he or she has no chance of winning and taking a flier when filling in the “party preference” space on the petition for candidacy.

“Make new friends, but keep the old One is silver and the other gold.”

The Rev. Deb Conklin writes, “This pandemic has brought home for me a commitment I made after Wall Street created an economic crash in 2008 – a commitment to work to create local economies that support healthy communities instead of multinational corporations.”

A recent drop in driving is a sign that people were largely heeding Gov. Jay Inslee’s orders. But when people drive less, they buy less gas. And when people buy less gas, they pay less in gas taxes. And when people spend less in gas taxes, the coffers of the state Department of Transportation – not to mention those of local governments and the state Legislature – start running on empty.

It may be a sign of age, but I can remember when the first thing a potential candidate did was hire a strategist and open an office. Now it seems the first thing is to put up a website, and sell merchandise.

For about 90 minutes almost every day, Mandi Ibarra-Rivera is a meal wrangler. Working from home, Ibarra-Rivera, a Spokane writer, contacts restaurants and coordinates orders from hungry families to help produce the home food deliveries that have been the core of Spokane Food Fighters – an emergency response system for the hungry that sprang to life on March 22, as the state shut down to thwart the coronavirus.

While the retail price of beef has gone up, the price of cattle has dropped faster than a 401(k) during a pandemic. Price gouging or price fixing, either way it’s the consumer who picks up the check.

Spokane sports broadcaster Sam Adams is about to become one of the anchors for KHQ’s popular “Wake Up” morning show. It might sound a little crazy, but it’s likely a crazy-smart move, both for the station and for the affable Adams.

Dr. Bob Lutz is getting ready to try and put the coronavirus in a box. That, he says, is ultimately how we will reopen public life safely – by having a strategy to quickly identify, trace and quarantine new cases of the coronavirus.

Bus rapid transit in Spokane is no longer just a glimmer in the Spokane Transit Authority’s eye nor an idea pushed around on paper. As of Friday, it was a small crew at the intersection of Cincinnati Street and Sharp Avenue, just north of the Gonzaga campus, with shovels in the dirt, working in the real world to pave the way for the City Line.

None of us have done this before. There was no playbook to follow. None of the newspaper’s historical emergency publishing plans explained what to do if there was a worldwide pandemic that would cause us to abandon our newsroom desks for months on end.

Has the Idaho Freedom Foundation – the faux charity that strives to be the king-maker and king-slayer of Gem State politics – caught a serious illness? Or just a seasonal bug? Either way, the sicker the IFF is, the healthier Idaho politics will be.

It is probably a sign of watching too many teleconferences and interviews with experts or reporters working from home that I have started looking over their shoulders to see what’s behind them.

The possibly good news is that the cop who kicked a handcuffed suspect in the nuts has been fired.

We flattened the curve and didn’t overwhelm our health care system. Yay for us! Now what?

Tommy Ahlquist, a former emergency room doctor and gubernatorial candidate, knew what was needed: testing. He didn’t want to wait around for the government, and he knew the economy couldn’t be responsibly opened without much more information.

If you’re looking to linger above the Spokane River, watching spectacular and imposing waterfalls crash up- and downstream of you in the middle of downtown, without a single car buzzing by, you might want to hurry down to the Post Street Bridge now, before it’s too late.