Dan Hansen

Thao Tiedt

Spokane Transit Authority buses on the five routes that lead to Lewis and Clark High School will probably be packed Wednesday afternoon. STA board members are inviting riders to the school for a hearing on proposed changes that would affect nearly every route in the county.

People screamed four years ago when the county started charging homeowners $10 a year to solve runoff problems. The day the bills arrived in the mail, one courthouse secretary did nothing but answer telephone calls from angry taxpayers. Now an advisory group is recommending that the fee be four or five times higher.

Spokane will lose $440,000 earmarked for a Centennial Trail bridge unless plans that haven't jelled in six years come together in the next 82 days. The U.S. Forest Service says it will take back its money unless trail organizers can say by Dec. 31 where they'll build the bridge, when they'll build it and how they'll raise additional money that will be needed.

Unhappy trails. Spokane County does not have the money to repair the damage done to the Centennial Trail five months ago by spring floods. Photo by Liz Kishimoto/The Spokesman-Review

Spokane County commissioners will limit the county's role in an agency they contend wastes money. On Tuesday, commissioners gave 30 days' notice that the county no longer will keep track of finances for the Spokane County Community Network, which deals with children's issues and operates independent of county government. The network will have to find another fiscal agent.

The off-road riding area is part of the 2,900-acre Liberty Lake County Park. Photo by Liz Kishimoto/The Spokesman-Review

Boxes containing the ashes of the dead are stored in the coroner's office. Photo by Dan Pelle/The Spokesman-Review

Amend

Their ruling upholds a decision made earlier. The Newport Highway may be one of the busiest roads in the county, but it's no place for a tire store, Spokane County commissioners decided Tuesday. Commissioners ruled that Alton's Tires cannot build a store on eight acres adjacent to the highway.

Liberty Lake companies that pay $100 a year to use public land are getting too good a bargain, Spokane County Commissioner John Roskelley contends. Five companies lease 90-foot-wide strips along Appleway Avenue. They include Egghead Software, which leases about an acre, and Telect Inc., which wants to increase its lease from about 1 acre to 2-1/4.

A West Plains man can't subdivide farmland just because it's not profitable to farm, county commissioners ruled Tuesday. Since the 1980s, Will Payne's land has been zoned "exclusive agriculture," a zone intended to protect prime farmland by prohibiting lots smaller than 40 acres. Payne argues that his land, just west of Riverside State Park and about 1-1/2 miles north of Coulee Hite Road, is infertile. It should be zoned "general agriculture," which allows lots as small as 10 acres.

A private golf course will get a tax break under a state law intended to promote land conservation. But Spokane County commissioners have yet to decide exactly how much to cut property taxes for the Deer Park Golf & Country Club. Commissioner Kate McCaslin said she doesn't think it should get as big a break - about $2,200 a year - as planners suggested.

The weak-bladdered masses won't have to hold it much longer. Spokane County commissioners decided Tuesday to buy four state-of-the-art concrete outhouses for two parks and two popular Centennial Trail parking areas. The prefabricated outhouses are billed as nearly vandalproof by their maker, CXT Inc. of the Spokane Valley.

(From For the Record, October 2, 1997:) Fiesta-Ware: Only orange-colored Fiesta-Ware dinnerware sold in the 1930s was made with glazes containing uranium. A story in Tuesday's newspaper about radioactive products failed to note that modern Fiesta-Ware is not radioactive, regardless of color.

1. With anxious merchants and sometimes angry motorists watching, employees of Inland Asphalt repave a section of North Monroe. 2. Susie Jarvis hunts for used CDs at Little Nell's Records on Monroe. "Maybe things are turning around," said co-owner Eloise Moeller when a Monday morning rush brought in five customers. Photo by Sandra Bancroft-Billings/The Spokesman-Review

This piece of pottery is coated on one side with highly radioactive radium ore. Photo by Dan McComb/The Spokesman-Review

Privatization is one way to cut the cost of putting people behind bars, corrections officials and sheriff's deputies told Spokane County commissioners Thursday. Alarmed at skyrocketing costs at Geiger Corrections Center, commissioners earlier this summer appointed a committee to find ways to save money there and at the county jail. Without changes, officials warn, Geiger's budget will grow by about $2 million in the next year, as it struggles to house a growing inmate population.

Two hundred acres offered free for a North Side golf course is too expensive to accept, Spokane County commissioners decided Tuesday. The county would have to spend $250,000 to $1.5 million building roads and laying water pipes to the scenic parcel of isolated land offered by a Seattle couple, parks planner Steve Horobiowski told commissioners.

Don't bother asking Spokane County road workers what they'd do with the county's share of a proposed gas tax increase. They've been ordered not to answer. In a meeting Tuesday, county commissioners told staff not to offer opinions about which roads would be repaired or how many miles of pavement the county could lay if voters approve a 2.3-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase in November.

Warning that "criminal cases would go unheard, criminals would go free," Spokane County Superior Court judges on Tuesday asked for more money to finish the year. Judge Michael Donohue, who made the request, got a lukewarm reception from two county commissioners and a cold shoulder from the third. Donohue asked for $80,000 for jury costs and $6,713 for a state-mandated pay raise for the 11 judges.

The purchasing department wants to study software in Seattle. The animal control shelter wants a Costco membership. And the people who give civil service tests say they need a fax machine. One by one, the heads of county departments are marching into the commissioners' office to lay down their requests for 1998.

A Seattle couple wants to give Spokane County 200 acres to build an 18-hole golf course in northern Spokane County. Lack of water may kill the deal. The land is part of about 500 acres that was passed down through five generations to Beverly Throndson and her husband, Roy. No one lives on the former wheat farm, said Beverly Throndson, who was raised in Spokane - though not on the farm - and worked in the 1950s for the city Parks Department.

Cooney