Jim Camden

Former Spokane City Councilman Steve Eugster is seeking a court order to stop the process that could lead to the recall of Mayor Jim West. Eugster filed a request Thursday for an order blocking the Spokane County elections office from validating signatures on petitions filed Wednesday by recall supporters. An attorney who heads the group Coalition for a New Spokane, Eugster says the signatures weren't properly gathered because the state Supreme Court has not published an opinion to support its Aug. 24 ruling that the ballot language on the recall proposal meets legal standards.

Former Spokane City Councilman Steve Corker inched ahead of neighborhood activist Judith Gilmore on Wednesday in the see-saw battle for a spot on the Nov. 8 election ballot. After counting absentee ballots received and processed the day after the election, county elections workers said Corker had a 21-vote lead over Gilmore for the City Council position in Northwest Spokane's District 3.

DAVENPORT, Wash. – For more than 60 years, the Spokane Tribe has been seeking compensation for the land it lost when the Grand Coulee Dam was built. It has waited while wars and political shifts put the tribe's issues on a back burner. When Congress raised concerns about the deficit, the tribe agreed to take less money in exchange for a shift in management over the land it was promised in 1881.

Some voters could be in for a surprise in Tuesday's primary election. Some is a key word in this case, because not all voters are casting ballots in the election, and only those who go to the polls will notice any change.

Three Spokane City Council primary candidates sent supportive e-mails to Mayor Jim West in May shortly after allegations were published that West was using his office to seek dates and possibly sex with young men. One candidate, Judith Gilmore, said in her e-mail she was canceling her subscription to The Spokesman-Review for what she declared was a "non-story."

The author of a petition to recall Spokane Mayor Jim West filed a claim Thursday with the city for a campaign sign removed by a city Street Department worker in the pre-dawn hours Monday. Shannon Sullivan said she waited more than two days to hear something – an explanation or an apology – on the incident, in which an unnamed city worker apparently violated city ordinance by destroying the 8-foot-by-10-foot sign. She said all she has heard so far was a message passed along through a television reporter.

Spokane city voters could decide whether to oust Mayor Jim West the Tuesday after Thanksgiving if the supporters of a recall petition collect all the signatures they believe they need. Recall author Shannon Sullivan and County Auditor Vicky Dalton said Monday that Nov. 29 is the most likely date for the recall election, based on a new timetable they have worked out.

Two signs directing motorists to an area where they can sign petitions for the recall of Mayor Jim West were removed before dawn Monday morning by a Spokane Street Department worker in a city pickup truck, city officials confirmed. The employee was following city rules that require campaign signs to be out of the right of way and not obstructing the sidewalk, city spokeswoman Marlene Feist said. But he did not follow procedures for handling the signs, apparently destroying them rather than taking them to an area where they could be retrieved.

Spokane city voters would be asked in November to choose more taxes or fewer cops and firefighters under a resolution that gets its debut Monday afternoon before the Spokane City Council. With the clock ticking toward the Nov. 8 ballot, the council will get its first official look during its afternoon briefing session at a resolution to lift the property tax levy lid. The proposal would raise an estimated $3.3 million in 2006 and again in 2007.

If all politics is local, the seven candidates for Spokane City Council in District 3 were handed an issue in their own back yards this summer by Mayor Jim West. A proposal to sell Joe Albi Stadium and the surrounding property lighted a fire under some northwest Spokane voters who consider the facility a community asset that ranks with Riverfront or Manito parks, said several candidates, who are going door-to-door looking for votes. The plan has the ability to unite voters from neighborhoods as diverse as West Central, just north of downtown, and Indian Trail in the suburban northwest.

Over objections of nearby Rockwood and Manito neighborhood residents, the Spokane City Council this week approved the Grand District Center Plan designed to boost development in the center of the South Hill. Developers had described the zoning changes between 28th and 38th avenues along Grand as the least that could be done to stimulate growth and comply with the Comprehensive Plan's shift to the "centers and corridors" concept of development.

A citizens' committee is recommending that the city of Spokane raise taxes by lifting the lid on property tax levies and upping the utility tax, rather than make more cuts in police, fire and library services. But the panel says the city should only do this for two years, not the six allowed in state laws on the levy lid, as a way of maintaining accountability of city officials. During that period, the city should also seek wage and benefit concessions from city employees as part of a package to help fill an estimated $6.8 million hole in its general fund budget.

The Spokane City Council revisited the controversial issue of providing benefits to the domestic partners of city employees, hearing many of the same arguments for and against the decision it made last April. But it refused to bend the rules and give voters a chance to repeal those benefits in the Nov. 8 election, saying the petition drive for a referendum fell short of the signatures it needed.

Supporters of a recall petition to oust Spokane Mayor Jim West will make a big push this weekend to obtain all the signatures they think they will need to get the proposal on the ballot. Recall sponsor Shannon Sullivan estimated Friday the group needed another 8,000 signatures to meet a goal of 17,000 they have set for the drive. But she said she doesn't know how to estimate the number of signatures that have been gathered on petitions that have gone out and not returned.

Supporters of an effort to oust Spokane Mayor Jim West said Monday they had about half the signatures they would need to get their recall petition on the ballot. By staffing a "drive-through" sign-up station on North Division around the clock since the drive began last Friday, and circulating petitions elsewhere in the city, volunteers had between 5,500 and 6,000 signatures by lunchtime Monday, petition sponsor Shannon Sullivan said.

Air refueling tankers flown and maintained by the Washington Air National Guard should be moved out of Fairchild Air Force Base, a federal commission ruled Friday evening. The Base Realignment and Closure Commission refused to alter a Pentagon recommendation to move the eight tankers operated by the Air Guard's 141st Air Refueling Wing to a base in Iowa. The commission voted 7-2 against an amendment that would have offered some possibility of returning tankers to the unit at some future date, when the Air Force receives a new design to replace some of the aging KC-135s.

Northwest Spokane residents who don't like to talk politics, or talk with politicians, might want to be careful answering their doors for the next month. Chances are pretty good it could be one of the seven people who want to be their next City Council member, most of whom are going doorstep to doorstep in a search for votes in the Sept. 20 primary.

Spokane County officials are sending notices to 79 voters this week, telling them that they can't vote anymore because they are felons. If they want to cast a ballot again, they'll have to show up at a hearing and prove that their rights have been restored.

Voters should have no chance to oust Mayor Jim West based on "The Spokesman-Review's invasive surveillance and contrived evidence" and that's all that recall sponsor Shannon Sullivan offered to support her petition, the mayor's attorneys contend. In their last legal brief before next week's state Supreme Court hearing, West's attorneys also argue that a trial judge overstepped his authority by overhauling the only charge in the recall that he didn't throw out, and that the mayor wasn't given an opportunity to explain e-mails offering an internship to someone he met through a gay chat line.

The city of Spokane has polled some residents on their feeling about a ballot measure to increase taxes for police, fire and library services. But that doesn't automatically mean such a measure is headed for the ballot, Mayor Jim West said Monday.