Mike Prager

A $117 million program to fix the worst of Spokane’s city streets will come to an end this year, 10 years after voters agreed to a property tax increase to pay for it. Mayor David Condon said he is not yet willing to seek another bond issue to create a follow-up street program.

Going for a ride in a Tesla Model S is like taking off in a jet plane, only without the noise. “You touch that accelerator, it’s all go,” said Tom Hutchison, a sales representative with Tesla in Bellevue.

Going for a ride in a Tesla Model S is like taking off in a jet plane, only without the noise. “You touch that accelerator, it’s all go,” said Tom Hutchison, a sales representative with Tesla in Bellevue.

An older gentleman who described himself as a World War II veteran turned up at Spokane County offices Tuesday morning and paid an $8,068.46 sewer bill that had a Spokane Valley woman facing foreclosure of her home. The man asked that he remain anonymous, a county spokeswoman said.

Brenda Grimm-Bear is facing the loss of her cozy home on North Willow Road in Spokane Valley over a $5,279 lien for unpaid sewer bills. She is one of at least four Spokane County property owners at risk of foreclosure next Friday in the first-ever effort by the county to get tough on delinquent sewer bills.

Two-term Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich came face to face with 2014 election challenger Douglas Orr Wednesday night, going back and forth on criminal justice reform, the need for a new jail, aerial surveillance, marijuana, body cameras, consolidation and other issues. “Leadership is moving this community forward,” Knezovich told an audience of about 150 people in Council Chambers at City Hall in an event sponsored by the 6th Legislative District Democrats.

Several hundred people turned out Monday to honor Jacob Michael Hess, a 22-year-old Marine from Spokane who was killed in Afghanistan on Jan. 1. “Leave here today knowing he’s the best I’ve served with,” his supervisor, 1st Sgt. Leon Banta, told those gathered in the Life Center Foursquare Church. “He was the epitome of what a leader in the Marines should be.”

The young woman at the end of the Goodwill aisle wriggled into a slinky, black cocktail dress but found it to be too small. “Sometimes I’m in a dress mood,” said Emily, one of a legion of thrift shoppers in the Inland Northwest.

A candidate for Spokane County sheriff has offered a provocative explanation for a drop in the U.S. crime rate starting in the early 1990s: legalized abortion. Douglas Orr, a Spokane police detective running as a Republican, is seeking to unseat Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich in this year’s election.

A series of three winter storms are going to bring some needed new snow to the mountains of the Inland Northwest and a mix of snow and rain to lower elevations through this weekend. Spokane might see less than an inch of snow today and tonight while North Idaho stands to collect 1 to 4 inches. Pockets of light freezing rain are possible in the Columbia Basin southwest of Spokane.

A drought spreading across the Western United States is creeping closer to the Inland Northwest. The latest report from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that abnormally dry conditions have moved into the Columbia Basin as well as the Cascades and Western Washington.

A series of mild to moderate earthquakes in north Spokane in 2001 was the first sign of an active earthquake fault in the region previously unknown to scientists. Geologists continue to study the fault, which some researchers have named the Spokane Fault.