Peter Barnes

After stopping a car Monday night for several traffic infractions as it sped away from a 7-Eleven store, police arrested two men on suspicion of stealing a gun just moments before. Police arrested Michael S. McGuire, 24, for driving with a suspended license, Sgt. Dave Reagan said in a release from the Sheriff's Office.

Not quite a puppy, not quite an adult, Betsy's a gentle dog who needs some love and attention. She's curious and likes to play. She likes to chase toys but isn't overly rambunctious.

A new building to replace the library on Main Avenue would be built somewhere between Dartmouth and Sullivan roads within a half mile of Sprague, library district trustees decided Monday. They also would like it to be as close as possible to a proposed Spokane Valley city center, although different timelines for the city and the Spokane County Library District projects might make that difficult.

Spokane Valley planners are poised to choose a team of architects and engineers that will give the city a blueprint for redeveloping Sprague Avenue. At Tuesday's meeting, the City Council elected to begin negotiating a contract with a team led by Freedman Tung and Bottomley, the firm that issued a smaller study on Sprague in 2004.

Be careful where you leave your ride – police have identified four spots in Spokane Valley that have been hit particularly hard by car thieves in the past two months. According to a press release from Sgt. Dave Reagan titled "Hate your car? Park it here," nine vehicles were reported stolen in the area vicinity of Sprague Avenue and Skipworth Road.

The ambulance might be the same, but a ride to the hospital for Spokane County residents could cost up to twice as much as it does for Spokane city residents. Even before recent acknowledgments by American Medical Response that it overbilled patients in Spokane by $320,000, fire officials outside the city have been considering a countywide ambulance contract that would bring down the cost of ambulance service. It also would hold AMR accountable for standards on how it conducts business.

New development won't have to match the scale and design of the neighborhoods around it under Spokane Valley's new land use plan, the City Council decided at a meeting Thursday night. "Each of these areas will have different types of challenges that I think we will have to come up with unique answers to," Councilman Rich Munson said.

After hearing impassioned statements from the public, fast-paced arguments from their peers and the opinion of a previously absent councilman, the Spokane Valley City Council elected to keep a chapter on neighborhoods in its new comprehensive plan. During deliberations two weeks ago, Mayor Diana Wilhite and Councilmen Steve Taylor, Mike DeVleming and Dick Denenny suggested that many of the chapter's goals were repetitious or could be placed elsewhere.

Willing to spend an extra 10 cents a gallon to reduce air pollution? Although most newer cars and trucks run fine on a blend of petroleum and biodiesel, there are some important things to consider before filling up. “How much is in there? Blends are referred to by the percentage of biodiesel in them. For example, B2 contains 2 percent biodiesel, B5 has 5 percent, etc.

Some Spokane Valley residents who are pushing for a chapter on neighborhoods in the city's new Comprehensive Plan are frustrated that the City Council will discuss the matter further on Tuesday, two days before a public hearing on the plan. "(We) don't want to rock the boat, we just want to make sure we can get on the boat," said Mary Pollard, a Greenacres resident who helped write the neighborhood chapter while the plan was before the Planning Commission.

After almost two years of negotiations, Spokane Valley approved contracts that set the cost for seven of the services Spokane County provided for the young city last year. At its meeting Tuesday, the Spokane Valley City Council unanimously supported the contracts for various tasks that the county handled in 2005, mostly in criminal justice. They account for about $2 million of the city's $17.4 million budget for county contracts.

Eight people testified at Tuesday's City Council meeting that they oppose a proposition to remove a chapter devoted to neighborhoods in Spokane Valley's developing Comprehensive Plan and move some of its language to other chapters. "If we slip this neighborhood program into another section, we're not going to have a neighborhood program. It's going to be lost," James Pantaleo said.

Four of the six Valley City Council members present at Tuesday's meeting indicated that the goals of a proposed neighborhood chapter in Spokane Valley's developing Comprehensive Plan could be accomplished by removing the chapter and adding some of its policies to other sections of the document. Last summer, the Planning Commission added a section on neighborhoods after homeowners said they wanted more control over how the land around them was developed.

After a year and a half and thousands of dollars in legal costs, homeowners in the Ponderosa neighborhood and lawyers for developer Lancze Douglass had their day in Superior Court on Friday. The oral arguments – roughly 15 minutes from each side – were familiar, with many of the points surrounding whether enough information was presented to the hearing examiner at a June hearing to prove residents would be able to evacuate quickly in the event of a large fire.

In the last week, firefighters handled calls ranging from a smoldering toothbrush to an all-out house fire where four people were arrested in connection with drive-by shootings that appear unrelated to the fire. There were about 160 calls total for fire service, said Assistant Fire Chief David Lobdell.

It wasn't long ago that it would be unseemly to park an ATV or a fishing boat inside a funeral home for a sportsman's service. But in recent years ideas on how death is handled have changed and for many the result is a less scripted, more personal approach to saying goodbye to a loved one.

At its meeting Tuesday, Spokane Valley's City Council apprehensively approved a plan to fully pave the roads torn out for county sewer projects this summer. "This is not something that we are going to automatically do every year," said Councilman Rich Munson.