Shawn Vestal

Elizabeth Trobaugh spent much of 2012 in Afghanistan as the Army officer in charge of a brand-new kind of unit: a Female Engagement Team. Trobaugh, a Spokane native who graduated from Mt. Spokane High School in 2006, and her soldiers spent months trying to form relationships with women in rural villages of the high desert in the country’s Ghazni region. It was a new – and not always well-understood – part of the American battle against the counterinsurgency in that country, and for Trobaugh and her team it required a lot of delicate diplomacy. Eventually, they were able to provide 10 sewing machines – old-fashioned foot-pedal models – to allow a group of Afghan women the chance to run their own business from their homes, without running afoul of cultural traditions.

As the VA has begun closely auditing wait times across the nation, some concrete figures about access to care at Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center have emerged. The Spokane hospital has one of the longest Electronic Waiting Lists in the country – indicating new patients who could not be scheduled for appointments within 90 days. It also has more veterans who’ve been on the EWL for more than 120 days than almost any other hospital in the country. But the audits – conducted every two weeks – also show that the Spokane hospital is trimming its EWL and moving more patients into treatment quickly over the past several weeks. The hospital says it is making “tremendous progress” on shrinking the EWL.

Pictures cover the refrigerator in the kitchen at Todd and Renee Watson’s North Side home. In one of them, their son, Cody, smiles out at a camera in 2009. “This is before he deployed,” Todd Watson said. “He looks like he’s 14 years old. And then you look at him here” – Watson points to another photo of Cody, bearded and looking hard, and his voice breaks – “he looks 15 years older.”

Tobby Hatley wants to bring some color back to the Spokane night. Hatley, a former TV newsman, is leading a project to identify and refurbish some of the grand neon signs that have fallen into disrepair or disuse around town. His effort, called Light ’Em Up!, is in its infancy, focusing on fundraising and identifying the first signs for work. And it’s far from certain how the re-glorified pieces might be displayed – but he’s optimistic about the potential to revive an artistic piece of the region’s history.

A question for Hoopfest weekend: Shouldn’t we have more events, big and small, in and around Riverfront Park? A group of local citizens who developed a master plan for the park think so. “In time,” they argued in a summary of the plan, “the goal should be to have events happening in the Park all the time.”

It would not have happened to a nicer guy. When the deputies came to put a stake in the heart of the Spokane Daiquiri Factory, it had long since ceased being a matter of one ignorant rape joke. That controversy might well have subsided, had the guy who owned the place done the simple, obvious, decent thing. And, had decency not been a good enough reason to do that, a self-interested business owner might have simply recognized the chance to make the most of all the attention he was getting and pretended to be decent. He could have spun that manure into great PR: We’ve changed the name. We made a mistake. We’re very sorry.

Scads of school shootings since Newtown, and you would have to say the winners, in terms of public policy, are the gundamentalists. Seemingly every other day, someone is shot dead in their school, and somehow the upper hand, legislatively, lies with those who see the only solution as more guns, faster access, weaker background checks, rifles in grocery stores …

There is a strange bit of parallel blaming in recent court filings surrounding Spokane fraud king Greg Jeffreys. In attempting to get a judge to lower the millions in restitution he owes his victims, Jeffreys has been arguing that many of his victims weren’t, in fact, victims at all, but people who simply made bad deals. He notes that the deals were blessed by banks, attorneys, real estate agents and others. A judge didn’t buy it, ordering Jeffreys to pay $9.3 million to a host of victims, in addition to serving eight years in prison. Ironically, though, one of Jeffreys’ victims is making a very similar argument in a new lawsuit, which names an attorney, an appraiser, Realtors and others in its allegations.

A key question regarding schools and money: To throw or not to throw? As the Washington Supreme Court continues to ride hard on the Legislature’s half-hearted attempts to provide “ample” school funding, one of the chief arguments against spending more – always couched carefully in undying support for schools, of course – is that there’s research that shows school spending is not correlated with improvements in student performance.

The grille of the Ford F-350 sitting on First Avenue tells a bloody story. “You can see the care taken with the viscera,” writer and producer Dan Merchant said. “Tendons, I think, are hanging there. I’m not sure what all we’ve got.”

Rex Miller’s problems getting in to see a pulmonologist have left him frustrated. Miller is a retired Air Force master sergeant with a 70 percent disability. Part of that is associated with pulmonary disease, and he’s been receiving treatment for his breathing problems and other symptoms for several years. When the effectiveness of his prescription medications began to wane in February – making it harder for him to walk and bringing the return of asthma symptoms – he went to see a primary care doctor at the Spokane VA hospital, who recommended that he see a pulmonologist, he says. VA standards call for a 30-day wait in such instances.

How much should you and I pay for the defense of Gail Gerlach? A judge will hear arguments today over bills submitted by the legal team for Gerlach, the Spokane man acquitted of manslaughter after fatally shooting a fleeing car thief. These bills are significant, totaling $284,000, and they’ve raised the kind of response in some quarters that almost any financial question in government life does – the sense that it’s too much.

So, if you’re ever pulled over or interrogated for any reason by Spokane County Deputy Scott Kenoyer, you know what you should say? Whatever you want.

Have you been down to the new plaza and park between City Hall and the river? If not, I’d go now if you can. The new space opens up such beautiful views of the river – along with the roar and mist of it – and provides such a pleasant place to linger and enjoy it that it’s shocking to consider how long that prime piece of land was used for parking.

OK, just to be clear: Two Spokane County planning officials pleaded the Fifth Amendment – you know, the one where you can’t be compelled to give criminal evidence against yourself – when asked in a public hearing if they had falsified planning documents to boost a new gas station over a legal hurdle. But they didn’t, we’re told, do anything wrong.

Wow. So the Wazzu sorority whizzers have been caught on film, denounced and decried, and they’ve come forth with an abject apology. Case closed. If only all questions of justice and the American undergraduate could be resolved with such speed and clarity.

I grew up in Gooding, Idaho, a farming town of a couple thousand people that was, in many ways, a friendly place. But it was not then a particularly friendly place to grow up gay, and it has been interesting to see – as we balding and softening children of the ’80s age – the way that the gays and lesbians among us have emerged and found their voices, even as the culture matures. It’s safe to say that few of us – straight, gay, open-minded or bigoted – expected Idaho to be at the center of the constitutional issue over marriage for same-sex couples. It feels momentous. Monumental. For if there is any sign that this ludicrous wall is truly crumbling, it’s not the arrival of gay marriage in the blue states. It is how the constitutional questions fare where the opposition is great.

A former clerk at Spokane’s VA hospital says that he and his fellow clerks routinely logged in appointment times in a way that obscured the long waits veterans had for treatment – similar to allegations that have arisen at the Phoenix VA hospital. The allegations made by John Bedwell, a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, concerned some of the time that Sharon Helman was the director of what is now the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane. Helman has been placed on leave as head of the Phoenix hospital while officials investigate claims by a longtime doctor that her administration kept false records about veterans’ wait times, and that as many as 40 veterans may have died while awaiting treatment.

They called him Victim 1. But many in his community knew exactly who Aaron Fisher was and what he was saying long before he let the world know that he was the first of Jerry Sandusky’s victims to come forward. As Fisher waited years for an arrest, he felt acutely that it was him, and not the popular Penn State assistant coach, who had earned the community’s deepest disapproval.

Seven years ago, Prosecutor Steve Tucker had an interesting idea. Tucker was coming under criticism at the time for his office’s slow handling of its review of the Otto Zehm case. Perhaps, Tucker said then, we should conduct coroner’s inquests into cases where someone dies in confrontations with police: seat juries of citizens to review the deaths, provide a public window into the investigative process, and lay the groundwork for any decision by prosecutors about whether the police actions were lawful.

It is a little after 7 a.m., and the sun is low and bright in the sky, and sprinklers are sprinkling, and garbage bins are parked at the curb, and it’s a beautiful morning in the neighborhood, and here come 200 boys and girls right down the middle of the street, banging their drums and blowing their horns, marching in step and swinging their instruments, their shadows long on the asphalt, delivering a funky, brassy wake-up call to all they pass. Good morning, “Jungle Boogie.”

Boy, the city’s new sit-lie ordinance must really be working. Because, after months and months of hearing only about our dire, deadly situation in the downtown area – after City Council meetings full of scolding and finger-wagging, after approximately 5 million airings on the local news of that one truly disturbing beating at the Satellite Diner, after expressions of doom about the potential that no one will ever do business downtown if so many shaggy types are allowed to sit or lie – there is an unmistakable blossoming of investment and energy downtown. Maybe it isn’t such a war zone after all.

One person’s flexibility is another’s cronyism. This is one reason for civil service laws, to protect employees – and, in a broader sense, the whole city – from the whims and caprices of a constantly rotating political leadership handing out favors to the loyal. And that, arguably, is one of the reasons the city can develop sclerotic organizational problems that never go away.