Shawn Vestal

Spokane’s new path on police oversight has been greeted by some reform proponents as a horror, a travesty, a failure. Even supporters have been lukewarm about it: Best we can do. Give it a chance. In truth, though, it is a triumph. Not because it purely honors Proposition 1 and the city charter. It doesn’t. Not because it provides perfectly unfettered independence to the ombudsman. It doesn’t. Not because it is ideal. It’s not.

For several years, Washington was a national leader in using money from a landmark tobacco settlement to battle smoking. Taking millions of dollars from the 1998 settlement with the tobacco companies, and millions more from the state’s own steep tax on smokes, Washington mounted public health campaigns. From 2003 to 2008, the state spent $26 million a year of tobacco settlement money on prevention. From 2003 to 2008, smoking in Washington state dropped as well; in Spokane County, the rate of adult smoking sank from 23 percent to 18 percent.

Ron Wells is becoming leery of setting deadlines at the Ridpath Hotel. He had hoped that work to turn the decrepit old hotel into a downtown apartment building would be underway by now. But he’s still working to put the financing package together, and the project has also taken a hit from a water pipe break that flooded the basement of the hotel and “fried” the building’s central electrical controls.

A lot of positive changes have taken place in and around the Spokane Police Department. Those changes should be credited and appreciated. But how much change has occurred in the hearts and minds of the members of the Spokane Police Department?

Surely you’ve heard. The government wants to take your guns. The government may act like it doesn’t want to take your guns, but you definitely should not believe that, because the government wants to keep a list of all your guns in a massive government database, and it wants to use that massive government database to come to your front door, possibly in the middle of the night and wearing vintage Nazi footwear, and barge in without a warrant or probable cause and take your guns.

One obituary is a portrait of an individual. Several are a portrait of a place. The obituaries of recent weeks told a tale of the Inland Northwest that included schoolteachers and nurses, sign-makers and window-dressers, pageant winners and championship wrestlers.

Everyone knew there would be a Bette from Spokane. If not a Bette, then a Bob or a Brenda or a Bubba or a Buck. And everyone knew that Bette from Spokane would be drawn out by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, as she rebutted the State of the Union address, to illustrate a point. It is a fine and useful technique, in speechmaking and in journalism, to “put a face” on general issues. To find the illustrative case. The human example. An interesting question preceding McMorris Rodgers’ moment in the spotlight was: How would she bring Spokane – how would she bring us – into it?

House Bill 2415 reflects the way that politics is supposed to work: Citizens talk to their representative about a problem; their representative researches possible solutions to that problem; their representative then writes a proposed law, gathers support from other representatives and tries to get most of the other representatives to vote for it. Normal stuff, right? Schoolhouse Rock.

More than 70,000 people have signed up for health insurance in Washington state under the Affordable Care Act. Sue Lani Madsen is not one of them. In fact, Madsen and her family – facing big increases in premiums and deductible under Obamacare – are part of a class of the uninsured-by-choice: They are joining a Christian health care sharing ministry, an exemption explicitly allowed under the new law.

If you’re concerned about charter schools coming to Spokane, take heart from the story of the charter schools that won’t be coming to Spokane. Spokane Public Schools board has approved the state’s first charter school, a plan developed by a longtime local middle school principal. But it also rejected two charter proposals. These rejections were grounded on detailed reviews that were rigorous and unforgiving. They were resistant to the lure of the glib, unproven promises that surround charter schools and school choice. They demanded specifics, details, viable plans, and they critiqued the applicants in no uncertain terms.

The elegant, historic Spokane County Courthouse was built almost 120 years ago. The inelegant, historic computer system can’t be much newer.

Like a lot of families, there were political differences around the table when Mary Higgins and her clan sat down to dinner. Instead of avoiding them, Higgins embraced them. She loved to talk about God, family and country, and relished teaching her children to make disagreement not so disagreeable.

Chuck D – the iconic rap pioneer and cultural antagonist extraordinaire – was peeking out from the wings at a Spokane crowd Wednesday, pondering what he called “my elder statesman role.” “I was an elder statesman even when I was a younger elder statesman,” he said.

It is not, to put it mildly, the kind of crime we’re used to. Not on the South Hill. Not on the North Side. Not on the East or West Side. Not anyplace, really, outside of TV and the movies.

We need more cops. The heartening news is that we’re actually getting them.

It was New Year’s Day, and Spokesman-Review photographer Jesse Tinsley had it off. Still, there he was at Sanders Beach, photographing the Polar Bear Plunge – the annual mental-health red flag at Lake Coeur d’Alene. Instead of a camera, Tinsley was holding a remote control unit. The images were being captured by a small camera hanging from a small drone hovering over the lake. The resulting birds-eye-view video showed squealing, shivering plungers rushing into and out of the water.

Five years ago, a federal effort to enroll more children in the Children’s Health Insurance Program was launched. This is apparently a point of debate in America, whether covering children with health insurance is a good or a bad thing. But there is no question that there were a lot of kids without health insurance: around 9.2 percent. There was no question that there were a lot of kids who qualified for the federal CHIP program who were, for some reason, not enrolled.

Some ethical purists are concerned about all the free lunches – and free dinners, and free breakfasts, and free drinks, and free golf, and free heavy apps at free receptions – being lavished upon Washington’s lawmakers when they’re in Olympia. It’s a question of independence and influence-peddling. But there is another, potentially more devastating problem with all the generosity flowing from lobbyists to legislators: the risk of dependency.

What do you call a safety net that shrinks when it’s needed most? If you’re a certain kind of thinker, you call it victory.

In less remarkable times, it might be less remarkable to hear a sheriff – a GOP sheriff in an ultra-red county, no less – remark that his job is enforcing laws. Not writing laws. Not ignoring laws. Not independently deciding the constitutionality of laws. And not turning over allegiance from the country and the county they serve to the wishes of political parties and their central committees.

The man on the Monroe Street Bridge railing waved his arms. He shouted and gestured at the police officers trying to talk him down. He stripped off his coat. He swayed, shifted from foot to foot, walked along the railing, peered down at the rocks and rushing Spokane River. On occasion, he appeared to be dancing, but there was nothing joyous here. He was threatening to jump. A resident of a downtown mental health care facility, the man has a history of mental illness and had reached a breaking point, and the members of the Spokane Police Department were trying to get him off that railing safely. Finally, about 90 minutes later, Officer Davida Zinkgraf reached out her hand, and the man took it and stepped down. He went into the care of Frontier Behavioral Health.

Supporters of the city’s new sit-lie law said repeatedly Monday night that they were not trying to criminalize homelessness. Starting with City Councilman Mike Allen – who put air quotes around the words “criminalize homelessness” – virtually everyone who testified in favor of the law that criminalizes sitting or lying on city sidewalks emphasized the exact same point: They are definitely, absolutely, totally not trying to criminalize homelessness.

It was late on a Friday afternoon in the spring of 2012. The auction of state liquor stores was drawing to a close, and Byron Roselli had a group of clients in his Vancouver office, all bidding to become new business owners in the freed-up, privatized Washington booze market. The state was selling off the rights to its liquor stores, pitching it as a “once in a lifetime” opportunity, Roselli said. But it became clear that the bidders were going over the top – everyone watching, he said, was shocked as the bids rose and rose, into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some people are already calling it a bridge to nowhere. But critics of the city’s proposed pedestrian bridge – connecting the university district to East Sprague – are suffering from more than just a lack of verbal originality. They’re suffering a failure of vision.