Shawn Vestal

The overlook on Cliff Drive offers one of the best views of Spokane – a panorama that sweeps from the twin spires of St. Aloysius to the twin pipes of the Steam Plant and outward. Couples pose there for engagement photos. Limos haul revelers past for a nighttime glimpse of city lights. TV news trucks hoist their antennae there for live shots.

It was technically a political town hall meeting – constituents and a politician, questions and answers. But apart from that, it was nothing at all like a political town hall, circa 2013. No one was dragged out, shouting. No one booed. No one gave truculent mini-diatribes or adopted an outraged façade.

I walked through downtown Spokane – and lived to tell about it. Just went out and walked around. Crazy, huh? Intrepid? Down Riverside. Over to the park. Looked at the river. Nice river. Nice park. Past the dreaded “planter” by the Olive Garden. Some kids were sitting there, aimlessly. A rumor of marijuana floated in the air. I braced myself and made it safely past.

Classes start today at Eastern Washington University. While every new school year brings a sense of hope and new beginnings, this year also brings something that is virtually unheard of – at least in the lifetimes of most new undergraduates. Tuition didn’t go up.

Ten bucks a month. That’s roughly the size of cut that each person who receives government food aid is facing in five weeks. Your response to this cut may vary, and may reveal something about your understanding of what it’s like to need food stamps.

When Luke Baumgarten, Ginger Ewing and Patrick Kendrick were growing up, they understood that there was one thing young, creative, artistic, ambitious people absolutely did not do in Spokane. Stay.

If Steve Salvatori is tilting at windmills, the whole city should join him in the tilt. Salvatori has lost patience with the quicksand of the city’s contract negotiations with the Spokane Police Guild. The process is a black hole of information, even for members of the City Council such as Salvatori, and one that has become a direct obstacle to the will of the people of Spokane. And so Salvatori is proposing that the city simply stop waiting on the guild and start implementing the charter amendments that voters passed in February – back when 70 percent of us said we wanted the Office of the Police Ombudsman to conduct its own independent investigations into complaints about police and to name a citizens review panel to oversee it.

Here is how you enter the Wu-Tang. At least, it’s how I did.

Ten years ago, Kaiser gave up on its Mead plant. The plant had been idled in 2000, but in 2003, the company formally stopped holding out hope for a reopening. If the sun had been setting on Kaiser, that was the year it dipped below the horizon.

I read it so you don’t have to. The Spokane Police Department’s Six-Month Progress Report on the city’s Use of Force Commission Recommendations, I mean.

It’s fascinating and amusing to watch as Washington tries to heave marijuana over the line from technically illegal to legal, and from disreputable to technically reputable. It is a marriage of two worlds that have not, heretofore, collided. The world of the bong and the world of the bureaucrat. The shaggy black market and the uptight realm of subsections and permit variances. A lot of us have felt for a long time that there is no sense whatever – no legal, economic or ethical sense – in pot prohibition. And yet the emergence of the first batch of state rules for a marijuana market struck me, initially, as simply hard to believe.

For the longest time, I felt barely, loosely connected to any community I lived in. There are plenty of reasons for this, both personal and professional, but the truth is that I was an outsider – an outsider on purpose. A lot of what constitutes community life – family, church, tradition, neighborhoods – was simply not a large part of my life.

They say most police officers never fire a shot in the line of duty. So would it be unusual for an officer to have shot four people in the line of duty, as Spokane police Officer Dan Lesser has? Three of them fatally?

One obituary is a portrait of an individual. Several are a portrait of a place. A recent week’s worth of passings told a tale of the Inland Northwest that included motorcycle riders and golfers, retired schoolteachers and longtime grocers, backpackers and horse owners – all the variety and history that produce a community.

It should be overwhelmingly obvious, but let’s just get this onto the record: Spokane gives a damn about Delbert “Shorty” Belton.

When three Spokane men were released from prison and exonerated of felony charges associated with a drug robbery, their defense attorneys took a lot of the heat from the judge. But it was Sheriff’s Department investigators, and Sgt. Doug Marske in particular, who came in for pointed criticism from others. According to the exonerated men, their attorneys and the team that eventually won the men’s freedom, Marske pressed the case solely on the word of an unreliable informant who got a sweetheart deal; he and prosecutors failed to consider exonerative possibilities and changed details in their allegations when the facts became unfriendly, according to this critique of the case.

The walls and ceilings of the small Peaceful Valley studio testify to the range of a creative life – an artistic life, an inquiring life, a life filled with the best forms of strangeness and potency. All the life that Norvel Trosst, longtime public-radio presence and photographer, left behind when he died in March. That’s the title – “Left Behind” – for the intimate and fascinating exhibit of Trosst’s work tonight at the Shotgun Studio.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers – as you may not know if you’re not Eric Cantor – is back in Eastern Washington, having an “effective August recess.” Most of you wouldn’t really know that, because her August is a very effectively managed one. She’s been spotted at a fundraiser with Cantor, the Virginia Republican. She’s been here and there around Eastern Washington, at tours and roundtables and “Coffees with Cathy” – now that she is, like Cher or Bruce or Hillary, on a first-name basis with us all. There is, apparently, some discussion of a potential town hall – you know, a pesky open forum where anyone can ask questions – but as of this week, her people say they are still working out the details of that.

Did you vote in the primary? If you did, welcome to the ruling council. We are a small group, relative to the size of the city, and our authority is outsized. About a fifth of us – 22 percent – cast votes. Our wishes, like the wishes of any elite, will now take precedence over the rest of you suckers.

It was a special dinner, to put it mildly – a Christmastime meal at Anthony’s, with a crowd of family and friends, in celebration of momentous, life-changing events. And yet what caught the eyes of Paul Statler and Tyler Gassman was the cutlery.

We have talked about a “great gorge park” in Spokane for a hundred years, and sometimes it feels like a million. But we may be on the cusp of a renaissance of river access – a dramatic new connection between the city and its namesake river, an expansion of opportunities to enjoy the beauty of the falls, and a vivid realization of the long-delayed notion that the gorge can be a crown jewel in our city’s park system.