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Shawn Vestal

This individual is no longer an employee with The Spokesman-Review.

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News >  Spokane

Political parties like spending, in one form or another

How do you like your welfare? Chances are awfully good that you get some and that you approve of it mightily. That you see it as fair and just and righteous and super-constitutional and not-really-welfare-at-all. As opposed to that other guy’s blood-sucking welfare.
News >  Spokane

Half the pay, none of the work? Who wouldn’t?

You know the problem, surely, with unemployment insurance. It’s so cushy, no one ever wants to go back to work. So trying to help people stay out of the poorhouse while they look for a job is simply counterproductive. Unemployment insurance actually creates unemployment.
News >  Spokane

Condon team big on ideas – and jargon

If you were hoping that Mayor David Condon would “manage” the city more effectively, take heart. His transition team’s report this week was spectacularly managerial: It was full to the brim of organizational jargon and cliché.
News >  Spokane

Santa delivers, gets lump of coal in return

It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Mike “Finn” Finocchiaro was dressed as Santa. His two daughters – ages 2 and 6 – were done up as elves, as were his wife and sister. In the back of the truck were boxes full of presents for the children at St. Margaret’s Shelter, a safe space for families wrestling with homelessness, domestic violence and other chaos. At first, Finn pulled up in front of the shelter on Hartson, but was told it would be better to leave that spot – the closest to the front door – open. He pulled into the empty parking lot – and into one of three open handicapped spots.
News >  Spokane

Rates keep rising, and long-term care insurers hold the reins

John Thielbahr got an unpleasant holiday surprise this year: an enormous increase in the “level” premiums for his long-term care insurance policy. Within a couple of weeks, he and his wife – and everyone else in Washington who holds the same kind of policy through Met Life – will be paying 41 percent more a month for coverage of the various steep costs that come with long illnesses or health care needs late in life. The Thielbahrs face a difficult choice: Pay a lot more, get a lot less, or risk the life-crushing debt that can come with long-term health care.
News >  Spokane

Few funds, big impact

There’s nothing to do. If every child in every town in every state in every nation of the world hasn’t said this, they must have felt it, at least once. But if you didn’t grow up in a small town, you might underestimate how real those words can be.
News >  Spokane

State also faces a deficit of understanding the other guy

So Kevin Parker said this great thing the other day about the state budget: “We can’t just cut, cut, cut.” My thoughts exactly. Which was not what I expected to hear when Parker, the Republican who represents Spokane’s 6th District in the state House, sat down with me for a chat. It was not too many months after I’d taken a big, fat rhetorical swing at something else Parker had said about state government: “We don’t have a revenue problem.”
News >  Spokane

Government scammers come in all shapes and sizes

Surely, by now, you’ve heard of the Lake Washington welfare scammers. A Seattle-area chiropractor and his wife, living in a million-dollar home and driving a Jaguar and fraudulently slurping up $135,000 in federal payments meant for poor people. It’s outrageous, of course. Unconscionable. And it’s being spun outrageously, too: It’s the tip of a billion-dollar iceberg, we’re told. Proof of the misbegotten welfare state. A spectacular government failure.
Shawn Vestal
Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Face-Off’s focus on students is debatable

Jennifer Walther is incensed that anyone would insult her Ferris High School students. So let’s be clear: It’s not Walther’s students who deserve to take heat over the planning of the Face-Off at Ferris, a debate between candidates for mayor and school board in October.
Shawn Vestal
Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Completing streets might prevent more ghosts

They call them Ghost Bikes. You’ve likely seen them around town over the past year or so: bikes painted all white, chained to a post or fence. They memorialize, in a simple, powerful way, cyclists who died on Spokane’s streets: Matthew Hardie, David Squires, Frank Red Thunder, David Widener …
News >  Spokane

Spokane man recalls Pearl Harbor attack

In 1941, Bob Snider was an 8-year-old kid interested in the world of 8-year-old kids, Oahu version: climbing trees, going shoeless on the beach, and studying the massive Navy fleet docked not far from his front door on Pearl Harbor. “I passed them on the way to school,” Snider said. “Of course I was fascinated by boats.”
News >  Spokane

The real cost of war? Here’s food for thought

What if we, as a community, could scrounge up $563 million dollars for some kind of worthwhile project? A little health care for poor kids or a new police officer or two? Filling a pothole or adding a day of library service? No? Then how about a cool $563 million to put into the deficit reduction pot? Or a grotesque tax cut for the rich, so they’ll start creating jobs for us again?
News >  Spokane

Rates down, but only for those in know

When Patti Redmond discovered in October that she was paying almost twice the going rate for her insurance policy, she called her company to ask them why. A representative from the company, Sterling Insurance, explained to her that, yes, she was in fact paying an old rate, she said. She was being charged $340 a month for supplemental Medicare coverage; due to changes in the program, monthly rates for that plan had dropped to $185.
News >  Spokane

No capital-gains tax? We’re at a loss to explain that

Here’s one for St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes: Why don’t we tax capital gains to help balance the bleeding Washington state budget? Oh, I know, literally, why we don’t: Because the state’s political atmosphere, a combination of a Republican minority and Democratic timidity, have produced the conventional wisdom that only an all-cuts approach is feasible. It’s horribly sad, it really is. But it’s all we can do. It’s just a damn shame, the governor says. These cuts will have dire repercussions for our citizens.
Shawn Vestal
Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Police oversight one thing, accountability another

Good news from the Spokane Police Guild: Despite appearances to the contrary, they’re not actually opposed to independent oversight of misconduct complaints. I know. I was shocked, too. Somehow, I’d gotten the notion that, rather than not being opposed to a real ombudsman with true investigative authority, the police officers’ union had actually … opposed it. Opposed it every step of the way. Opposed it so much that they undercut the city’s year-old ordinance giving the ombudsman the ability to actually conduct his own investigations.
News >  Spokane

An open door requires not coming unhinged

In politics, everyone’s for openness – for accountability, for transparency – until they get a good dose of it. Then, more often than not, they climb into a bunker, start issuing statements, managing the message and taking no questions. Because when you’re on the business end of true openness – listening to the nettlesome public, warding off the pesky media – it simply ain’t any fun.
News >  Spokane

Returning veterans fight to fit in

Billy Barmes spent months behind a heavy machine gun in Iraq, in an Army National Guard unit that escorted supply convoys around the country. He found himself in several firefights, often at night – chaotic, long-distance affairs in which some of his colleagues died or were injured. After each mission, he returned to a base camp that was hit nearly daily by mortar fire.