Tom Lutey

Opposites attract. Just ask Mary Pollard. The Greenacres woman, who led a neighborhood fight to preserve the country setting of her community, is quickly being circled by housing projects.

Opposites attract. Just ask Marry Pollard. The Greenacres woman, who led a neighborhood fight to preserve the country setting of her community, is quickly being circled by housing projects.

Old-timers in Spokane Valley see red when new houses pop up in the wide open spaces to which they're accustomed. Not Connie Grove. She sees spots. Grove makes maps for the new Spokane Valley city. Charting the city's building progress with blue and red dots is part of her job. She's seen a lot of spots lately because construction in the city is booming. Through the first eight months of the year, the city issued 348 building permits for everything from new roofs to new homes. Half the new permits are for single-family homes. "We had 174 single-family units at the end of August," said Tom Scholtens, Spokane Valley building official. "There's stuff going on all over the place."

This is why Lisa Kinyon tears up in the fall – because the long summer days at her Otis Orchards truck farm give way to empty fields and farewells from patrons of her vegetable stand. She spends her days locating charities in need of food and eyeing the bedding plant season five months away. Soon, she will be uncomfortably idle-handed.

No neighbors make the best neighbors, which meant the eight empty acres bordering Ron Van Tassel's home set the gold standard for solitude – at least until recently. A zone change allowing as many as 176 apartment units to be built on the land is in the works.

Richard Lennon wanted to see America on the cheap. The headhunters visiting his university in Scotland were looking for foreigners to sell books door to door in far-flung places like Spokane. He could make $118 a day, they said. Up to $2,900 a week, they said, provided he put in 12.5 hours a day, Monday through Saturday. It all sounded good to 19-year-old Lennon, until he found himself standing on an old woman's porch on Spokane's North Side, asking if she wouldn't mind letting him stay in her basement for the summer.

In Mike Bailey's neighborhood east of Felts Field, summer has been anything but quiet. In fact, it's been earth moving. Bulldozers and road graders roll down a grid of ripped up roads that extend for almost 12 blocks. The metallic moan of hydraulic buckets scraping against boulders buried deep in the ground is endless. And every now and then, a vibrating steamroller rattles the retired military man's windowpanes. Bailey's home is one of 1,700 that will have public sewer access by the end of October. "It's just fun to watch them," said Bailey who is enjoying the action, but dreading the $7,000 in sewer costs he'll have to pay in the next year. "They're so efficient." Private contractors working for Spokane County have been laying pipe down Spokane Valley streets at a blistering pace for more than a decade now, driven by the concern about septic tanks located above the community's drinking water source, the Spokane Valley/Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer.

A $350,000 motor home stolen in Louisiana was recovered at a Spokane Valley RV dealership Monday, after a business owner became suspicious of two men attempting to sell the 43-foot luxury vehicle. Ron Little, owner of RVs Northwest, had a bad feeling about the motor home, which two men were trying to sell used for $210,000 to the Spokane Valley dealership. Little called the Washington State Patrol, which set up an early-morning sting at the Barker Road business.