Tom Lutey

Heard this one? A Spokane Valley couple, Bruce and Bonnie, on their way home from the lake Saturday night, pass a car traveling with its headlights off. The couple flash their car's high beams as a heads-up warning to the other driver that he's driving in the dark. Terror ensues. The couple's lives are threatened.

Everything one needs to know about the "support our troops" movement, the one in which members of the cause adorn tailgates and trunk lids with yellow ribbon-shaped magnets, can be gleaned from the parking lots of America's red, white and blue megastores. The trend didn't stick nearly as well as the magnets.

Fearing their crime-reduction efforts of 10 years could be undone by the closing of Pratt Elementary School, Edgecliff area neighbors are asking the city of Spokane Valley for $20,000 to help rent the school building as a community center. "The school served as much more than an elementary school. It was a safe haven for Edgecliff's Weed and Seed program," said Ken Briggs, director of Spokane Valley Partners. "No one wants to see those gains lost. So we want to continue using the building."

With more than $1.2 billion in federal funding on the line, there's been a gold rushlike frenzy of loan applications to provide high-speed Internet service to rural America, including towns such as Cheney that don't need the help. Last December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a $24.5 million loan to a Salem, Ore.-based business promising to deliver broadband Internet service to 121 small communities in Oregon and Eastern Washington, including the university town 18 miles southwest of Spokane.

Clean water. Everybody loves it. But few people are willing to personally do anything about it, suggests a Liberty Lake survey. Completing a June survey for the state Department of Ecology, 91 percent of Liberty Lake area residents polled said water quality is a high priority for them. However, few were willing to sign a pledge to conserve water and cut back on fertilizers and detergents proved harmful to the aquifer.

Red, white and blue, the colors most associated with Independence Day, are also the colors of law enforcement. Anyone celebrating recklessly in the Spokane Valley is apt to experience the latter this Wednesday. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office this week put the community on notice that officers will be aggressively handing out parking tickets around Liberty Lake on July 4. Thousands of people flock to Liberty Lake every Independence Day. The small community offers everything from a homespun neighborhood parade on the west end of the unincorporated lake area, to evening concerts at Pavillion Park in the town proper, to lake fireworks.

Linda Dixon, like a lot of Spokane Valley residents, has learned to dread the "Notice of Application" signs that crop up on neighborhood streets whenever a new development is in the works. She dislikes them, not for what they say, but rather for what they don't – that change is on the way and there isn't a darn thing she can do about it. That there will be a hearing where she can speak her mind, but that her mind doesn't matter. That's the impression she got this spring when a nearby landowner rolled out plans to build 13 new homes on little more than two acres in Dixon's North Farr Road neighborhood.

A firefighter's tool box is a curious thing with oddities you just can't find at Peters Hardware. Take for example a wedding ring cutter. A couple of times a month, Spokane Valley Fire Department has to cut a ring off someone's finger, either because of an emergency procedure or because someone calls the station with a stuck band on a swollen hand. Firefighters were called out June 7 to remove a ring from the swollen hand of an elderly person in the 7700 block of Sinto Avenue. The call came in shortly after 6 p.m.

Fish swim in schools, everyone knows that, but few know the rainbow trout in Liberty Lake were once enrolled at a West Valley middle school. Earlier this month, 245 trout raised by students of West Valley School District's City School were released into Liberty Lake by state Fish and Wildlife officials.

A pickup pulls into the empty parking lot of Spokane Valley Fire Station 6. The passenger door opens and Elsie Mae Long's 77-year-old legs stretch for the weedy gravel below. "I'm OK, honey," she says, as her shoes touch terra firma. Elsie calls everyone honey.