Letters To The Editor

Otis Orchards area showed support for city

Your article about Valley incorporation and the Otis Orchards area (Valley Voice, Jan. 28) prompts me to give you some information you apparently don’t have.

Whether or not incorporation is a way to preserve a rural lifestyle is a matter over which reasonable minds might differ. That is why it is always easy to find someone to argue for and against the proposition. However, one salient fact you left out of your article is one over which there can be no debate, and that is the election returns from the last incorporation election.

As a whole, the Valley voted 44 percent in favor of incorporation. As a whole, Otis Orchards voted 46 percent in favor of incorporation. And, if everyone had voted like the folks in Otis Precinct No. 1, we would already have a city and be well on our way to developing a comprehensive plan, by the citizens of the new city, for the citizens of the new city. No one in Spokane County has more respect for the rights of people in Otis Orchards than do the rest of us in the Spokane Valley. Howard Herman Spokane

Merging with city is better option for Valley

One more time regarding Valley incorporation.

I can understand the reason for making the move to separate us from the city, considering the city council’s lack of leadership and inept moves.

However, I have not seen any leadership in the proponents of incorporation who could lead us down a straight, secure path to being a viable city in our own right. Too many questions about such things as taxes, increased responsibility to employees and buildings, equipment, supplies, new departments, etc., are answered with little insight as to how much it costs to run a government.

If these people think it won’t raise already high taxes, they are hiding their heads in the sand.

They are already cutting out the more expensive neighborhoods from the plans, thus losing a good tax base and adding the load to those who voted against incorporation but have no choice.

We would be better off going into the city, finding good leadership and making the second largest city in Washington so Olympia will need to sit up and take notice that there is an east side to the state.

Our major problem in this whole affair is good leadership - no matter how we handle the boundaries.

In the six years I have been in Spokane, thousands of dollars have been spent on outside consultants who in the end could do nothing for the city council because they would take no advice from anyone. The county commissioners have done the same thing. They prefer to do their own thing - unrelated to what needs to be done for growth and the success of Eastern Washington. LaNice Korus Spokane