Public Periscope

Let’s do lunch

County commissioners were questioning the Washington Association of Counties’ offer to provide a “facilitator” for a meeting between them and East Side legislators … Why do two groups who already know each other so well need a facilitator, asked Commissioner Kate McCaslin. Could the association be looking for a chance to convince commissioners to buy a full $59,000 membership in 1998? Commissioners have already vowed to spend only half that amount … Perhaps, noted Commissioner Phil Harris, but if the facilitator comes, the association will pay for lunch during the meeting … “As long as they don’t expect anything in return,” McCaslin cautioned. Which prompted Commissioner John Roskelley to observe: “This isn’t a date, Kate.”

It’s the water

County residents concerned about water or development issues may want to join a newly formed Citizen Advisory Committee on Aquifer Recharge. For the next seven months, it will study whether the county should take steps to protect areas where the aquifer gets its water - the recharge areas in the panel’s name … Resumes can be submitted by Oct. 24, to John Mercer, director of long-range planning, 1026 W. Broadway, Spokane, WA 99260, Attn: citizen advisory committee. For more information, call 456-2294.

Check your wallet

Citizens Against Government Waste, a national organization, reports a big, expensive boo-boo over at the U.S. Treasury. Seems those fancy new counterfeit-proof bills, the $100 and $50 varieties, got too fancy for our own good … The new bills feature bigger, off-center pictures of Ben Franklin and U.S. Grant, respectively, and concentric lines supposed to make them hard to counterfeit. Franklin’s hippie-like long hair fills much of the frame, so few lines were needed. The ones that showed up were good and sharp, so the feds figured they had the system perfected and cranked out a bunch of 50s … But Grant is more closely cropped, which meant lots of lines, and some 217 million of the bills smudged during printing. Because the lines are supposed to be an indicator between true bills and phonies, the feds are afraid that good bills will be mistaken for bad … The Treasury hasn’t yet decided whether to burn the bad bills and replace them, or put them in storage for a few years until the new 50s have been in circulation so long that a smudgy background won’t automatically trigger suspicion … If they wait long enough, some of us might even have a chance to have two of them in our wallets at the same time, and make the comparison.

We goofed

Last week’s note on whom to call with questions about property tax or assessment payments had an incorrect phone number for the county treasurer. The correct number is 456-4713 … The error was a result of a wrinkle in the fax transmission that mangled the 6. But that’s still no excuse. We should have known the prefix for the courthouse was 456.

, DataTimes MEMO: Public Periscope, which is published Mondays, is compiled by Jim Camden from staff reports. You can write to us at The Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, 99210; or send e-mail to jimc@spokesman.com; or fax to (509) 459-5482.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by Jim Camden from staff reports.