Alternatives Offered

Mount Spokane State Park

Four preliminary alternatives for managing Mount Spokane State Park - ranging from limiting access to portions of the park in order to protect wild resources to allowing virtually all user groups access to most of the park - will be presented at a public meeting this week by the Washington Parks and Recreation Department.

The meeting is set for Tuesday at Mount Spokane High School beginning at 7 p.m.

The four preliminary alternatives were devised following a November meeting in which the public identified park management issues.

“The final choice probably won’t be anything like these four options, but this is a starting place to let the public fine-tune what they want for the future of the park,” said Daniel Farber, state parks planner.

Two of the alternatives lean toward protection of natural resources, Farber said. The other two lean toward governing recreation.

One of the recreation alternatives compartmentalizes the park to help avoid incompatible uses from mingling in certain areas, Farber said.

“The other recreational alternative looks at Mount Spokane as one big park where everybody can have fairly open access,” he said. “The alternative would rely on education and monitoring to teach different groups how to get along.”

The parks staff plans to use comments from Tuesday’s meeting to develop a preliminary recommendation, which would be presented in another public meeting in early October, he said.

A decision on the Mount Spokane plan is scheduled to be made by the state Parks and Recreation Commission during an Oct. 29 meeting in Spokane.