The Law According To Sterk Spokane County’S New Sheriff Sees Big Changes For The Valley

Spokane County’s new sheriff, Valley resident Mark Sterk, envisions big changes for the area he calls home — everything from precincts on local street corners to cops in schools to the possibility of a regional jail in the Valley.

The Spokane Valley resident, who was sworn into office on Tuesday, says the next four years will bring plenty of improvements in law enforcement to the 100,000-plus people living here.

Sterk said he plans to keep his campaign promise to decentralize the Sheriff’s Department and create precinct-like substations around the Valley and across the county.

The intent, he says, is to give residents and deputies more face-to-face contact.

“It will increase the level of service to the community,” he said.

He said he plans to slice up the county into geographic areas and assign lieutenants and deputies to the Valley’s five SCOPE stations.

He says he wants deputies to begin and end their shifts in the areas they patrol. Nowadays, deputies lose time commuting between the Valley and downtown just to sign in and out, he said.

Commanders assigned to the Valley and other districts will have more responsibility.

“(Lieutenants) will be just about like a chief of police in their own area,” he said. “They’ll have their own resources.

They’ll have their own budget. They’re going to be expected to be held accountable for running that division just like they would a police agency,” he said.

But all of this will take time, Sterk said.

It could be another year or more before these changes happen, Sterk said.

The new sheriff said he has not yet sat down with his new staff to discuss how much money is needed or how to divide the county into precincts.

Sterk said he wants to work with county commissioners to create a Valley government service center, where residents could pay their taxes or buy building permits, or possibly pay traffic fines without driving downtown.

Sterk wants to put SCOPE volunteers, deputies and holding cells in the government service center so deputies don’t have to drive people arrested in the Valley to the jail downtown during a shift.

“That’s a waste of about an hour of their shift each time they do that,” Sterk said. “So if they arrest two, maybe three, people a shift you lose three hours of a deputy’s presence out here in the Valley.”

Sterk said he’d like to incorporate the old sheriff’s substation at Valley Fire District’s Station No. 1. The substation was closed in 1981, but that fire station has two holding cells that are now being used as a computer room.

Sterk said he would favor building a regional jail in the Valley that would house inmates from Whitman and Stevens counties. He envisions a two-story jail in the Valley capable of holding 600 inmates.

“We know we’re going to need more jail space, a large amount of jail space in the future,” he said. “I think we have to prepare for the fact that our community is growing and crime is getting worse in our community. And we’re going to have to plan for that, and that means room for more incarceration.”

When Sterk met with county commissioners earlier this month to talk about his ideas, the Valley jail annex was met with skepticism by Kate McCaslin.

“The idea was to have a holding facility,” she told Sterk firmly. She said she had no intention of building a mammoth structure in her district.

Sterk also said he wants to hire seven more deputies to help with traffic patrols now that Washington State Patrol troopers will stop investigating fender benders on county roads.

He said he wants to focus on school safety and add officers to University, Central Valley, East Valley and West Valley high schools to increase security, but no funding has been secured.

Valley Fire Chief Pat Humphries said he finds many of Sterk’s ideas interesting, but notes that he must face the realities of public office - political wranglings and fights for funding.

“I enjoy Mark’s optimism,” Humphries said. “But sometimes I think reality needs to happen.”