Pulling Together Or Pushing Apart?

Which is it, this community of ours - a united and cohesive region or a cluster of distinct neighborhoods with competing outlooks, issues and aspirations?

Evidently it’s both. Or so it appeared recently when several Spokesman-Review staff members spent an evening with more than two dozen residents of the Spokane Valley.

During an hour and a half of candid, free-wheeling conversation a sense of tension between the Valley and the city of Spokane was never far removed.

“If the city of Spokane annexes the Valley, I’ll move out of the Valley,” one man declared.

Yet a woman seated nearby yearned for a city that’s regional in scope.

“We live in the Valley but we go downtown for cultural events,” she said. “These are things we ought to be proud of.”

And leave it to a relative newcomer - such as Martena Peterson, who came to the Valley from California in 1992 - to make you question your basic assumptions: “There are only 400,000 people (in Spokane County). What do you mean Valley and city?”

(Peterson expands on her upbeat assessment of Valley living in one of three essays written for today’s Perspective page by participants in that night’s forum.)

But while people like Peterson can tell you of places that make Spokane County seem idyllic - places where traffic is in real gridlock, schools are deplorable and officials who could do something about it won’t talk to you - they lack the historical perspective that makes old-timers’ heads spin at the change going on around them.

Longtime Valley residents like Sally and Ron Jackson, Dick Behm and Ed Mertens may have sharply contrasting ideas about a lot of political issues, but they have one thing in common. They remember a time when the Valley, with less than one-tenth of today’s population, was a quiet farming area, dotted with functioning townships like Dishman and Greenacres and Chester and Foothills.

Growth and construction have radically altered the character of the Valley and the issues with which government, residents and neighbors - including Spokane city dwellers - have to wrestle. Adjusting to revolutionary change can be stressful.

Even the setting for our forum was symbolic of the transition. We met in the classy new Valley YMCA at Mirabeau Point, a modern recreation facility that has been increasingly necessary as Valley population has grown.

The newspaper scheduled the meeting as the first in a series of neighborhood forums that we plan to hold monthly at least through the end of the year.

Valley residents talked to us about growth, about incorporation of a city in the Valley, about The Spokesman-Review itself, about whatever was on their minds.

It would have been convenient if all their views had fit nicely into consistent categories. They didn’t, of course. Valley residents are anything but unanimous in their thinking.

The Jacksons, for instance, mourn the disappearing lifestyle they cherished.

“It hurts me every time I see a cornfield changed into a housing area,” said Sally Jackson.

Other folks, meanwhile, believe growth and development are keys to economic survival in an area that doesn’t generate good enough jobs to keep their children and grandchildren from fleeing.

“I tried to tell the growth management people the Valley is the place for growth,” said Loyd Peterson.

Incorporation had plenty of backers among the participants, plus some doubters, and the ever-present distrust of Spokane was an unmistakable influence.

It was city officials’ open talk last spring about a more aggressive annexation policy that galvanized sentiments about Valley incorporation, noted former East Valley School District Superintendent Chuck Stocker.

From the bustling and changing Valley, the neighborhood forum series moves this week to the pocket of Spokane that most frequently is identified with the community’s poverty concerns, the West Central neighborhood.

What are the consequences of that perception and what impact does it have on levels of trust, empowerment and civic participation?

Editors and other staffers from the S-R will be at West Central Community Center, 1603 N. Belt, from 5:15 to 6:30 on Thursday.

If you want to attend Thursday’s forum (or either of the upcoming forums at the East Central Community Center on Nov. 9 or our Coeur d’Alene office on Dec. 6) call the registration line: 744-5666 or 800-789-0029 (ext. 5666).