No one who has followed the tribulations of local government in the Inland Northwest for the past several years will have been surprised by last week’s news that the city of Spokane and Spokane County are siccing lawyers on each other.

Disgusted, maybe. Disappointed, at least. Appalled, even. But not surprised.

Spokane City Hall and the Spokane County Courthouse are known as rival fortresses, separated by a river and a battery of grievances that tend to command more of officials’ energy than do the community’s collective interests. There have been some notable collaborations – the Public-Safety Building and Spokane International Airport, to name two – but those are exceptions to the norm. Bickering over which entity can ratchet its gambling tax lower in order to lure a casino and its taxes over the boundary line is more typical.

The latest, and perhaps most spectacularly wasteful, example of city-county feuding is a pending lawsuit that Spokane County has filed against the city over the bills that some residents of unincorporated Spokane County are charged for sewer services. The revenue-starved city plans to countersue.

By relying on the courts to sort the matter out, of course, the elected representatives will spend hundreds of thousands of scarce constituent dollars on lawyers – as they’re already doing to seek resolution of another dispute over the administration of municipal courts.

The sewer-tax showdown is especially pointless from the perspective of city residents who are, after all, county residents and taxpayers, too. Yet city and county have reportedly negotiated over the sewer taxes for a year, to no avail.

As Spokane Deputy Mayor Jack Lynch understated it, “I think both sides would have been better served if we were able to reach a compromise.”

The problem is, they’ve had no practice at reconciling differences. That’s a shortcoming city and county officials have an urgent duty to the community to correct.