Time to rethink city-county union
Residents and visitors glide easily across the invisible boundaries that separate Spokane County’s governmental jurisdictions. Public officials find the situation trickier.
The county’s shrinking gambling tax offers an example. It generated $1 million a year once but only $125,000 now.
Did the card rooms and casinos pack up and move? No, the residents of Spokane Valley voted to incorporate as a separate city, taking the major gambling businesses out of the county’s tax base.
To compensate, county commissioners may lower the county gambling tax as an inducement to new card rooms. If they pursue that strategy and it works, gambling will expand in Spokane County. Not because of any supply-and-demand imbalance, but because political lines changed.
Lately, the structures of local government have been in tectonic flux. After 40 years under a council-manager form of government, Spokane adopted a strong-mayor system in 1999. Liberty Lake formed a city in 2000. Spokane Valley followed in 2002.
One enterprise that might have provided some needed stability and efficiency did not pan out – an ambitious drive a decade ago to consolidate Spokane city and county governments.
The piecemeal revisions that have occurred since have resulted in recurring tensions. Liberty Lake and Spokane Valley have struggled over annexation. Liberty Lake, the municipality, has challenged for control of the sewer and water district that pre-existed it and has vied with county officials over the cost of contracted law enforcement services.
The potential for turf battles is unlimited, with community leaders fighting each other for economic development prizes that dwarf gambling tax receipts. Their constituents, meanwhile, decide where to live, work and shop with minimal thought to the boundaries.
Maybe it’s time to take another look at the city-county consolidation movement that failed in 1995. One defeat is rarely accepted as final in Spokane County, after all. Remember Expo ‘74, the Spokane International Airport, Veterans Memorial Arena, even Spokane Valley incorporation, variations of which were rejected four times in the 1990s?
A consolidation process is time-consuming and complex, but it offers the possibility of a unified community that could do a more efficient job in the campaign for prosperity. As skeptics will point out, 25 elected freeholders spent three years coming up with a proposed charter that got only 46 percent approval. It’s also true, however, that when they were asked about undertaking the consolidation process in the first place, Spokane County voters said yes – and by a two-to-one margin.