Goodwin put on list to lead Valley police

The head of Spokane County’s major crimes unit is now among the officers under consideration to become the new police chief in Spokane Valley.

Jim Goodwin was promoted from sergeant to captain and will replace one of the three original chief candidates. That candidate announced plans to retire.

City Manager Dave Mercier will choose the new chief from three names the sheriff has submitted to the city – a process that has grown contentious as Spokane Valley leaders seek more control over who runs their city’s police force.

“Right now it is basically a conflict as to who has control of the authority to remove the chief,” said Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich.

City officials have argued that hiring and firing the chief should be the same as the head of any other city department.

The law enforcement contract takes up 58 percent of the city’s general-fund expenditures and nearly a quarter of its entire budget. That money pays for the equivalent of just over 100 officers, which is more people than Spokane Valley employs in all city departments combined.

When he picked the candidates for the city’s police chief, Knezovich looked internally to a score of high-ranking officers within the Sheriff’s Office.

The city’s department heads, though, are chosen from applicant pools, which usually include people from around the country.

Mercier had pitched the idea of soliciting applications from outside the Sheriff’s Office and possibly advertising it as a city position.

“My alternate proposals were not embraced by the Sheriff’s Office,” Mercier said.

His update on the chief selection at a recent City Council meeting elicited a discussion among the council about the tricky task of maintaining the city’s independence while paying Spokane County to handle many of its basic services through contracts.

“One of the reasons we became a city was autonomy,” said Councilman Bill Gothmann.

Councilman Dick Denenny compared the police chief situation to a mall hiring a security company and then having that company demand the mall not control who becomes the security supervisor.

From the sheriff’s perspective, though, the police chief is an integral member of the department for which he or she is ultimately responsible.

“For some reason it gets lost that the Valley chief is actually an inspector with the Sheriff’s Office,” Knezovich said.

If Knezovich and his undersheriffs are gone, the police chief’s rank puts him or her in charge of the entire sheriff’s department.

As the chief’s superior, the sheriff can also be held to account for the police chief’s actions. If the city hired and fired the chief, Knezovich said he could become liable for someone that he could neither fire nor choose to begin with.

The new chief will replace Cal Walker, who resigned last fall after loosing the Republican sheriff’s candidate nomination to then-interim Sheriff Knezovich.

Many of the issues surrounding the sheriff’s authority to fire the police chief came to the surface during that campaign.

Knezovich said he would only exercise that authority if the chief violated department policy, broke the law or jeopardized the partnership between the city and the county.

And although points of contention remain, both Knezovich and city officials said they will keep negotiating the details of the contract that governs how the Sheriff’s Office polices the city.