Gaming issue emerges in mayor’s race

Mayor Dennis Hession accused Councilwoman Mary Verner of supporting an Indian casino in downtown Spokane, saying Monday she came to him a year ago with an idea to save a historic building from the wrecking ball with a gambling operation.

Verner disputes it, and suggested that Hession wasn’t just mistaken, he was lying. She knows of no such proposal for the now-demolished Rookery Building and insists the meeting never happened.

Their clash at the North Spokane Rotary Club debate Monday afternoon injected new issues into the Spokane mayor’s race. For Hession, it was an issue of gaming, which has expanded in recent years as Native American tribes have opened casinos in Washington, Idaho and elsewhere. For Verner, the issues were honesty and racism.

Given a chance at the start of the debate to ask Verner any question he wanted, Hession chose gambling, saying that a year ago Verner approached him “on behalf of one of the gaming native tribes about purchasing the Rookery block as a gaming site.”

“What is your position about gaming in downtown and within the city of Spokane?” he asked.

Verner, clearly angry, told the crowd of about 50 people that she could “unequivocally deny” that she ever approached him about such a plan.

“I defy you to produce any evidence that I did so,” she said. Although she is the executive director for the Upper Columbia United Tribes, Verner said she does not handle gaming issues for the tribes.

Tribal gaming is heavily regulated by the federal government, which would have to approve any plan before it could come to the city, if such a plan existed, she said during the debate.

But it doesn’t, at least as far as she knows, Verner said in a later interview. If any of the tribes suggested such a plan to Hession, they would have done it without her knowledge.

Any such plan would be moot, she said, because the Rookery Building and neighboring Mohawk Building were demolished in 2006.

“My concern about this is Dennis’ willingness to go in front of a civic organization and just lie,” she said. “It was racism.”

Hession, in a post-debate interview, seemed puzzled by Verner’s reaction.

“I’m surprised that she denied it. I remember it very clearly,” he said.

He doesn’t remember the exact time and place of the meeting, although “I believe it was in person” rather than over the phone. He said there wasn’t a formal proposal at the time, although he expected one. It never came, and he never saw anything in writing.

There was no public discussion of a tribal casino in the area during the months the city was trying to save the buildings. At the time, a nontribal gambling operation, Marilyn’s on Monroe, had closed. Hession said Monday he would have been opposed to a new one opening.

That’s not racist, he insisted, because he’s against new gambling operations in the city regardless of who operates them, but he was “personally offended” that Verner would suggest it was.

“My sensitivity to race and cultures, and personal acceptance of all our citizens, are well-known,” he said. He called her allegations of racism “a feeble attempt to create a diversion from a fair question about gambling in Spokane.”

Gambling was not the only point of disagreement in the debate. Hession said he thought Spokane’s gang problem is overstated, even though some gangs are moving in and graffiti is proliferating, although not all of that is gang-related. A coalition of law enforcement agencies is making progress, he said.

“I believe that we’re doing quite well with our gang problem,” Hession said. He would like to see more after school programs for the city’s youth, to keep them occupied and away from the temptations of joining gangs.

No, it’s a serious problem, Verner said. The neighborhoods think so, and the community assembly that represents the neighborhood councils think so, she said.

“If we’re in denial, we won’t address it like we need to,” she said before putting in a plug for a ballot measure to increase the local sales tax for more communication equipment for law enforcement. She also wants the city to do more to fight graffiti, “which helps gangs to get established in our neighborhoods.”

They also disagreed on a key point in the city’s plans for handling growth, known as centers and corridors, because those are the areas where development is encouraged to occur.

Verner said developers and builders are telling her the concept is failing and if elected she’ll convene a meeting of groups involved in the process to ask, “What isn’t working?”

Hession countered that there have been successes and “challenges” with the centers and corridors concept: “It deserves some time to develop.”