If you think civic life suffers from public apathy, take heart. There’s an antidote.

Want to get citizens to a meeting? Just spread the word that sex offenders and drug abusers are about to invade the neighborhood. That’s how a mundane zone-change application in Medical Lake turned into a turn-away crowd that surpassed fire-code capacity and forced the meeting to be rescheduled. The wild-eyed fliers that generated the huge turnout were false, but apathy sure took it on the chin.

What was at stake was a land-use change that would have allowed, among other things, a $3.7 million, 42-unit apartment complex, some units of which would be reserved for low-income tenants. Where the fliers came from is hard to say. Maybe somebody had read about low-income tenants, some of them sex offenders, who have been displaced by the conversion of subsidized single-occupancy rooms in downtown Spokane to other uses.

But whoever leaped to the misinformed conclusion didn’t put much energy into research.

“Nobody called here,” said David Roberts, development specialist for Spokane Housing Ventures, which wants to build the project.

Anyone who bothered to inquire would have found out that the seven sixplexes envisioned as Stanley Meadows are to be housing for people who live and work in Medical Lake. People whose incomes are below the median – in some cases well below – and need affordable housing if they’re going to have anything left at month’s end to pay for groceries, gasoline, clothes for the family.

Moreover, it would be a buffer between existing residences and Medical Lake’s commercial area. What would those behind the fliers prefer, a strip mall (which present zoning would allow)? And whom did the fliers have in mind as new tenants for Stanley Meadows? About 30 percent of Medical Lake residents would qualify for the units, according to Jeff Amistoso, president of A&K Development Inc., which owns the land and sought the zone change.

Sadly, rumors and overreaction are not uncommon when it comes to affordable housing projects. When Community Frameworks, another nonprofit organization, launched its Dishman Commons project in Spokane Valley, similar fears were spread. The organization’s Chris Venne says it took two years and $80,000 of staff time to work through the approval process.

Today, former protesters sometimes say they never would have objected if they’d known how the project would turn out – and some of their sons and daughters live in the units created.

The canceled Medical Lake meeting has been rescheduled for 5 p.m. Sept. 27 in the Medical Lake High School gymnasium. Perhaps by that time a more accurate story will have made its way around the community, or at least residents will turn out to find out what’s really at stake – without spending two years and $80,000.