Sue Lani Madsen: Spokane City Council’s focus on national issues takes away from its attention to local problems

Elections are referendums on past decisions.

On one critical decision, city of Spokane taxpayers never got to vote, not even a nonbinding advisory vote: Should City Council members be serving part time or full time?

It’s a decision with significant budget and policy impacts. And the council adopted the habit through mission creep without public input.

When the strong mayor form of government was approved by voters in 1999, the new charter was vague on the job description for City Council members. The assumption was the positions would continue to be part time, as they had been for 40 years under the council-manager system. When former Spokane City Council President Rob Higgins left office in 2003, he predicted but didn’t approve of expanding the role.

Higgins had previously served as a council member under former Mayor Jim Chase in the city manager form of government. “You could always make it a full-time job if you wanted to, there’s always another meeting to attend,” Higgins said. Under the strong mayor form of government, he predicted “the legislative function of local government will exponentially increase in cost as politics creeps into policy-making.”

According to an analysis by Michael Cathcart, executive director of Better Spokane, the city’s general fund expenditures increased by 52.4 percent from 2005 to 2017. In that same 12 years, the cost of operating the City Council increased by 121.6 percent. Higgins accurately forecast the budget impact as the council increasingly takes on progressive political issues tangentially related to operating city government.

In 2014, then-council members Michael Allen and Steve Salvatori wanted an advisory vote, but were blocked by the council majority. The proposed advisory vote never got out of committee for discussion at a council meeting. The only public discussion was dueling guest editorials in The Spokesman-Review.

“If there is a legitimate appetite on the part of the citizens to have a full-time council taking on larger issues, then let citizens have a vote on it,” Salvatori said when contacted this week.

The current council majority is no more likely to put the question to a vote of the people than they were in 2014. So now Spokane has a City Council pursuing trendy state and national causes as their work expands to fill the time available.

“This council has a better-living-through-legislation mentality,” Allen said.

It makes this year’s City Council races a referendum on its role.

If a full-time, Seattle-lite council is your preference, you might support the candidate who has over 65 donors out of Seattle and others from Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Nevada, New York and Tennessee. It’s unlikely they are bankrolling Kate Burke out of concern for Hillyard’s potholes or Spokane’s housing affordability. Her opponent, Tim Benn, is a local business owner whose Public Disclosure Commission filings show about 70 percent of his support from Spokane addresses and most of the rest from Spokane County.

If you believe the council’s job is to operate the city efficiently, you might prefer candidates with a background in mediation, not litigation. The Progressive Voters Guide describes Andy Dunau as a “moderate who is prioritizing improving infrastructure” but prefers Beggs as “the clear progressive choice.”

Progressive apparently means ignoring the city’s own legal counsel in writing Proposition 2, guaranteeing an expensive lawsuit if it passes.

Candace Mumm was part of the majority that blocked Allen and Salvatori’s push for a citizens advisory vote on the role of the council. The Progressive Voter’s Guide prefers Mumm to support their larger government social policy agenda. Her opponent, Matthew Howes, is a local business owner described by the guide as running a campaign “centered on crime, road maintenance, and reducing business taxes.” They say that like it’s a bad thing for a city council to focus on city business.

There is a national progressive movement using municipal legislation to drive state and federal policy through the courts. Does Spokane want an increasingly political City Council, or one that focuses on city business?

That’s the hidden referendum on the 2017 ballot.