Four candidates vie to represent south Spokane on the City Council

Four candidates are vying to represent south Spokane on the City Council this year. After the Aug. 1 primary election, only the top-two vote getters will advance to the November general.

Paul Dillon, the vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, and Cyndi Donahue, a small business owner and U.S. Air Force honorary commander, were the first to enter the race. Educator Katey Treloar announced her bid soon after. Mike Naccarato, a purchaser for HDT Global, made a last-minute entry into the race.

They are competing for a seat being vacated by term-limited Councilwoman Lori Kinnear in District 2, which includes much of the city south of the Spokane River except for the downtown core. The district also is represented by Councilwoman Betsy Wilkerson, whose term is not up until 2025, but who is running for council president.

The district faces a number of challenges. It is economically diverse and includes many of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, its northern areas have experienced growing traffic problems, and it has seen an uptick in the homeless population, which has, until recently, been more concentrated elsewhere in the city.

The district also contains the East Central Neighborhood, which was split in two by Interstate 90 when the highway was built in the ’60s, leaving a mark on the community to this day.

The district has for years been the most liberal in the city, though redistricting in 2022 made it marginally less so, and its candidates reflect this: Dillon and Donahue have both been endorsed by the county Democratic party, and Naccarato supports a “housing-first” approach to homelessness and rails against big money in local politics. Treloar, who has raised nearly twice as much as all of her opponents combined from largely Republican-affiliated donors, and who sought the local Democratic endorsement but was rejected, insists she is nonpartisan.

Most of the candidates agree on top issues this election: homelessness and public safety. But they differ when identifying the causes or how they would tackle them.

Dillon

Paul Dillon, a well-known activist and organizer in Spokane, is an unabashed progressive and a vocal critic of Mayor Nadine Woodward.

In March, he said he was stepping away from a leadership role with Planned Parenthood during his run for office to avoid potential conflicts of interest. He has often been the face of that organization as it has lobbied for abortion protections.

In February, when an anti-abortion group, the Church at Planned Parenthood, was ordered to pay $960,000 for interfering with patient care at Planned Parenthood, it was Dillon who addressed the moment to the media.

“This is a critical victory for Planned Parenthood at a time of historic attacks on abortion access,” Dillon said at the time.

Dillon previously worked as a legislative assistant for state Sen. Andy Billig and, before that, former Spokane City Councilman Jon Snyder. He once was a columnist for the Inlander and wrote for The Spokesman-Review.

He touts endorsements by a suite of Democratic and progressive organizations and politicians, including both Kinnear and Nikki Lockwood, who defeated Treloar in the 2019 Spokane school board election.

Dillon wants to see the city adopt a more humanitarian approach to homelessness and criticizes the focus on the large congregant shelter on Trent Avenue, which he says is fiscally unsustainable and part of the mayor’s attempts to “sweep homelessness away.”

“Housing is a human right,” Dillon said. “We can judge ourselves and our society by how we treat our most vulnerable, and by that standard, the city has been failing.”

Like most candidates for local office this year, Dillon says he wants to believe that a tentative regional coalition to address homelessness could be effective. However, he is increasingly skeptical of the proposal, including its proposed governance structure, saying it’s “heavy on Republican elected officials” and that Spokane will likely provide most of the resources and so should have outsized representation on the board.

He still supports the framework, though, and if elected would want to be one of the city’s board members.

He is critical of the reorganization of the Spokane Police Department earlier this year that drew away neighborhood resource officers to boost patrols and reduce response times, especially downtown. He wants to see a decreased reliance on uniformed officers and the criminal justice system in certain situations, such as mental health or addiction cases, freeing up police resources for patrol and a return to staffing neighborhood resource officers. He points to work that the city of Eugene was doing with the CAHOOTS program, a nonemergency crisis intervention team.

Dillon wants to increase the city’s housing supply, such as by relaxing zoning restrictions, building on incentives for infill development, and streamlining the permitting process, though the latter is largely a function of the mayor’s office and staffing.

There’s one case, however, where Dillon is wary of development: the Latah Valley, where new residential development has significantly outstripped infrastructure and placed increasing pressure on local roads. He supports another moratorium on development in that area until the city can put forward a clear plan for future growth and providing sufficient services, a position he believes has earned him the animus of developers, realtors and related groups.

Donahue

Cyndi Donahue is wary of the progressive label and believes “moderate” implies complacency with the status quo. Instead, she calls herself a “collaborative Democrat.”

She is an honorary commander for the 92nd Air Refueling Squadron at Fairchild Airforce Base, a former yoga teacher and personal trainer at the Spokane Club, and worked until recently as the community engagement director for nonprofit startup accelerator Ignite Northwest.

She was appointed to the Downtown Spokane Partnership Business Improvement Board in 2022 and serves on the Community Economic Development Strategy Steering Committee. She graduated from the Leadership Spokane program in 2020 and was among the Spokane Coeur d’Alene magazine’s Top 20 Women in Business Leadership in 2019.

Donahue considers herself a servant leader, more likely to turn to experts and less keen to pick fights over politics than some of her opponents in the race, she said in a Tuesday interview. She believes that there needs to be better communication between the City Council and the mayor’s office, as well as more vocal support for law enforcement.

She is willing to criticize some decisions by the administration, saying that funds should not have been allocated from street maintenance during a budget crunch. She also says she’s heard from neighborhood councils frustrated with their traffic-calming proposals. If elected, she says she would push to allocate more funds for filling potholes and refocusing on other aspects of city maintenance.

She isn’t ecstatic about pursuing more speeding cameras around the city, but believes it will be the most affordable way to reduce speeding and is reassured that the ticket revenue generated can only be spent on traffic-calming measures, as opposed to going into the city’s general fund.

Donahue also supports a regional approach to homelessness, saying that Spokane cannot bear the financial burden of addressing the growing issue alone. She has some concerns about the governance structure, as well as how current service providers will fit into the picture.

“I think all of us just have to find a way to work together,” she said. “The only path forward is cooperation, in my opinion.”

Donahue wants to see a focus on police recruitment and retention, saying she supports a recent guild contract approved by the City Council with a significant expansion of the compensation package, though she says she also supports police reforms, such as bias training.

“I think it’s never an either-or, it’s an add-in,” she said.

However, she’s hesitant to ask voters to approve any new taxes in order to pay for that growth in expenses, she added. In fact, given current economic conditions, Donahue wants the city to better educate residents who may qualify for some property tax exemptions, including the elderly or disabled.

“I want to look at programs like that, where we can be a little bit more progressive instead of regressive, in terms of helping those that have the heaviest burden financially,” she said.

Instead, Donahue wants to balance the budget by cutting costs. Like mayoral candidate Lisa Brown, Donahue thinks the city should consider potentially selling the defunct Cannon Street shelter, or find a new purpose for it.

She also wants the city to start collecting a 20% tax on the revenue generated by a county-owned wastewater treatment plant inside the city’s borders. The tax was adopted in 1998 but has never been imposed on the Spokane County Regional Water Reclamation Facility, which opened in 2011 on Freya Street.

Treloar

Katey Treloar wants voters to know she is nonpartisan. Her yard signs say she’s nonpartisan, and she repeatedly characterized herself as such throughout a Wednesday interview, though Dillon and others have accused her of being a Republican in disguise.

“People are really just using that as a way to try to get people to question who I really am,” she said in a Wednesday interview. “They can’t find anything to attack me with, so they’re choosing to make up lies.”

Treloar said she is the only nonpartisan candidate for the Spokane City Council, among the 15 running for one of four seats.

First and foremost, Treloar emphasizes a need to recruit and retain more officers. She believes that residents are not receiving adequate police services, hearing from many voters who don’t bother calling for police response after car break in or burglary because an officer won’t ever show up, she said. She’s heard from officers as well, she said, who are frustrated that they can’t respond to many crimes because they’re stretched too thin.

Primarily, she believes the City Council can help by showing more support for the police, she said.

“What we need to do is incentivize these officers to come here by having a City Council that supports them, so that when they ask for something, they feel heard and supported by our City Council,” she said.

Treloar didn’t identify a particular budgetary request from the police department that the City Council hadn’t supported, but she said she wanted council members to spend more time interacting with officers and hearing from them outside of City Hall.

Treloar also said she would support a property tax levy being proposed for the November ballot in order to pay for recent increases in officer compensation, in addition to other rising staff costs at the city.

She acknowledges that, amid growing budget concerns, the city may have to trim spending. She added that she would look first at cutting positions within the City Council office, which has grown significantly since the beginning of the city’s strong mayor system.

She is the only candidate for the seat who has previously run for public office. During her unsuccessful 2019 campaign for the Spokane Public Schools Board, Treloar opposed a supplemental levy and supported hiring armed police officers who would be permanently assigned to a specific middle school and high school.

She was a finalist in 2020 for a vacant council seat to which Betsy Wilkerson was eventually appointed, saying she wanted to bring “a balanced and moderate approach” to the legislative body. Later that year, she joined protests calling for an in-school learning option as COVID-19 restrictions flared.

She worked for nine years as a classroom teacher in various schools for the Spokane Public Schools district but left in 2013 after her two sons were born.

She then helped to start Bite2 Go, a program aimed at supplementing meals for underserved students, she said.

“When you have kids that are hungry, they can’t study or work on their behavioral problems, because their attention is on their next meal,” she said.

At the start of 2022, Treloar started Executive Functioning Coaching, a company that helps train people with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or other conditions to learn better organization, impulse control and other vital skills.

Naccarato

Mike Naccarato was the only candidate for the district who did not provide an interview for The Spokesman-Review this week. In an initial May interview, he said wanted to pursue housing-first approaches to homelessness, incentivize higher housing density, reduce development fees and streamline the permitting process, though the latter is almost entirely under the purview of the mayoral administration.

But in emails sent Wednesday and Thursday, Naccarato was narrowly focused on the one issue he believes is at the heart of the city’s problems: money in elections.

“Regarding policy proposals, I want to emphasize that all the candidates in this race have very similar proposals, or, at the very least, acknowledge the same issues that plague our beautiful city of Spokane,” he wrote.

“However, there is one significant difference between them and me: I am the only candidate who hasn’t succumbed to the allure of money.”

Indeed, Naccarato reports having raised no money , while his opponents have collectively raised more than $160,000, most of which has flowed to the campaign of Treloar, who has also attracted nearly $50,000 in independent expenditures from real estate interests.

“If Spokane truly desires real change, it needs a candidate who has the courage to say no to the influence of money and prioritize the needs of our community above all else,” he said.

Naccarato is employed as a purchaser for HDT Global, working with specialized shipping containers that can be airdropped to U.S. and allied troops. He is a newcomer to electoral politics.

Born and raised in the Tri-Cities, Naccarato moved to Spokane for college. His family has deep roots in the region, part of a large settlement of Italian immigrants in the Priest River, Idaho, area in the 1800s, he said.