Spokane City Council will continue to meet on Mondays after contentious fight ends in concessions

Spokane’s City Council will continue to meet on Mondays as it has for more than 112 years, after concerns were raised about major changes to the council’s rules that the conservative minority believed were intended to weaken their already nominal power.

What started as a contentious fight ended with unanimous agreement, though it took a long week to get there.

A proposal to move council meetings to Tuesdays and make it harder to move proposed laws out of committee, which supporters on the council argued would improve collaboration and make meetings more accessible to the public, seemed to be on track for approval Monday after being introduced last week. But after pushback from members of the public and council members Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle, the conservative dual representatives of northeast Spokane, the council walked back these and other changes.

Bingle is unable to attend Tuesday meetings, as his wife works those days and he cares for their children while she is away. Cathcart had suggested the move to Tuesday meetings was an attempt to force Bingle to resign. Council President Betsy Wilkerson and Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke had argued the intent was to avoid canceled meetings due to Monday holidays and to make it easier for parents to attend council meetings amid frequent Monday school closures

Another proposed change would have required three sponsors for a proposed law to get out of committee, which acts as the first venue for proposals to be heard by the full council. The current requirement is for two sponsors. Councilman Paul Dillon had initially argued requiring more sponsors would encourage collaboration and prevent unnecessary debate over proposals that don’t have broad support.

But Bingle and Cathcart had rebutted it would prevent themselves or the two representatives of any individual district from bringing forward legislation that specifically touched on that district. By the end of the week, Dillon appeared to have been swayed by this argument. Both proposals were scrapped by Monday afternoon.

In what appeared to be a spirit of conciliation after heightened tensions and accusations of a partisan weaponization of the council rules, a majority or in some cases all council members also approved other amendments to the rules put forward by Cathcart that broadly allow council members to more frequently and freely address legislation.

A mollified Cathcart said that he had not expected to be able to vote in favor of the rule changes by the end of the night, but thanked his colleagues for the “very gracious changes” and added that he was “a little speechless, and you can probably tell, but I am very appreciative that these changes have occurred.”

Bingle celebrated the victories with a crowd of conservative protesters ahead of Monday’s evening meeting, but argued that the proposals shouldn’t have come forward in the first place, wryly suggesting that the weeklong fight could have been avoided with additional collaboration.

“Those are the kinds of things that, had people listened to us before they were proposed, we could have said, ‘This is a huge problem, and here’s why,’ but we didn’t,” Bingle said in an interview. “(This is) better, yes, but that doesn’t mean I feel great.”

There were a number of other changes to council rules that drew less debate, including making it easier for council members to introduce legislation to a committee in the first place – it requires only one member now, instead of two – and allowing the public to speak during committee meetings, which was not previously allowed and is not a common practice for cities in the region.