Former prosecutor Kate Telis announces run for Spokane City Council
Kate Telis, a former prosecutor who has more recently worked on the campaigns of several Spokane-area candidates, has announced she is running for Spokane City Council.
Telis is running for a seat occupied by Councilwoman Lili Navarrete, who recently announced she is not running for a new term. If elected, she would be one of two council members representing District 2, which includes most of the city south of the Spokane River. Councilman Paul Dillon, for whose 2023 campaign Telis served as volunteer coordinator, is the district’s other representative and is serving a term through 2027.
Telis believes the council could benefit from her experience as an attorney and hopes to bring her perspective both as someone who has worked closely with law enforcement and with homeless families to balance how she’d approach issues downtown and across the city, she said in an interview.
“What we see on Spokane’s streets is visible homelessness, but there’s a large segment of homelessness that is invisible,” Telis said.
“I think we really need to address mental health and all the various factors that bring people to become homeless, and not only just figure out what to do once they’re on the streets, but also prevent people living paycheck to paycheck from becoming homeless.”
Telis said she wanted to see the city engaged in “outside the box” approaches to homelessness, aiding in the creation of “a place for people to go other than jail or the emergency room.”
Given the city’s budget constraints, having just dug itself out of a significant hole and facing potential cuts in state or federal spending, Telis said that it was necessary to find new funding for mental health and addiction services, but hesitated to suggest a tax increase would be appropriate.
She also suggested more robust “community partnerships” with area service providers could provide better coordination and prevent redundancies, noting she had been supportive of a regional homeless authority to spur collaboration between area cities and Spokane County. She also noted she was not familiar enough with why that effort had faltered, including Mayor Lisa Brown’s public criticisms of its proposed structure, to speak on what should be done to advance that goal.
“At this point – my campaign slogan is listening, collaborating, leading with vision, and I would say, right now I’m in the listening section,” Telis said.
“I’m not afraid to make decisions, but as a lawyer, I want to have all my facts straight.”
Telis has practiced law in Virginia and New Mexico, having served as an assistant district attorney in New Mexico from 2014 to 2015 with a focus on domestic violence issues. She has also served as development director for Cuidando Los Ninos, a nonprofit supporting homeless families with children who were too young to go to school, from 2016 to 2017.
As the mother of two young children, Telis said she chose not to retake the bar in Washington and has instead worked the past six years as a “professional volunteer.” She moved to Spokane in 2019 because of a job opportunity for her husband, orthopedic surgeon Alex. She has volunteered with the League of Women Voters and Hutton Elementary, and founded a support group for parents with children with ADHD in 2023.
She has also worked on the campaigns of Maggie Yates, who ran unsuccessfully for the Spokane County Commission in 2022 and now serves as Spokane’s deputy city administrator under Brown; Molly Marshall, who unsuccessfully ran for county commission in 2024; and Dillon.