As budget deadline looms, Spokane council weighs its own budget against the library’s

As the eleventh hour sounds on yet another difficult budget year for the city of Spokane, the City Council finds itself at odds about how deeply to cut its own budget to avoid cuts elsewhere, particularly in the library system.

The debate follows a presentation last week by Spokane Public Library Executive Director Andrew Chanse, who warned a 5% cut to the library budget approved last year is now coming to a head. The library has managed with only minor cuts by burning through reserves, but now has to make a major reduction in operating hours and community services in 2026 if the funding isn’t restored (and preferably enhanced).

Mayor Lisa Brown’s proposed budget kept the cuts in place. Acknowledging the community benefit provided by the library system, Brown argued the city’s finances required deep cost savings, and that pain should be spread out across all departments, she said in a Thursday interview.

But following Chanse’s presentation, a separate plea to the public for restored funding and the wave of community pushback that followed, the City Council appears unified at least in restoring the library’s funding.

Questions remain, however: How much to restore? And is the council willing to lay off its own staff to get there?

Even with a new parking tax and a utility tax boost slated for approval Monday, Spokane doesn’t have the funds to fully backfill the library while meeting some of the council’s other priorities, such as a new public defender and restoring a cut position for the city’s public broadcast station, City Cable 5.

One side, represented by Council President Betsy Wilkerson and Councilman Paul Dillon, recommends increasing library funding by $500,000, just enough to let the library system avoid service cuts next year but not much longer. They accomplish this primarily with funds from the new taxes; while they do propose a $270,000 cut in the City Council office budget, this is less than the $370,000 requested by the mayor’s office and avoids any layoffs, cutting only one position already slated to be vacated. Most of the savings come from reducing stipends for travel, food, security, fuel and freezing cost-of-living-adjustments for the council’s staff.

This is more or less the bare minimum the library needs to get itself through 2026 without service reductions, Chanse said in an interview.

“We’ll take a greater amount from the reserves that we have and use those to cover what the general fund can’t,” Chanse said. “In 2027 … it would take a greater amount. Without it, by the time 2027 ends, we would more than deplete the reserves.”

Dillon agrees the library needs more sustainable funding.

“This points to the larger systemic issue about the lack of funds the library has received from the general fund,” he said. “They deserve more, I want to be very clear about that. … They provide a critical service.”

On the other side, council members Zack Zappone and Kitty Klitzke argue they should get more funding and they should get it this year. They’re willing to lay off swathes of the council’s staff to get there.

Their version of the budget would cut funding for the council office’s by $570,000 and would allocate $800,000 to the library system – still not enough to sustainably fund operations, but a number that would put it in a better position headed into 2027. The pair have argued both that the library system is worth the cuts and also that many council employees, specifically the ones shared by all members that effectively have seven bosses, are neither an efficient use of money nor particularly effective due to their split priorities.

Klitzke called the libraries “a staggeringly successful public service.”

“It really is hard to me to think about cutting something that is so successful and clearly competitive, as far as what we get for what we pay,” she said.

Wilkerson and Dillon agree, but expressed that laying off staff was a bright red line they would not cross. Even so, Wilkerson told The Spokesman-Review just weeks ago she expected the council would reduce staff by three positions. Dillon later said those comments were premature.

“There was a campaign by the library. Good for them,” Wilkerson said to Zappone during a Thursday budget discussion. “They rallied all their folks, and glad to hear from them that the libraries are important.”

“There could be the same campaign that rallies and says, ‘You know what, we value City Council staff and the role they play in this community,’ ” Wilkerson added.

The budget and staffing for the council office has ballooned in the past 20 years: The office employed a secretary and a single intern two decades ago and has since added assistants for the council president and every council member; a budget director; an office director; a communications director; a policy adviser who in some ways acts as legal counsel; and four managers for various policy areas such as homelessness or equity. The debate about eliminating a few or many positions from that body has been ongoing for years but has rarely been seriously taken up by the council itself.

“I’ve just already come to the conclusion that nobody’s going to be happy with this budget, so everybody will feel some pain and disappointment going forward in how we present that,” Wilkerson said.

“If everyone’s hurting and taking a cut, how is council hurting or taking a cut?” Zappone asked.

The cuts to nonpersonnel costs were evidence of the council office’s self-sacrifice, Wilkerson argued. And the council had previously frozen rehiring one of its initiative managers and now planned to freeze another position being vacated. The fact that the office wasn’t instead growing was in and of itself a kind of sacrifice, she added.

Several council members expressed frustration with library leadership for coming to the council at the “bottom of the ninth,” trying to all but publicly shame them into giving them more money amid another difficult budget crunch.

“But I think, personally, that we were even able to find any funding for the library at the bottom of the ninth – because, personally, this really came out of the blue,” Wilkerson said.

Library leadership initially hadn’t been aware of the 5% cut to its budget until the council was voting on the biennial budget in 2024, Chanse said. They had planned for a 2.5% budget increase.

“That in itself was a surprise to us,” Chanse said. “We thought the library would be an exception (to cuts) because the voters had just passed” the 2024 levy renewal, maintaining a tax that helped supplement about 18% of the system’s annual budget.

Expecting the cuts to be reversed before 2026, the libraries ate into reserves, avoided a reduction in the number of hours but swapped some costly evening hours during the week to the weekend, and cut a subscription to a digital streaming service. It got them through the year, but it wasn’t sustainable, Chanse said.

“As part of this process, we were told, ‘Oh, in 2026, things will look better,’ ” Chanse recalled. “‘We’ll be able to work this out and make you whole again.’ ”

“When we finally found out what our allocation would be (next year), we realized we wouldn’t be able to meet what the public had voted on in 2024,” he added. “The library board said we needed to do something about this.”

If the council hadn’t been pressured for more money, the library could have seen the elimination of Sunday operations, a second cut day for the downtown library, a reduction in programming and events, and likely a significant reduction in their collections of physical and digital media, Chanse said.

“We didn’t feel it was right to not let the public know it was in danger,” he said.

It’s not entirely clear how the rest of the council views the current debate.

Councilwoman Shelby Lambdin urged a compromise on Thursday, but Monday will be her last council meeting, as newly elected Kate Telis will be sworn in early and replace Lambdin, who was appointed to the seat, by Tuesday.

Councilman Michael Cathcart has expressed dissatisfaction with council staff in the past, but also hesitated to cut into the council office budget unless he saw deeper cuts in the mayor’s office. Brown dismissed this suggestion in an interview, arguing her office was very lean.

Councilman Jonathan Bingle, whose vote on the budget may be one of the last significant actions he takes at the dais after losing his re-election effort this November to incoming Councilwoman Sarah Dixit, has historically voted against the council’s budgets, arguing it wastes money on ineffective homelessness projects. He provided scant comment at Thursday’s meeting.

Whatever coalition prevails will need at least four votes to pass. The budget could be approved Monday if that coalition forms around one of the two sides, with one minor wrinkle: Klitzke and Zappone entered their amendment three minutes after the Friday deadline to file. If it’s their side that prevails, but the council decides to be sticklers about the rules, it could delay a vote by a week.