Policy disagreements and personal attacks: Northwest Spokane council race pits incumbent against perennial challenger

The race to represent Northwest Spokane on the City Council pits a progressive incumbent against a conservative challenger who served alongside each other in student government in high school, and it has seen some of the most personal attacks of the local election season.

Councilman and high school teacher Zack Zappone is running for a second term against delivery driver Christopher Savage, having won the August primary with 51.3% of the vote compared to Savage’s 28.8%. Both once served together on the student body government at North Central High School, but what camaraderie they once shared appears to have eroded on the campaign trail.

The two candidates have both focused their campaigns on addressing public safety, affordability and homelessness, but have presented different approaches to the issues, trading particularly sharp barbs along the way. Savage has accused Zappone, the council’s first openly gay member, of deepening the city’s financial woes with wasteful projects, particularly those in support of the LGBTQ community like the frequently vandalized and twice-repainted downtown rainbow intersection mural; Zappone has accused Savage of throwing away their childhood friendship on homophobic dog whistles and more recently of supporting a National Guard takeover of Spokane’s streets.

Zappone is one of two council members representing Council District 3, which covers the northwestern third of the city, stretching north from the Spokane River and west of Division Street, and after redistricting in 2022 also includes the Browne’s Addition neighborhood.

The seat was fiercely competitive when Zappone first ran in 2021, when he edged out his conservative opponent Mike Lish by only 1.3%. The district has since become more likely to elect liberals after the map was redrawn in 2022 – a map Zappone created, sparking accusations of partisan gerrymandering.

A judge ruled in April 2023 that the map was not illegally gerrymandered – but also ruled that council members should not have that level of involvement in the process going forward. Voters in 2024 approved reforms to create more distance between the council and the creation of City Council district boundaries, reforms which Zappone supported.

This is Savage’s fourth attempt at running for a council seat in this district, each time arguing the council needs more conservative voices, though this is the first year he has made it out of the primary election. Savage believes that his prior three runs lacked campaign infrastructure, which he says he has corrected this year with more robust staff and volunteers.

He has also been a nearly ubiquitous presence at city council meetings since his last run, attempting to both better inform himself on local issues and prove his seriousness to the public; when candidates were asked recently how often they attended those Monday meetings, most gave vague or single-digit answers – Savage’s tally numbered in the hundreds.

Since his election in 2021, Zappone has been one of the more prominent members of the council’s liberal supermajority, a coalition that he believes has made significant progress in recent years in slowing rent increases, improving public safety and reducing homelessness without relying on a monolithic warehouse shelter. He has personally spearheaded reforms to reduce residential development costs,

Savage, meanwhile, argues Zappone and the council majority have not done enough to mitigate the unintended downsides of their reforms, if they worked at all.

Housing

The same year Zappone was elected, then-Mayor Nadine Woodeward proclaimed a “housing emergency” due to a lack of capacity in the housing market; rental vacancy rates lingered under 1%, giving landlords the ability to drive up rents as tenants had few alternatives to choose from. Today, vacancy rates hover around 5.5%, which is at the low end of the historical norm in the United States, according to data collected by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Rents are still climbing – about $200 in the last four years for a one-bedroom apartment, according to data from the Washington Center for Real Estate Research – but the rate has slowed substantially.

Zappone believes current city leadership deserves some of the credit for this improvement with reforms encouraging development through citywide upzoning, relaxing requirements for developers to build parking alongside apartments, and creating tax incentives to convert existing street-level parking lots into housing. Zappone helped spearhead those latter two reforms, though notably all three had bipartisan support and two passed unanimously.

“For three years in a row, we’ve had the highest number of permits that the city’s ever permitted on housing,” Zappone said. “Now we see the stabilization of the housing market. When I got into office, people’s housing prices were going up 20% per year.”

Savage, meanwhile, believes the city has been overly focused on encouraging multifamily development and too reticent to significantly expand its inventory of single-family homes – namely by annexing undeveloped land in Spokane County and creating new semi-suburban communities like are popping up in the hot real estate market of the Latah Valley.

“A lot of people are getting priced out of their homes right now because it’s just way too expensive to live here in Spokane, and hopefully, by opening up more land…we can help alleviate that by creating more of a free market kind of principle where we satiate demand by creating enough inventory so we can bring the prices down,” Savage said .

Zappone argues that the city has tried to accomplish this through relatively cheap infill development, focusing on building triplexes and extra living units on underdeveloped land within the city’s urban core; but Savage argues that apartments and shared buildings don’t meet the needs of the city’s families.

“The one thing that I hear about with people when I’m knocking on the doors is that they want a house, they want a yard, they want a fence, they want the American dream,” Savage said.

Zappone believes Savage’s plans are shortsighted and counterproductive, pointing to the Latah Valley for another reason: the difficulty and expense required to provide city services like sewer and water lines and functioning roads to the city’s edges. Savage acknowledges this obstacle, but the typically tax-averse candidate believes city voters would be willing to foot the bill to build that infrastructure.

“Yes, you’re kind of falling on your sword right now to help out another community, but by helping out that community, you’ll be helping out yourselves in the long run…by being next down the line for your own kind of facilities that you need in your area,” Savage said.

He also believes some of Zappone’s reforms, such as eliminating parking minimums for new residential development, have done little to drive down prices while forcing more on-street parking, which he argues hurts local businesses and could make it more difficult for fire engines to navigate residential streets.

Zappone acknowledges that there are some growing pains with various reforms to encourage development, whether it’s an old single-family house demolished for duplexes or more on-street parking. While he argues there are steps that can be taken to mitigate these impacts, he more broadly believes they are the cost of change.

“I absolutely think there are ways to address those concerns, but at the end of the day, we as a city have to ask ourselves, do we want to continue looking the exact way we always have, or do we want to grow and be able to have our kids and grandkids live near us?” Zappone said in an interview. “If we don’t change, we’re going to be excluding young people from living in our city.”

More recently, Zappone has begun advocating for property tax reforms, shifting more of the tax burden off of developer properties and more onto undeveloped or underdeveloped land, both to lower homeowner and business owner tax bills and encourage the sale or development of empty land. Though they have referred to the reform loosely as a “land value tax,” the actual approach being spearheaded by Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke looks more like an expansion of the kind of tax exemptions already utilized to encourage multifamily housing developments.

Homelessness, public safety

More than any other area of public interest, Savage argues Zappone and the council majority are failing to address the city’s on-street homelessness or downtown public safety concerns, issues he believes are closely linked.

“Our downtown is, whether it’s perception or reality, a lot of people are not wanting to come downtown anymore,” Savage said.

He supports a reinstatement of the 2023 voter-approved law banning homeless encampments within 1,000 feet of schools, parks and licensed day cares, which the state Supreme Court struck down on technical grounds in April. While Zappone supported a doomed procedural vote for the city council to bring that law back, he quickly pivoted to supporting Mayor Lisa Brown’s alternative proposal, the H.O.M.E. ordinance, which outlawed camping citywide but opponents argue puts too much emphasis on outreach and too little on enforcement.

Savage proposes a “downtown hospitality zone” law. Though some downtown business groups have called for a law under the same name, preventing the homeless from loitering around downtown businesses, Savage’s version is more akin to the Stay Out of Drug Areas law passed last year in Seattle, which would bar people convicted of certain crimes from entering downtown Spokane .

“It would be able to have these businesses trespass anyone who’s within that zone that’s causing problems, like, for instance, if there’s a guy that’s going down by Fast Eddie’s who is throwing rocks at windows and at cars and is being a nuisance,” Savage said.

He also believes the city should change the service providers it works with to manage its shelters, pointing favorably to Union Gospel Mission, which has an intensive, long-term faith-based homelessness program with many success stories but relatively limited capacity, and Adult Teen Challenge, a faith-based residential care program for youth and adults struggling with addiction and other “life-controlling problems.”

Savage believes these programs are more often successful than the providers the city currently contracts with for its scatter site homeless shelters, including Catholic Charities and Jewels Helping Hands.

“They’ve had a long while to try to make our homeless crisis solved in a very better manner, and they haven’t,” Savage argued.

Zappone, meanwhile, believes the city has made significant progress on homelessness in recent years, noting that the federally mandated homelessness census showed homelessness in Spokane County has decreased by more than 10% for each of the last two years, following significant year-over-year increases from 2016 to 2023.

He also argues the system of smaller, geographically dispersed shelters championed by Brown with the council’s support has been more humane and less impactful on their neighborhoods than the Trent Avenue warehouse that once housed as many as 500 homeless people under Brown’s predecessor.

He acknowledged that there is more to be done and expressed sympathy with the public’s frustration when they don’t see results from the council as quickly as they would like, but argued that is the nature of a legislative body.

“Being in a legislative policy role is frustrating because you don’t see results for a long time,” Zappone said. “There is a lag from when something is passed as a law for it to actually be implemented and funded, if it’s ever implemented and funded.”

While Zappone supports the H.O.M.E. ordinance, he agrees that enforcement needs to be monitored and may need to be adjusted as time goes on, pointing to loitering he’s witnessed that he believes violates that law.

“So now that we have that strategy in place for the last two months now, we need to be making progress towards those goals and delivering those results,” Zappone said.

Savage, meanwhile, discounts the annual homelessness census as fatally flawed, relying instead on a much smaller survey commissioned by the conservative Spokane Business Association and conducted by Robert Marbut, the former “homelessness czar” for President Donald Trump. He agrees with that survey’s findings that a majority of Spokane’s homeless population isn’t from Spokane – findings in direct conflict with the closer to 20% figure reported by the annual census – and supports the survey’s conclusions: that services should almost exclusively go to homeless locals.

At a recent candidate forum, Zappone pointed to Trump’s use of the national guard to ostensibly address homelessness in Washington, D.C., and recent comments by former Mayor Nadine Woodward suggesting the White House should do the same in Spokane. Asked whether he would support such a move, Savage initially said yes, before dodging the question to instead argue that he would be unable to stop them as a local official.

Wasteful spending or “dogwhistles”?

In recent weeks, Zappone has repeatedly pointed to comments from Savage at a July candidate forum hosted by the politically active church Calvary Spokane.

“… Zappone needs to be ousted from office,” Savage said at the forum. “He goes out there with his own personal agenda, trying to help out with the LGBTQ and all these small groups that really don’t have a huge population here in Spokane, and wasting your tax dollars on stupid stuff like transgender bathrooms …”

The council has not approved any spending on “transgender bathrooms.” Immediately after the Calvary Church forum, Savage clarified that he was mistakenly referring to stray comments made during the debate over an April ordinance Zappone sponsored that, among other things, guaranteed continued insurance coverage for gender-affirming care for city employees; during that debate, Councilman Jonathan Bingle introduced a failed amendment to prevent transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice.

However, Savage has more recently returned to insisting the expense for “transgender bathrooms” is real, including at an October candidate forum.

Zappone has argued that Savage’s comments are homophobic, particularly given the outsized attention paid to the relatively small and relatively rare city-funded projects related to the LGBTQ community. Savage rejected this characterization.

“It’s not anything about him being gay or LGBTQ, whatever two people do in the privacy of their own home with two adults being consenting, I have no business with that, and the government shouldn’t have anything to do with that,” Savage said. “It was more of a comment on him being fiscally irresponsible.”

Both in campaign mailers sent to voters and in the interview, Savage pointed to the downtown Pride mural near Riverfront Park – one of more than 30 projects funded under the city’s roughly “asphalt art” program approved in 2023. The nearly million-dollar program, which is funded through 2027 from the city’s ‘safe streets fund’ paid for with revenue from speeding and red-light camera tickets, has been a frequent target for criticism, notably centered around the Pride flag mural downtown.

In an interview, Savage criticized it as ineffective at slowing down drivers and argued the city had wasted money on it initially and when it was repainted twice after repeated vandalization. The mural was repainted once with existing funds from the asphalt art program, and again with donations.

Savage was also critical of the city for trying to “throw the book” at three teens who were arrested after vandalizing the mural with Lime scooter skid marks almost immediately after it was repainted.

“There was a couple of kids that made a mistake of making some scuff marks on it, because kids are kids, or they were just going too fast, I’m not too sure about the whole thing, but, you know, kids are kids,” Savage said. “By trying to throw the book at them, by trying to say it was a hate crime because they made skid marks on it, that was one of the major reasons why I found that (crosswalk) was a problem.”

It was the arresting officer, not the Spokane City Council, who arrested the teens with probable cause for first-degree malicious mischief and a likely hate crime, partially due to the homophobic slurs they shouted at witnesses who attempted to intervene, according to the police report.

Charges were quickly dropped by the Spokane County prosecutor against the oldest teen, a 19-year-old.

In campaign flyers, Savage has suggested the asphalt art money should have been spent addressing the city’s homelessness crisis; by law, the ‘safe streets’ fund can only be used on projects meant to reduce traffic fatalities.

Asked whether there were other specific asphalt art projects that also caused Savage pause, he pointed to a mural of poppy flowers, arguing it was inappropriate given the city’s opioid crisis.

For his part, Zappone argued Savage’s comments and focus on projects related to the LGBTQ community were a thinly veiled attempt to pander to the ‘anti-woke’ political bloc.

“I think those comments are dogwhistling, harmful comments directed at extremists in our community,” Zappone said. “Blaming fiscal problems on gay people is, at the very core, scapegoating and blaming and othering people.”

Emry Dinman can be reached at (509) 459-5472 or by email at emryd@spokesman.com.