Spokane council considers making it easier to fire their staff amid budget crunch

Just more than three years after the Spokane City Council passed protections to make it “easy to hire but hard to fire” full-time staff in their office, some are moving to remove those protections in the face of a $13 million budget deficit and calls to cut staff citywide.

The council office holds more than 20 full-time equivalent positions, ranging from a communications manager to a policy director to a budget manager, several managers versed in specific policy areas such as homelessness or diversity, equity and inclusion, and legislative assistants for individual council members.

While council members have discretion over their assistants, the council president for years had the sole authority to fire the full-time staff. Former Council President Breean Beggs pushed to change that in 2023, arguing that it should take a majority vote to hire someone and a majority-plus-one vote to fire them.

The protections were meant to insulate staff from the shifting tides of council elections “so that it would really have to be clear that they were not doing their job before they lost their position,” Beggs said at the time.

As the city faces down another multimillion deficit and few easy ways to fill that hole, Council President Betsy Wilkerson has proposed changing the law to once again give her position sole discretion over those firing decisions – stripping protections she voted for in 2023. Removing the five-vote requirement would itself only require four votes, and notably only took four votes to enact in the first place.

Wilkerson could not be immediately reached for comment, but Councilman Zack Zappone, who also voted for those protections two years ago and now supports removing them, argues that circumstances have changed.

The council office has grown substantially from just one full-time employee two decades ago, largely because of conflict between the council and the mayor’s office. With an administration more in line with the council’s progressive majority, that need has changed, Zappone said.

“And we don’t have the luxury of staffing we had a few years ago, so we need to address the needs of the city and figure out how to do more with less,” Zappone said.

Councilman Paul Dillon, who was elected after the protections were created, said he expects to cosponsor Wilkerson’s legislation. He argued the changes were needed to give the council flexibility, both now as it grapples with a deficit, but also more broadly if changes to the staffing model or reclassification of existing positions were desired for any reason.

Dillon went so far as to argue the changes would help the council’s full-time staff, who currently undergo “undue scrutiny” when they are hired or fired publicly through a council vote.

He also denied that the changes suggested that there wouldn’t be five votes to fire staff.

“That still has not been determined yet,” Dillon said.

The ordinance, which Dillon expects will be amended before it is voted on, will be introduced in a city council committee on Monday.