Spokane City Council considers new meeting day, limits to public testimony and other reforms

Major changes may be coming to Spokane City Council meetings, with a large slate of reforms up for consideration Monday.

After more than a year of debate, the council is poised to move its main meetings to Wednesdays and its supplementary meetings to Tuesdays, arguing in part that the change will avoid frequent Monday holidays. The council has held its legislative meetings on Mondays since 1912.

The council also preliminarily agreed on reforming its process for filling vacancies when a council member steps down. The changes proposed by Councilman Michael Cathcart – whose seat could be vacant in 2027 as he’s running for Spokane County Auditor this year – allow each council member to nominate at least one candidate to fill the seat and require the top two candidates to face questions from the public at an open meeting.

The council also unanimously agreed on creating a formal avenue for legislation to be rejected outright if it doesn’t include enough supporting information, such as the cost of the legislation and its expected impact on marginalized communities. While this information is already technically required, it’s often missing or incomplete, an omission that added to public backlash when activists protested against a federal police hiring grant in January.

It’s less clear if there is a majority coalition willing to approve reforms to significantly limit public testimony.

Currently, ahead of each vote on a given item, the public is allowed to speak for three minutes per person. If there are multiple items a person wishes to address in a given night, they get a new three-minute slot before each item.

Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke and Councilman Zack Zappone have sponsored an amendment to limit this testimony to a single block at the beginning of the meeting, a proposal initially made by Councilwoman Kate Telis. If someone wanted to address a dozen items that night, they would have up to a single five-minute block earlier in the night to address all 12 items.

The trio has argued that the changes would actually increase public engagement, noting that the majority of testimony comes from only a few people – of the nearly 500 people who spoke before the dais in 2025, 21 people accounted for nearly half of all public testimony. Limiting that kind of testimony and moving the public feedback block earlier in the meeting would make it easier for the average person to engage, they argue, particularly on controversial items where meetings can stretch late into the night.

Klitzke, Zappone and Council President Betsy Wilkerson have alternatively proposed another amendment that wouldn’t explicitly limit testimony, but would make the format more convoluted.

Rather than take all of the public testimony on a given item in sequence, their reform would require speakers to prioritize which items they want to speak on. Speakers would be called on to provide testimony on their highest-priority item first, and would be permitted to speak to lower-priority items only after everyone had had a chance to speak on their first-priority items, then second-priority items, and so on.

It’s also not immediately clear, heading into Monday’s vote, how much support there is for a Cathcart amendment to reform the amendment process.

Currently, amendments are typically adopted ahead of the evening meetings where most public attention is focused, meaning that the general public tends to see items only after they have been amended. Legislation typically goes to those evening meetings twice: once for public consideration, and then again for a vote.

Cathcart is pushing for items with amendments to instead go to the evening meetings three times. The first time, the clean bill would be presented to the public along with all of the proposed amendments in a bid to increase transparency and public engagement in the amendment process. Amendments could then be adopted between meetings. At the second evening meeting, the amended legislation would once again receive public testimony, and only at a third meeting would the ordinance be adopted.

In an interview, Cathcart said there appeared to be majority support for at least some parts of the proposal, but it may need further tweaks to get approved.

Mayor Lisa Brown, who largely declined to wade into the council’s internal reforms, did express some concern about Cathcart’s proposed changes to the amendment process.

“Our ability to move things quickly is many times in the best public interest, and obviously we also support public input, but the processes, if they get too cumbersome – so anytime you bring an amendment it takes another week – I think that can be a tool for delay,” Brown said.

Cathcart called this a misunderstanding of his ordinance, claiming amended legislation would usually be sped up by about a week by also making it quicker to get things out of committee and onto the council agenda.

“The other piece, I agree there should not be any ability for maliciously trying to delay things, and I’m saying that as someone in the minority who might have an incentive to delay,” Cathcart said. “So what I have proposed is, if you’re going to have additional amendments beyond that timeline, it would require a majority of the council to agree that’s an amendment we should consider.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the maximum amount of time to testify under the amendment proposed by Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke and Councilman Zack Zappone.