Washington Voices

It’s a chilly Friday afternoon in northeast Spokane. Kim Bailey and Sandy Smith have been watching the weather forecast carefully for a couple of days, hoping it wouldn’t start snowing again. The two women are volunteers at Neva-Wood COPS, just east of NorthTown Mall off Wellesley Avenue, and they are getting ready to go out on their almost weekly neighborhood observation patrol.

The community organization Project Hope has hired Joel Williamson as its first executive director. Williamson worked as City Councilman Jon Snyder’s legislative assistant for a year and a half, and he’s Project Hope’s first full-time, paid staff member.

The Spokane Valley Heritage Museum, 12114 E. Sprague Ave., is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Admission is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors, $4 for students and $4 for children 18 and younger. The museum is looking for volunteers, donations and historical photos. Contact the museum at (509) 922-4570 or visit the website www.valleyheritagecenter.org.

They’ve set the standard exceptionally high for girls basketball at Freeman High. Last March the Scotties fell short of winning a third consecutive state Class 1A championship, falling to Okanogan in the title game, 44-36. And felt awful about it.

The city of Spokane’s dog park opened in December 2010 and it’s been well-used by pooches since then. The park, which is within High Bridge Park in west Spokane, is being constructed in several phases – a solid fence was the first thing to be completed – and now the park may get running water thanks to a grant from pet food maker Nutro Co.

If you were an amateur philosopher who gazed at Haley Waddington’s paintings, met the artist and then flipped through a notebook filled with images of her work, you just might point at the print titled “Teddy Alien” and ask if it was a self portrait. Her answer would be, “No, I did that for my brother when he was younger,” but you would still wonder because Waddington has more sides than one. “Teddy Alien” is a modern yin-yang; assuring on one side and slightly disturbing yet endearing on the other. It is the representation of a well-rounded childhood; equal measures of sweet dreams and monsters under the bed, and it is something that almost everyone can relate to.

Spokane Valley Fire Department Engine 5 is being evaluated at the factory after it was rear-ended while responding to an accident. The engine’s lights were flashing and siren sounding when a Ford pickup hit it on Interstate 90 on Dec. 29.

Students are picking up the pace at Greenacres Elementary School by steadily improving their reading and math scores over the past five years. The Spokane Valley school has been named a School of Distinction by The Center for Educational Effectiveness. The list, released earlier this week, featured six other schools in Educational Services District 101 for their continued performance.

If you are considering starting a community garden, now is the best time to start building the community to create the garden. We’ve had great success over the past five years growing from two gardens to more than 20 in the greater Spokane area. Community gardens are 90 percent community and 10 percent garden. In other words, a successful and sustainable garden will need a group of committed friends, neighbors and community members who help develop and build the garden. The “build it and they will come” philosophy doesn’t work.

Changes are coming to the North Sullivan Road corridor this spring and summer as the city of Spokane Valley prepares to tear down and rebuild the west Sullivan Bridge that carries southbound traffic over the Spokane River. City staff outlined the bridge replacement plans during a public meeting Wednesday at CenterPlace and also talked about plans to redo the storm drains on the bridge and repave Sullivan Road from just north of the bridge to Trent Avenue.