3/4/2022
I’m leading off this morning with a great article from The Inlanders’ Daniel Walters. Please consider sending him a message to congratulate him - danielw@inlander.com - this is just the kind of unbiased and in depth reporting on this issue we need. He interviewed a number of our citizens, including Julie Garcia, Sheldon Jackson, Chris Patterson - as well as the Mayor and Council member Betsy Wilkerson. Good job, Daniel!
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The Inlander:
South Seattle Emerald:
Pallet, a For-Profit Provider of Utilitarian Shelters, Could Be a contender for (King) County
Spokesman-Review:
Software update leaves local vets in a bind
‘Change is never comfortable’ (Mike Sparber has been promoted to County Senior Director of law and justice)
KXLY:
Spokane’s Ukrainian community gathering donations for fleeing refugees, those fighting on the ground
KREM:
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For years Spokane property owners have hammered city government over homelessness — but as they get more organized, could they be part of the solution?
Young Kwak photo
Andrew Rolwes is the interim CEO of the Downtown Spokane Partnership: "The day-to-day experience of downtown workers, property managers and property owners is that the situation has deteriorated as a result of COVID."
For six days a week every week for seven months last year, Selkirk Development CEO Sheldon Jackson drove the long way to his office. Sometimes he'd take his Subaru, sometimes he'd take his pickup truck, but he'd always drive the same winding route, past the city gateways and underpasses, past downtown's hot spots of homelessness and vandalism.
He'd narrate notes into his phone about each location, logging graffiti, garbage, broken windows and evidence of drug use, and counting car campers, RVs and homeless encampments. Then he'd tap out an email back in the office, grading each location on a scale of "worse, same, better, best" — with an occasional "terrible" and "disgusting" thrown in for good measure.
"A person sitting on a traffic barrier writing up his plea for drug money," he wrote about the Browne Street overpass on one day in June. On another, he detailed "a man ripped out of his mind showing his butt to traffic, near the Salmon artwork" at Pacific and Division.
He'd call it the "Morning Camping Update," and each day he'd send a new edition to a selection of City Council members, other elected officials and business owners. The Inlander came across his emails in unrelated public records requests for some of these officials. Sometimes, he'd include salvos against nonprofit charities like Catholic Charities and City Gate, against the mayor and the City Council. He'd describe canceling his vacation to "to stay in town and secure one of my properties from damn vagrant/homeless damages."
In one sense, Mayor Nadine Woodward's administration has been listening. On at least one day in August, City Administrator Johnnie Perkins took over the Morning Camping Update, following the same route and issuing grades for each location.
But about four months ago, Jackson says he gave up. Checking in on multiple hotspots six days a week was taking too much time, he couldn't find volunteers to take the monitoring over more permanently. He feels things keep getting worse year after year. Yet when the Inlander reached out, Jackson sounded almost hopeful, a far cry from his dire emails. He believes businesses like his can be a key part of the solution downtown, but also recognizes that he's only scratched the surface of such a complicated issue.
"I've learned a tremendous amount" about homelessness in the past year, Jackson says, "and I've learned that I don't know much about it."
"We need results now. Nadine was elected to fix these problems," Jackson wrote to then Neighborhoods, Housing and Human Services Director Cupid Alexander in March. "That was her platform."
You could point to Jackson's properties, including one Second Avenue downtown, as one reason he's so passionate about the issue. But there's another. Jackson says he grew up poor, in a dying logging town. He had relatives who were addicted to drugs, and every one of them, he says, died as a consequence. They never went to rehab — he says someone always swooped in before they hit rock bottom.
"I came from a heroin family and know what enabling does," Jackson wrote to Alexander. "It kills."
And when their email exchange grew testy, with Alexander offering to "alleviate the misguided and frankly wrong statements" he said Jackson continued to make, Jackson countered, pointing to the last city Alexander had worked for — Portland — as a grim potential future for Spokane.
"We would all rather let our leaders lead and stick to our core businesses," Jackson wrote. "But they will not stand by and let our City turn into the City that you came from."
Woodward tells the Inlander that Spokane has made massive strides in slashing the rate of homelessness for veterans, families and youth. But she says the city needs to zero in on chronic homelessness, the most difficult — and most visible — type of homelessness to try to solve.
"That is a tougher demographic to connect to services," Woodward says. "And it tends to be the most expensive to help rehabilitate their lives."
On top of an ongoing drug epidemic and massive housing crisis, the pandemic itself has continued to dog downtown.
"We have not had that activity of people visiting downtown that would disperse the transient vagrancy element we're seeing right now," Woodward says. "That element is much more visible and much more active."
In a recent survey of Downtown Spokane Partnership ratepayers and newsletter subscribers, 85 percent agreed that the "downtown cannot fully recover until addiction, mental health, and public safety problems are addressed."
"The day-to-day experience of downtown workers, property managers and property owners is that the situation has deteriorated as a result of COVID," says Andrew Rolwes, interim CEO of Downtown Spokane Partnership.
In one thread responding to one of Jackson's Morning Camping Updates, downtown hotel owner Jerry Dicker writes that tourists "witness the First Avenue vagrant environment" and then cancel their stay.
Hutton Settlement director Chud Wendle was hammering the City Council on homelessness and crime in 2017, too, two years before his wife at the time narrowly lost her bid to become City Council president. Last year, he formed the Spokane Business & Commercial Property Council, bringing other property owners together to lobby on the issue.
Councilwoman Betsy Wilkerson agrees that conditions have gotten worse, but she also says she's disturbed by the way that some people refer to those suffering.
"They're using the word 'vagrants,'" Wilkerson says. "That is such a dehumanizing term."
Last spring had some of the lowest levels of reported property crime downtown in recent years. There has, however, been a recent rapid spike in property crimes since late July, roughly returning Downtown Spokane to where it was in the latter half of 2017.
Some have blamed the recent downtown crime increase on a controversial Washington police reform law that took effect last July arguably limiting the ability of police officers to question and pursue some types of suspects.
"Correlation is not causation," Rolwes says. "But there is actually very, very notable correlation there."
But trying to parse 2021 crime stats is particularly messy. You've also got to contend with big changes in COVID restrictions, the eviction moratorium, stimulus checks, fading unemployment benefits, inflation and skyrocketing rents. A U.S. Government Accountability Office study released in 2020 found that median rent increases of $100 were associated with a 9 percent increase in homelessness in the communities examined.
Woodward says that downtown is being hit by all these factors, from COVID to the police reform law.
"I feel like we're going backwards because of all these things," Woodward says. "It's a domino effect.”
In many ways, Woodward hasn't abandoned her campaign rhetoric. She suggests Spokane's Community Court is a "revolving door of a social program" that offers too many chances and not enough consequences. "We've got to get tough on people who aren't willing to get help," she says.
But legally, she's limited. The 2018 Martin vs. Boise court decision found that if a shelter didn't have adequate shelter space, punishing someone for sleeping outside constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The courts are still untangling exactly what cities can and can't do as a result.
Last June, Woodward called reporters to the Browne Street viaduct to discuss her emphasis on cleaning downtown. Police officers had told the homeless campers under the viaduct to leave — offering them a ride to shelters. But numerous campers returned to the viaduct just a few hours after her press conference. Last month, the Woodward administration erected chain-link fences to narrow the sidewalks underneath the Browne's Street viaduct, making it impossible for anyone to sleep there without blocking traffic.
On Sunday night, as a cold February rain hammers downtown, there's plenty of trash strewn around the Browne Street viaduct, but nobody is sleeping there. Yet there's someone huddled underneath a sleeping bag under the overpass at Washington Street a few blocks away. There's a tent near the Masonic Temple on Riverside Avenue.
And there are those like Greg Lopez. Wearing a gray shawl wrapped over his head to protect himself through the rain, he walks under the Browne Street viaduct but doesn't stop to rest.
On a handful of occasions in the years he's been homeless, Lopez says, he has slept in doorways, under bridges, outside businesses. He outlines a basic code to follow. Keep the spot clean. Get up early. Maybe even ask the property owner if they're OK with it.
He's been to shelters, but more often, he says, he doesn't sleep at night at all. He doesn't feel safe.
"I have phobias," he says. "I'll just walk around, that's it."
In November, Woodward launched the Mayor's Advisory Council on Downtown Environment — a group of downtown property owners, nonprofit leaders and city officials — tasked with providing enough resources for homeless people and "ensuring that sidewalks and storefronts remain safe and accessible to the public."
Meanwhile, Washington Trust Bank hired Chris Patterson, a former Woodward adviser, and made him part of a coalition of business leaders and nonprofits called Hello For Good, aiming to address complicated issues like homelessness.
"We are looking for solid solutions that are not politically charged in any way," Patterson stresses in an email.
Yet as Woodward tries to satisfy local businesses and neighborhoods, political controversy can be inevitable. Last month, her administration pulled the plug on a proposed temporary shelter on city property in Hillyard, thanks to a flood of business and neighborhood opposition.
"Word got out about our planning for a possible shelter there, and it went sideways very quickly," Woodward says.
Local activists like James Leighty, meanwhile, have been extremely critical of business owners like Jackson. Leighty, who came across Jackson's emails repeatedly in his public records requests, accuses Jackson of being someone who "doesn't care about homeless people as much as aesthetics."
And yet, Jackson has won praise from perhaps the most unexpected corner: Julie Garcia of the sometimes controversial Jewels Helping Hands nonprofit, which helped resurrect "Camp Hope," a tent city intentionally erected directly outside City Hall as a way to protest Spokane's lack of available shelter beds.
Garcia may seem like Jackson's opposite. But in another way, she's his mirror. Camp Hope was, in its own way, a way to deliver the same flavor of message that Jackson did: that the city had failed to adequately address homelessness.
"What we've been doing is trying to bring the problem to the attention of the city," Jackson says. "Asking the city to do their job."
In a series of text messages, Garcia writes that Jackson's views have shifted over time. He has been willing to learn, she writes, that "forcing folks off the street isn't possible" and that often low-barrier options are crucial.
"He has taken time to understand why folks' behaviors are the way they are," she writes. "He believes in compassion with accountability, so do I."
Today, Jackson doesn't necessarily leap at the opportunity for a crackdown.
"If you're doing sweeps today without a shelter for these people, you're probably just pushing them around," Jackson says. "We're not trying to sweep them under the rug. We're trying to help them get into a better place." ♦
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Pallet, a For-Profit Provider of Utilitarian Shelters, Could Be a Contender for (King) County Funding
by Erica C. Barnett
(This article originally appeared on PubliCola and has been reprinted under an agreement.)
Over the past two years, a broad consensus emerged that non-congregate shelter — hotel rooms, tiny houses, and other kinds of physically separated spaces — was both healthier and more humane than the typical pre-pandemic congregate shelter setup, in which dozens of people sleep inches apart on cots or on the ground. When people are offered a choice between semi-congregate shelter and more private spaces, they’re far more likely to “accept” a hotel room or tiny house, and once there, they’re more likely to find housing than they would in traditional congregate shelters.
In January, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) issued a request for proposals for almost $5 million to fund new non-congregate shelter spaces. (An RFP is a preliminary step in the process of selecting and funding nonprofit service providers.) The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), which operates a dozen tiny house villages in and around Seattle, applied, as did Seattle’s JustCARE program, which offers hotel-based shelter and case management to people with complex behavioral health challenges and criminal justice involvement.
The original schedule called for the KCRHA to award the funding last month. Instead, at the end of January, the authority did something unusual: It extended the RFP by two weeks and expanded its terms to allow for-profit companies, rather than just nonprofits, to apply. The only for-profit firm that builds non-congregate shelters locally is an Everett-based company called Pallet.
Although the KCRHA wouldn’t say whether Pallet applied for the money, the authority’s CEO, Marc Dones, has frequently expressed skepticism about LIHI’s tiny house village model, arguing that people stay in tiny houses too long and that the “proliferation” of villages around King County needs to end.
Pallet might offer an alternative. The company builds “cabins” that serve a similar function to, but look and feel very different than, LIHI’s wooden shelters. If tiny houses look like scaled-down craftsman homes, complete with sharply peaked roofs and porches, pallet shelters resemble miniature FEMA trailers — identical, white, and utilitarian. According to Pallet spokesperson Brandon Bills, that’s by design. The shelters, which are made of prefabricated aluminum and composite panels, are meant to feel temporary, because shelter is supposed to be temporary.
“All our villages have some version of forward momentum,” said Bills, who added that the typical stay at a Pallet shelter is between three and six months. “We want them to be warm and safe, which they are, but we don’t want to encourage people to live in these for a long period of time, whereas something that’s more cutesy or homey might be more welcoming for a longer period of time.”
On a recent sunny afternoon, Catholic Community Services (CCS) program manager Jennifer Newman showed me around the pallet village at CCS’ Junction Point shelter, an expansion of a modular shelter complex that opened in 2020 as part of the effort to “de-intensify” mass shelters across the city in response to the pandemic.
The cabins, arranged in narrow rows on a barren lot facing busy Elliott Avenue West, are taller and more spacious than they appear from the road, with high windows for ventilation, a fold-out cot, and a few small shelves for personal belongings. Each row of cabins is anchored by a portable toilet, but residents can access restrooms, along with a kitchen, common areas, and showers, at the main shelter building a few yards away.
Newman said guests at the shelter, which began as a “de-intensification” site for CCS’ St. Martin de Porres shelter, vastly prefer the individual shelters to cubicles in the nearby modular units.
“The advantage of a Pallet shelter, versus cubicles or congregate shelter, is just the sense of safety, and the dignity of being able to shut and lock a door is a little bit more stabilizing for folks,” Newman said. This stability, in turn, allows CCS to better assess people’s needs. Newman said CCS has “been intentional about trying to move people into the Pallet shelters who are working with case managers” to get into housing, using the shelters as “practice housing, in a way.” The bright, relatively breezy units are an obvious upgrade from the nearby cubicles, which — although more private than a mat or cot at a mass shelter site — are dark, musty, and uninviting.
Pallet shelter units cost more to build than tiny houses — the price starts at about $5,300 a unit, compared with about $4,000 for a tiny house, according to figures provided by Pallet and LIHI, respectively. King County, which owns the land where the Junction Point shelter is located, has bought 74 Pallet units, including the 20 at Junction Point and 46 for a future site on Aurora Avenue North, plus three at a shelter in Bellevue and five at Eagle Village, a group of mostly modular shelters operated by the Chief Seattle Club in SoDo.
Lua Belgarde, the site manager at Eagle Village, said Chief Seattle Club did have to ask for physical changes, which Pallet made “very quickly,” so people in wheelchairs or on crutches could access the units and get into and out of the built-in bed, which was originally too far off the ground. The shelters also lack air conditioning, making them “hotter inside than it was outside” during last summer’s heat wave, Belgarde said.
Still, as at Junction Point, people at Eagle Village tend to prefer living in their own space to sleeping in a trailer in close proximity to other people, Belgarde said. Two young men who have been in Pallet units at Eagle Village for close to a year “really like the option — they say that in the trailers, the rooms are too close together, they can hear people talking, so having the tiny house option with space in between” is appealing, she said.
Pallet shelters have their critics — among them LIHI director Sharon Lee, who spent much of the pandemic seeking funds from the City to build more tiny house villages. Lee says the same “homey” qualities that Bills said can turn tiny house villages into “forever homes” are what make them one of the most popular shelter options. “Most people like to have a sense of identity with where they’re living — they can decorate it and it’s attractive,” Lee said. “We’ve also heard feedback from people, especially neighbors and community residents, that they like that they’re colorful … and, of course, because they look like a tiny house.” In contrast, Lee said, Pallet shelters appear “sterile-looking” and “flimsy.”
“I understand why some cities are buying Pallet shelters, because they’re quick to put up, but I think it’s much better to have a higher quality of materials and living environment,” Lee said.
Lee also pushed back on the charge that people get too comfortable at tiny house villages and stay there long-term, noting that 56% of people who stayed in tiny house villages last year moved into permanent housing. The median stay in a tiny house last year, according to Lee, was 114 days, similar to that at shelters run by other organizations using Pallet structures.
Newman, from CCS, noted that every homeless service provider has been hit by staffing shortages over the last year, limiting access to case management (and slowing down the housing process for sheltered people) across the board. “One of the biggest determinants for housing outcomes is not only appropriate and adequate housing resources, but adequate case managers for helping folks get into housing,” she said.
Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, whose efforts to add new tiny house villages across the city were continually thwarted by former Mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration, says he sees no reason why tiny house villages and Pallet shelters can’t coexist. “I am certainly a fan of diversifying products and operators and collecting feedback and data and seeing how it works in the field,” Lewis said.
Lewis said Pallet’s business model also appealed to him. Unlike other for-profit companies, Pallet is organized as a “social-purpose corporation,” a State tax designation that allows it to base business decisions on social impact, rather than just company or shareholder profits. The company’s mission includes creating job opportunities for nontraditional workers; according to Bills, more than 80% of Pallet’s employees have lived experience of addiction, homelessness, or criminal justice involvement.
“When I was doing my It Takes a Village concept, Pallet factored into my consideration,” he continued. It Takes a Village was Lewis’ plan, never implemented, to place new tiny house villages in every City Council district. “If we had some city sites that we could use for only a year or two, Pallets would be easier to tear down and relocate.”
Bills said he considers Pallet shelters just one option among many possible shelter alternatives — one that works better for some people, but “is not the magic solution” to homelessness. “There are people living on the streets because the options that are currently available to them don’t fit their needs,” he said. “We’re trying to create one more option that we believe this population is likely to accept.”
Of course, funding for new shelter is limited, making competition for $5 million more of a zero-sum game than the “more of everything” proponents suggest. The KCRHA plans to make its final funding recommendations next Monday, March 7.
Erica C. Barnett is a feminist, an urbanist, and an obsessive observer of politics, transportation, and the quotidian inner workings of City Hall.
📸 Featured Image: Pallet Shelters. (Photo: Erica C. Barnett)
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Software update leaves local vets in a bind
By Orion Donovan-Smith
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Work ground to a halt at Spokane’s Veterans Affairs hospital Thursday after an update to a troubled computer system left patient data corrupted and unusable, according to patients and internal emails.
In an email sent Thursday morning and obtained by The Spokesman-Review, Robert Fischer, director of the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, told employees to stop using the electronic health record system they rely on to coordinate health care and “Assume all electronic patient data is corrupted/ inaccurate.”
Services would continue for patients already admitted to the hospital, he wrote, but no new patients would be admitted “until further notice” and the hospital’s chief of surgery would make an assessment about the safety of continuing surgeries.
Fischer directed staff to use “downtime procedures,” which involve writing patients’ information by hand and entering it into the system when it comes back online. A Spokesman-Review investigation in December found the system has seen multiple outages since it was launched in October 2020 at Mann-Grandstaff, but Fischer wrote Thursday’s downtime was “unlike previous episodes insofar as all data” in multiple software programs “may be corrupted.”
Problems with the system, developed by Missouri- based Cerner Corp. under a $10 billion contract, have delayed care, threatened patient safety and left VA employees exhausted and demoralized at the Spokane hospital and its outpatient clinics in Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint, Wenatchee and Libby, Montana.
The rest of VA’s 171 hospitals and more than 1,100 clinics still use a different health record system that employees say works better, but the department has not reverted Mann-Grandstaff to the older system, opting instead to collect “lessons learned” in the Inland Northwest to help other parts of the country avoid similar problems.
In his email, Fischer told employees they should “provide only those healthcare services you are comfortable providing assuming all electronic sources of data are unreliable.”
“It is understood healthcare delivery, until these problems are rectified, will be very limited,” the email continued. “Empathy and an apologetic approach to patients will be very important.”
The director noted that many patients would need their appointments rescheduled, but he also wrote that employees may not have access to schedules in the system.
Health care workers should “make every effort to limit” ordering medications, laboratory tests and imaging studies such as X-rays, Fischer wrote. All mailings, including prescriptions sent to veterans by mail, were also suspended.
Joe Harmer, a 76-yearold Army veteran who lives in Greenacres, said he called Mann-Grandstaff on Thursday for help with his prescriptions and was told, “No prescriptions can be filled today.”
“They’re not able to pull up our records,” Harmer said. “The computers are completely down. They don’t know when they’ll be back up.”
Jason Ernsting, a Navy veteran who lives in Nine Mile Falls, said he called the medical center to talk with his doctor and was told by another employee they could not help him because the system had been down all day.
“Because they cannot pull up any medical records everyone cannot reach anyone,” Ernsting, 53, said in a text message. “This is truly unacceptable.”
VA Press Secretary Terrance Hayes confirmed in an email that the electronic health record system at Mann-Grandstaff and its associated outpatient clinics, as well as a VA facility in Las Vegas that manages patient accounts, “experienced a service outage March 3, 2022, due to an issue with patient demographic data.”
“In an abundance of caution, the EHR (electronic health record) system was taken offline to prevent any impact to patient care areas,” Hayes wrote. “VA’s health care teams were notified and are following standard downtime procedures until the issue is corrected.”
In a separate email obtained by The Spokesman- Review, a supervisor at Mann-Grandstaff told employees not to use the system Thursday or Friday and to expect an update by the end of the week. Until the system is restored, the supervisor wrote, employees would need to write down veterans’ information by hand.
Brian Sandager, general manager of Cerner Government Services, said the company is working to address the problem. The VA awarded the $10 billion contract to Cerner in 2018 without considering bids from other companies, on the grounds that the software would work more effectively with a similar system Cerner had developed for the Defense Department.
“Cerner remains steadfast in its support of VA efforts to provide timely, high-quality care to Veterans through a modern, interoperable electronic health record,” Sandager said. “We are working hand-in-hand with our VA partner to address any and all concerns.”
In January, VA delayed the launch of the Cerner system at the next planned site in Columbus, Ohio – originally scheduled for March 5 – due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but so far the department has not pushed back the system’s planned March 26 rollout at the VA hospital in Walla Walla. The next sites on VA’s tentative schedule are Roseburg and White City, Oregon, on June 11; Boise on June 25; Anchorage, Alaska, on July 16; and several facilities in the Puget Sound region Aug. 27.
Spokesman-Review reporter Arielle Dreher contributed to this story. Orion Donovan-Smith can be reached at (202) 853-2524 or at orionds@spokesman.com.
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‘Change is never comfortable’
By Colin Tiernan
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Mike Sparber started his county government career at the bottom.
In 1988, the Spokane native became a corrections officer. It was a change of direction after time in the military and jobs as a welder and metal fabricator.
Sparber worked his way up to lieutenant; then assistant director of detention services. In 2019, the Spokane County commissioners promoted him to director.
No one had ever climbed from corrections officer to director. Sparber, an Eastern Washington University graduate, says he stayed with the job through the decades because it gave him an opportunity to help people.
“In my industry, you work with inmates,” he said. “All of them are having the worst days of their lives because they’re here. I always felt it was my role to help them understand that we’re here to help them get through the process.”
After 34 years with the county, Sparber has been promoted once again. He’s now the county’s first senior director of law and justice.
The new role is part of a larger effort by Spokane County CEO Scott Simmons to reorganize the county’s leadership structure. The intent, Simmons says, is to increase efficiency, clarify chains of command and improve communication between departments.
As senior director of law and justice, Sparber will oversee the parts of the county’s criminal justice system that aren’t run by elected officials. That includes pretrial services, law and justice administration, the medical examiner’s office, detention services, the public defender’s office and counsel for defense – which takes cases that present a conflict of interest for the public defender’s office.
See SPARBER, 2
Mike Sparber, who has worked in Spokane County Detention Services since 1988, has become the county’s first senior director of law and justice. He will oversee the public defender’s office, pretrial services, detention services, the medical examiner’s office and the regional law and justice administrator.
JESSE TINSLEY/ THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
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Spokane County Commissioner Josh Kerns said Sparber’s background makes him a perfect fit for the new job. He added that it reflects well on the county when employees stay for more than three decades, and emphasized the former jail manager is wellliked.
“Mike is a good guy,” Kerns said. “I don’t know anybody that would say anything bad about Mike Sparber.”
Sparber explained that the new position gives the county an employee who can focus on big-picture issues. Individual departments often focus narrowly on their own responsibilities, he said, but the senior director of law and justice can assess all the “bits and pieces” and guide them toward a common goal.
“What needs to happen is there needs to be a good, focused look at the overall processes and how those decisions along the way impact the folks up or downstream,” he said.
Sparber will be intimately familiar with one part of his new job – overseeing detention services.
Not only did he serve as detention services director, he also served as project manager when the county was actively considering the construction of a new jail.
A new jail hasn’t been built, but Sparber took courses at the National Institute of Corrections to learn more about jail projects. If the county had decided to move forward, Sparber would have helped lead the effort.
At this point, Sparber said he thinks the jail discussion has shifted. He said he hopes the county will soon start considering the creation of a community corrections center.
A community corrections center would provide qualified inmates with various programs and opportunities to turn their lives around, Sparber said. For instance, it could help people get their GEDs, find housing or fight addiction.
Spokane City Council President Breean Beggs, a reform advocate and longtime attorney, said he doesn’t think a community corrections center would be the best move.
It would cost millions, he said, and the county should be investing more in projects like the Spokane Regional Stabilization Center. That facility, which opened this fall, diverts people from the Spokane County Jail and connects them with resources to help them fight addiction and mental health issues.
“That’s where we need to go,” Beggs said. “They don’t have to be lockups.”
Regardless of what route the county takes, there’s consensus that the current system isn’t working.
“Everyone understands that the model we have for the jail right now is not efficient,” Sparber said. “The jail is still crowded. The jail was designed for 462 (inmates), we on average have 675 in the jail right now. We’ve double-bunked spaces that should have remained single- bunked.”
As part of his new responsibilities, Sparber will be overseeing the county’s reform efforts. For instance, it’ll be up to him whether the county hires a new regional law and justice administrator to replace Maggie Yates, who resigned in January and oversaw the county’s reform efforts for the past 3½ years.
Sparber said he wants to start evaluating all of the county’s ongoing reform programs.
“What are the projects?” Sparber asked. “What problems are they solving, how long have they been in process, where is the supporting data for it, is it doing the things we asked it to do, how much money is being spent on it?”
In Yates’ absence, Sparber will take over the county’s supported release program.
The proposal has faced resistance from the prosecutor’s office, but if it moves forward it will give District Court judges the option of releasing nonviolent defendants awaiting trial and connecting them with resources – such as assistance for housing, drug addiction and mental health issues – instead of holding them in jail on a low bond.
Sparber said he’s eager to explore ways to improve the county’s criminal justice system and explained that despite his jail background, he has experience outside of detention services.
For instance, Sparber was the county’s representative on the Blueprint for Reform, which former U.S. Attorney Jim McDevitt, retired Superior Court Judge Jim Murphy and attorney Phillip Wetzel wrote in 2013. He also served as a fill-in regional law and justice administrator between the tenures of Jacqueline van Wormer and Yates.
Sparber said those experiences, plus his time on the Spokane Regional Law and Justice Council, have given him a good understanding of the entire criminal justice system.
Beggs said he doesn’t think Sparber’s jail background will necessarily inhibit his ability to implement reforms so long as he surrounds himself with people with the right expertise.
“His experience in detention services has led him to understand how broken and dysfunctional the current system is,” Beggs said. “I have personally found him open to solutions, but like the judges, he needs more resources and more tools.”
Sparber said his ultimate goal is to make sure the criminal justice system moves in the right direction.
“Change is never comfortable,” he said. “People, water and electricity all flow to the path of least resistance. No one is really up for change, but it’s necessary.”Colin Tiernan can be reached at (509) 459-5039 or at colint@spokesman.com.
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Spokane’s Ukrainian community gathering donations for fleeing refugees, those fighting on the ground
Posted: March 3, 2022 4:16 PM Updated: March 4, 2022 7:46 AM by Rania Kaur
SPOKANE, Wash. – Spokane’s Ukrainian community is coming together to help their brothers and sisters devastated by Russia’s invasion.
They are gathering physical goods and donations that will get sent overseas to help fleeing refugees and those on the ground fighting.
The Emergent Warehouse in Spokane Valley is one of the multiple locations across the country where people are gathering donations to help ease the pain of this crisis.
Decades of Russia-Ukraine conflict is playing a role in why they are pushing to make a difference.
Tanya Wann calls the Inland Northwest home; it is where she raised her kids, but her heart is with her homeland.
“My uncles live in Kyiv and he says it’s devastating right now. They can’t get food, the only place they can get bread, they stand in line for four hours,” she said.
She is one of the people here in Spokane gathering donations. She says it will make a difference even if the conflict ends tomorrow.
“We’re looking into rebuilding cities and towns – it’s going to take a long time. So, any help, will be really, you will show support to Ukraine with any kind of help, even if it will take longer to get there,” Wann said.
Sergey Topik knows the history of his country. Russia starved Ukraine in the 1930s when it was part of the USSR.
“They would force people to make the food and not let them eat it, which is why a lot of people ended up starting to be involved with cannibalism and that’s a historical fact, that Ukrainian people would eat each other just to survive,” Topik said.
The devastation of Ukraine right now is reminiscent of that history.
“There’s like a big mob there. There’s no toiletries, there’s no water, there’s no nothing, just people trying to get out of the country,” Topik said.
The face of crisis is uniting a community.
Spokane Pediatrics is also collecting donations in an effort to help.
“Anything, anyone in the world can do is something and if one package gets to one family, then that is one step to helping someone get out or stay and survive,” said Dr. Kimberly Grandinetti.
Donations gathered at a variety of sites will be dropped off to Meest a boots-on-the-ground organization with a base in Federal Way.
Items needed:
Cotton bandages, gauze bandages, dressing bandages
Cotton
Hydrogen peroxide
Brilliant green
Activated carbon tablets
Paracetamol
Aspirin
Analgin
Spasmalgon
Band-aid all sizes
Isopropyl rubbing alcohol
Tourniquets
Ibuprofen
Sedatives
Painkillers
Iodine
Fucorcin
Items for personal hygiene: toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, shaving cream, etc.
Paper towels
Tissue
Gloves and mittens
Power banks
Flashlights
Tactical equipment
Walkie-talkies
Dry cakes
Children’s mixes
Car first aid kits
Medical gloves
Thermal blankets
Body armor and helmets
Thermal underwear and sleeping bags
Hemostatic
Analgesics
Bandages
Syringes 2 and 5 cubic meters
Systems (droppers) Plaits (turnstiles)
Plaster bandages
All for the treatment of field injuries
Cream, powder
Where to donate:
Bethlehem Slavic Church
302 W. Augusta Ave, Spokane, WA 99203
Thursday and Friday between 5-7 p.m.
South Hill
Natasha Yunin – 3918 E 25th Ave, Spokane, WA 992233
Any day between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m.
Liberty Lake
Tanya Wann – call/text before drop off, 509-768-2933
24226 E Maxwell Ave, Liberty Lake, WA 99019
Spokane Valley
Marando’s Restaurant – 11320 E Sprague, Spokane Valley, WA 99206
Venmo: @tanyawann
Cash app: $tanyawann
PayPal: @tanywann or email tanya.syva@gmail.com
Zelle: tanya.syva@gmail.com
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New bill looks to lease state property near I-90 and North Spokane Corridor back to East Central community
Now that the state plans to lease surplus land back to the community, local Thomas Speight hopes that the property will be turned into affordable housing.
SPOKANE, Wash. — The East Central Neighborhood in Spokane could see more changes along the I-90 corridor.
The legislature passed senate bill 5853, which would allow the department of transportation to lease state property near Interstate 90 and the north Spokane corridor back to the community. Thomas Speight's house used to be near 3rd and myrtle.
"They were buying all the property up,” Speight said. “The state came through and offered us good money for the house. So I told my mom to sell."
The Speight family was one of the hundreds that sold their house in 2010. This forces Speight to move out of the East Central neighborhood.
“I felt ties to the neighborhood," Speight said.
So much so that he ended up opening his bakery Spokane Cheesecake a year later in the neighborhood. Now that the state plans to lease surplus land back to the community, Speight hopes that the property will be turned into affordable housing. State Senator Andy Billig says most likely it will, and this bill aims to reconnect the neighborhood.
"This is a part also of a national conversation and a conversation throughout our state about writing some of the wrongs from the past with highway construction, Billig said.
According to the bill, whoever leases the land will pay less than the market value, but the exact cost is still undetermined.
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