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Council Member-Elect Lori Kinnear Excited for Term to Begin

Kevin Boyd via flickr
Washington Power and City Hall, Spokane

Spokane's new city council member is ready to get to work when she is sworn in come January. Steve Jackson sat down this week with Lori Kinnear.

Lori Kinnear hopes to hit the ground running when she is joins the council officially in January. As the legislative aide to current council member Amber Waldref and former councilman Richard Rush, she believes she already has a head start since she is familiar with how ordinances are written and researched and also accustomed to dealing with city staff.

“Planners, the people in neighborhood services, the people in HR, all the people that work under the mayor, those are the people you have to work to get ordinances passed, to get information.”

As for priorities, Kinnearbelieves public safety is job number one. She says she helped to craft an ordinance dealing with human trafficking, along with the city attorney’s office under Mayor Verner, and she wants to revisit that to see if there are loose ends that need fixing. She also wants to look at “Smart Justice” reforms tied to property crime. She says Spokane police lament the fact that they often arrest people for property crimes, but many don’t serve jail time because the jail is full of other offenders.

“Smart Justice can address if we actually need people in jail--or in drug treatment or mental health intervention or just have too many parking tickets.  Why are they there?  Because people who commit property crimes should be in jail. They shouldn’t be out to commit them again.”

After the beginning of the year, the council will address the issue of a city-wide sick leave policy for employers.

Kinnear says she wants some time to decide how that should be crafted.  “I would like to talk to business owners who would be affected by that. I want to find out what their concerns are. That’s not to say I don’t support it.  I just want to look at it again.  I just feel because I’m the new person coming in, I should be able to do that.”

Kinnear also wants to reassure those who might worry about the support she got from unions who contributed to her campaign.  “We have become a community and nation that is vilifying unions."

Kinnear says she believes the analysis of the election as a move by the council to a progressive majority is overstated. She says the council is far from the type of leaders who would agree on specific issues because of their political leanings and cites the recent dealings with the city leave policy as a good example of that.

Steve was part of the Spokane Public Radio family for many years before he came on air in 1999. His wife, Laurie, produced Radio Ethiopia in the late 1980s through the '90s, and Steve used to “lurk in the shadowy world” of Weekend SPR. Steve has done various on air shifts at the station, including nearly 15 years as the local Morning Edition host. Currently, he is the voice of local weather and news during All Things Considerd, writing, editing, producing and/or delivering newscasts and features for both KPBX and KSFC. Aside from SPR, Steve ,who lives in the country, enjoys gardening, chickens, playing and listening to music, astronomy, photography, sports cars and camping.