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Spokane City Council Candidate Lacrecia "Lu" Hill Calls For New Approaches To Policing, Homelessness

Courtesy of Lucrecia Hill

This week, we’re interviewing people who have announced their candidacy for Spokane city council. We're focusing this week on the five candidates in the Northwest district. Today, Rebecca White introduces us to Lacrecia “Lu” Hill.Hill grew up in Hillyard. She's a yoga teacher, consultant and owner of several cannabis brands.

If elected to city council, she hopes to bring a combination of her lived, Spokane experience, and her business and non-profit expertise. She said there are several ways the city council could help the small business community recover from the pandemic, saying many were missed in coronavirus aid programs over the last year.

“What we could have done is really negotiated and reached a little deeper into the communities. My experience with a lot of my friends that had small businesses, they couldn’t even access those resources. It would have been nice to see a bigger push to make those dollars more flexible for small businesses and the operating costs they were needing to cover during this time.”

Hill’s also focused on homelessness, and affordable housing saying the city needs to work toward providing long-term housing combined with services.

“A lot of our houseless members are experiencing really hard times and they won’t be able to function in housing without additional services. As a community, those are dollars we have to commit to.”

Hill said the city also needs to look for alternatives to traditional policing. She said social workers and other unique solutions can ensure better outcomes for families, and individuals in need, rather than relying on the police for every situation.

“We have been doing the same thing the same way for a very long time. I think it’s exciting to look at better ways that we triage people in need in our community. That takes all of us working together to look at how we respond to people in need. There should be nothing wrong with having an evidence-based approach to how we’re spending our dollars in our community.”

Hill is running for a seat in city council district three which includes West Central, Indian Trail and the Shadle Park area.

She is running against Mike Lish, Christopher Savage, Karen Kearney and Zack Zappone. A full interview with each candidate will be posted online spokanepublicradio.org and stories with the rest of the candidates are airing this week.

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Spokane City Council Candidate Lucrecia Hill is running for an open seat in the Northwest District.

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