When Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown’s office announced its plans this month for helping people withstand the first major heat wave of the summer, the details looked familiar.
The city’s six libraries would act as cooling centers during business hours. The Trent Avenue shelter expanded its capacity. Residents were encouraged to use splash pads at city parks and take a dip in public pools. The Spokane Transit Authority would offer free rides to people trying to get to a designated cool space.
The approach was similar to that described in a July 2023 press release issued by Brown’s predecessor, former mayor Nadine Woodward. And one from August 2022. And another from July 2022.
Spokane’s municipal code requires the city to activate an extreme weather plan for unsheltered people when temperatures are forecast to reach 95 degrees for two or more consecutive days. Seven months into Brown’s term, there have not been substantial changes in the way the city government approaches heat waves.
Brown and Neighborhood, Housing and Human Services Director Dawn Kinder said officials are doing the best they can under budget problems inherited from previous administrations, while at the same time attempting to rewrite the way weather emergencies are handled in the future.
“I think the current approach gives people options while we work to transition from large congregate shelters to [a] small, dispersed shelter model,” Brown said in a recent conversation with SPR News. “Ultimately, our goal is to stand up these smaller emergency shelters.”
One change this summer is the ability to expand capacity at the Trent shelter, Kinder said. That would give some people an overnight option to seek refuge from the heat. Libraries are places people already use to cool off on hot summer days, Kinder said, so advertising them as designated cooling centers and extending their operating hours are considered good options.
One person who works with Spokane’s unsheltered said those steps aren’t enough.
“[There are] absolutely gigantic gaps in the response,” said Julie Garcia, CEO of Jewels Helping Hands. “This is the same narrative that we’ve seen for the last two administrations, which is that libraries can facilitate caring for people experiencing homelessness during these heat snaps.”
The problem, Garcia said, is that libraries are not 24/7 facilities. Neither are pools and splash pads. And though Spokane Transit is offering free rides to cooling centers, Garcia said that doesn’t solve transportation issues that could stand in the way for people trying to get to and from pools, parks and libraries.
Garcia, whose work with Spokane’s unsheltered began in 2017, said she thinks the city’s methods are stuck in neutral.
Brown’s administration acknowledged more needs to be done. Brown and Kinder said they want to end Spokane’s reliance on large shelters clustered around downtown and shift to a “scattered site” model.
“In an ideal scenario, we would have multiple small locations where people could access cooling centers, whether they’re housed or unhoused,” Kinder said.
In late June, the city began soliciting proposals for a navigation center that would coordinate services for the unhoused and direct people to the right place for their needs. The city also encouraged proposals for 20- to 30-bed scattered site shelters. The contractor that’s selected would create the navigation center and have the ability to issue subcontracts for the small shelters, according to city spokeswoman Erin Hut.
A project timeline posted to the Community, Housing and Human Services (CHHS) website calls for initial navigation center applicants to get CHHS consideration and a city council vote in August, with the goal of launching the center in September.
Brown’s office is also working to discover partnerships that can be forged with churches and other faith-based organizations. Those conversations are based in part on experience built in January, when Jewels Helping Hands persuaded four churches to devote some of their space to serve as overnight warming centers during a brutal cold snap. Three are still participating, Kinder said, though their current agreement is set to end next month.
The sales tax increase Brown proposed July 8 would ply a portion of its revenue into extreme weather response. But the tax proposal needs approval from the city council and Spokane’s voters before it could take effect. The revenue is also intended to help fund police and fire services. The amount to be directed to extreme weather planning has yet to be announced.
At the end of January, transition committees assembled by Brown submitted recommendations for the mayor’s first hundred days in office. Extreme weather response wasn’t specifically mentioned, but one recommendation called for the creation of an Office of Community Resilience whose responsibilities would include helping coordinate efforts to adjust Spokane to climate change’s effects. That office has yet to be established.
But Brown said she wants to search within future city budgets for more resources that can be directed toward helping people endure extreme weather events beyond heat waves, such as cold snaps and wildfire smoke.
“We know that these climate-related emergencies are not going to diminish anytime soon,” Brown said.
