Council approves new Spokane police chief
The Spokane City Council has confirmed the city’s new police chief.
Kevin Hall, who has been the former assistant chief in Tucson, Arizona will replace interim chief Justin Lundberg, who has made a transition to the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office.
Police reform activists, such as Anwar Peace from the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, said they’re cautiously optimistic Hall will take their concerns seriously.
“He really impressed me during his interviews because of the fact that he has been credited for his innovative approaches to community-based violent crime reduction, alternative staff and response models, as well as ethical budgeting,” Peace said at last night's city council meeting.
“Plus, in June, he was named to the Evidence-Based Policing Hall of Fame, which I’m eager to learn more about, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he plans on bringing that to Spokane.”
Hall is scheduled to begin his new job next Monday.
State climate grant money to help Maxey Center become resilience hub
The Carl Maxey Center and Gonzaga’s Institute for Climate, Water and the Environment are the joint recipients of state grant money aimed at helping communities deal with climate change.
The money will aid the Maxey Center’s effort to become a resilience hub – a place that can be opened to the public when the weather is extremely hot or extremely cold, on poor air quality days, or in the event of protracted power outages.
Currently, the city of Spokane’s extreme weather centers are its six public libraries. Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown’s administration and the city council want to adopt the resilience hub model at other places, such as community centers and churches.
Early findings indicate resilience hubs may work best when they’re places locals already know and trust, according to Gonzaga Climate Resilience Program Manager Dante Jester.
“The Carl Maxey Center is a big one of those, obviously,” Jester told SPR News. “It’s very central to the East Central neighborhood. [The resilience hub project is] taking that location, and not changing it in any drastic way, but changing how people think about it during an extreme weather event.”
Among other needs, the grant money will pay for a survey to find out what the community’s emergency needs are. The findings will be shared with Brown’s office and with the city council.
The grant is funded by revenues generated through the Climate Commitment Act. The 2021 law seeks in part to raise money from carbon allowances auctions aimed at the state’s biggest polluters. A conservative-backed ballot measure this fall asks voters to repeal the act.
Labrador tries again to block open primary/ranked choice ballot initiative
Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador has re-filed a lawsuit that seeks to nix a November ballot measure that would change Idaho’s primary and general elections.
The initiative would institute a primary system in which the top four candidates, regardless of party, would advance to the general election. It would also implement ranked-choice voting for general election, under which voters would rank candidates in order of preference.
First reported by the Idaho Statesman, Labrador’s suit contains the same allegations as an earlier complaint that was dismissed by the Idaho Supreme Court: that the initiative’s organizers misled voters about the true purpose of the measure. He claimed the changes proposed under the initiative would be “unpopular and complicated.”
The state Supreme Court did not rule on the validity of Labrador’s accusations. The justices found that he skipped a step in the judicial process by going to them first, rather than a lower court. Labrador re-filed his suit Friday in Ada County.
Luke Mayville, a spokesman for the group Idahoans for Open Primaries, told the Idaho Capital Sun that Labrador is “doing everything in his power to interfere with the election and deny voters a voice.”
Washington apple harvest forecast shows little change from 2023
Orchard owners expect to harvest 124 million 40-pound boxes of apples. While that’s slightly lower than in 2023, the Washington Tree Fruit Association says this year's estimate is still in the normal range.
The association’s Jon DeVaney said frosty weather in late spring caused some light damage, but not nearly as severe as the damage done to other fruit, such as pears, cherries, and peaches. He said the hot triple-digit temperatures that followed did not have much of a negative effect on apples, in part because of precautions taken by orchardists.
“For example, putting up shade cloth, doing some overhead cooling with sprinklers on their trees to prevent damage, and from what we've been hearing from our members, those methods were enough to prevent any real crop damage,” Devaney told SPR News.
DeVaney says the most popular-selling varieties of apples will take up a larger share of the harvest this year. Gala apples are expected to comprise nearly 20-percent of production. Granny Smith is next at 15 percent. About one in six apples harvested will be considered organic apples, up from about one in 10 five years ago.
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Reporting was contributed by Brandon Hollingsworth, Clark Corbin and Steve Jackson.