Spokane Transportation Director Jon Snyder hopes to close fee loophole for big trucks
A loophole in Washington law lets larger vehicles avoid paying a fee to help improve roads.
Some Spokane officials want to change that to keep the city from missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Every time you register a vehicle or update your car tabs, you probably pay a Transportation Benefit District, or TBD, fee. Those dollars help pay for road improvements.
But even though the numbers of people and cars in Spokane are going up, TBD revenue isn’t. That could be blamed on people not updating car tabs, but Spokane Director of Transportation and Sustainability Jon Snyder thinks something else is going on.
"I think we’ve found something that’s bigger than noncompliance," he said. "And that is the increase in heavier trucks."
A decades-old Washington state law excludes vehicles heavier than 6,000 pounds from paying an annual TBD fee.
Snyder said he suspects legislators were trying to exempt commercial vehicles, but now, plenty of personal vehicles are that heavy.
Recent models of Ford Explorers, Jeep Wranglers, Chevy Tahoes, Dodge Durangos and Tesla Cybertrucks all weigh more than 6,000 pounds.
Snyder’s team was able to estimate the number of exempted cars in Spokane.
"It's about 18,000 vehicles," he said. "If you turn that into $20 per a year for registration that's $360,000-ish dollars that we could be using to fix streets."
Snyder is now asking the city to support legislation that would close this loophole.
Pertussis makes a reappearance in Whitman County
After three months without an outbreak, whooping cough is back in Whitman County.
Whitman County Public Health reported a pertussis, or whooping cough, outbreak last week.
The health department says people should talk to their health care provider if they have been in close contact with someone who has pertussis.
Pertussis is a bacterial infection that is particularly dangerous to infants under a year old. It starts with cold-like symptoms before developing into a severe cough.
A person is considered a close contact if they live in the same household as an infected person, or spent several hours together with someone who was symptomatic.
Pertussis cases that are caught early can be treated with antibiotics to reduce the risk of spreading it to others.
Public records audit gives Spokane high marks
An audit of Spokane’s public records performance says the city is compliant and doing a good job.
This might be a surprise if you’ve submitted one of the hundreds of requests in recent years that have taken over six months to fill.
Auditor Danielle Arnold found that the city has around a 93% compliance rate, meaning requests are initially responded to within 5 days per state law.
"The other part, the part that gives people a lot of opinions and emotions, is how long it takes to get something done and through the finish line," she said. "For the most part, the city does a really good job. We do have some that are in excess of six months, and most of those are due to complexity."
According to the audit, Spokane received nearly 17,000 records requests in 2024.
Around 13,000 of those requests involved the Spokane Police Department, which handles its own records requests.
The SPD’s compliance rate is consistently about 10% lower than the city.
Arnold recommended better employee training and interpersonal improvements.
Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates said the city’s IT department is exploring ways to use AI to pre-redact documents and lighten city clerks’ workloads.
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Reporting by Eliza Billingham and Rachel Sun.