This week on Inland Journal...
Members of Spokane’s Safe and Healthy Task Force have been researching potential solutions to the community’s difficult public safety and public health issues. Today, we talk with two of its members, Dr. Melissa Mace and Chud Wendle, to hear about what they’re learning and what they might recommend.
"There's a lot of individuals in the jail with severe challenges that shouldn't be there, whether it's mental health or substance abuse disorders, and we're not giving a fair shot to them or the community. And so I think this puzzle is very complex and how the community comes together and crafts it. We have the right people at the table to do that, I believe."
Washington legislators have given Spokane more time to devise a way to scrub greenhouse gases from the waste-to-energy plant emissions. We’ll talk with city Public Works Director Marlene Feist about the challenges involved and how the city is approaching them.
"How can we reduce the amount coming out of the stack? A lot of it's on how do we get plastics and packaging out of the waste stream...and then carbon capture. Can we do carbon capture? How do we pay for carbon capture? And those are the things we're exploring...That's really the next big step for Spokane."
