Today's headlines:
- A majority of WA Supreme Court seats are up for election this year as the court prepares to hear historic cases.
- Spokane County relaunches its emergency notification system.
- Hunters aims to fix its water treatment system to lower arsenic, manganese levels.
- State funding for salmon recovery dries up.
- Salish School of Spokane gets funding for a solar project at its yet-to-be-built campus.
Plus, a conversation with the founder of FaVS News. The Eastern Washington-based religion-focused outlet is expanding its footprint at a time when many local news organizations are shrinking.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting contributed by Sarah Mizes-Tan, Doug Nadvornick, Monica Carrillo-Casas and Owen Henderson.
Owen Henderson hosts and produces the show.
TRANSCRIPT
[THEME MUSIC]
OWEN HENDERSON: From Spokane Public Radio, it’s SPR News Today.
I’m Owen Henderson. It’s Thursday, April 23, 2026.
On today’s show, a look at several state supreme court races on this fall’s Washington ballot.
Voter turnout for those contests tends to be low, but this year’s races could majorly change a court that’s poised to decide on historic cases.
And funding for salmon protection was one of many casualties to budget cuts during the recent legislative session in Olympia. How will it affect the effort to bring back the Northwest’s iconic fish?
Plus, a conversation with the founder of FAVs News. The Eastern Washington-based religion-focused outlet is expanding its footprint at a time when many local news organizations are shrinking.
Those stories and more, coming up on SPR News Today.
[FADE OUT THEME]
Five seats on the Washington state Supreme Court are up for election this year. It’s something experts say hasn’t happened in recent memory.
These races tend to have low voter participation rates.
But as Olympia correspondent Sarah Mizes-Tan reports, this election could bring big changes.
SARAH MIZES-TAN: Usually, there are about three seats that are open for election, but five is a majority of the Supreme Court seats.
There are only nine in total, so there really is the potential for a big court change.
The court has typically leaned more moderate-progressive, but depending on who you speak to, some who are watching these races closely think there is a chance—depending on who's elected in November—for the court to shift slightly more conservative.
OH: That was state government reporter Sarah Mizes-Tan.
The new court will also be tasked with deciding the constitutionality of the so-called “millionaires’ tax.”
It’s the first state-level income tax in Washington.
It imposes a 9.9% tax on personal income over $1 million.
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Spokane County’s ALERT Spokane emergency communications system is making a comeback.
The service that sends information to people via their phones and computers went offline in November when the previous vendor, CodeRED, experienced a serious cyberattack in November.
The county has hired a new company, Regroup Mass Notification, to relaunch the system.
Deputy Emergency Management Director Chandra Fox says the new version includes newer and more accurate maps and information.
She says it’s a more localized and comprehensive version of other emergency apps, like Watch Duty.
FOX: “Watch Duty is not going to help you in a winter storm and it's not going to help you if there's police activity down the block and the police want you to stay in your home. So, you know, if folks really want to be aware and tied into the messaging, this is the way to do it.”
OH: Fox says people who subscribed before will have to sign up again for the new system.
They can do that at ALERT Spokane dot org or the county’s emergency management website.
Fox hopes to increase the participation in the emergency alert system.
She says only 15% of county residents were registered before the old system became inoperable.
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The rural town of Hunters’ current water quality isn’t great. But that’s about to change.
After a three-year project, the Hunters Water District is finishing a new treatment system.
Horrocks Associate Engineer Tyson Larson says this will help remove high levels of arsenic and manganese in the Stevens County town’s water.
Horrocks has been part of the construction process of the project.
TYSON LARSON: “I’m very excited to finally see, you know, see the construction almost complete, and get this system up and running, because I know it's been a struggle for a while right for the district.”
OH: Larson says the last water treatment system installed was 15 years ago but faced technical issues and stopped working properly.
And he says that led to the high arsenic and manganese levels.
The new system is expected to be completed sometime next week.
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Salmon took a hit this year in Olympia as funding to help the Northwest’s signature fish dried up.
People who work to restore fish habitat say salmon runs will keep declining unless legislators make bigger investments in their future.
KUOW’s John Ryan reports.
[CREEK AMBI]
JOHN RYAN: A little stream called Starbird Creek meanders through the lowlands of the Skagit Valley. Its water is dark brown with tannins from nearby wetlands.
YUKI REISS: “Even though they're hard to see, I'm sure there's coho in here right now.”
JR: Yuki Reiss is a restoration ecologist with the Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group.
It’s one of 14 regional non-profits formed by the state legislature to save salmon.
The Skagit group got state funding to remove salmon-blocking culverts from a private road on Starbird Creek.
YR: “This project opened up over six miles of habitat upstream.”
JR: She says results were quick.
YR: “If you remove a barrier one summer, that fall, you're gonna see salmon moving upstream past where they weren't able to get before.”
JR: State funding for the regional salmon groups has dropped by about a third.
State agencies that work on salmon have also had their budgets cut.
The state budget signed by Governor Bob Ferguson preserved core services over environmental spending.
Advocates and state officials say the spending is essential to getting salmon and orcas off the endangered-species list.
Federal funding for Pacific salmon has been steady. The Trump administration wanted to eliminate it. Congress rejected that idea.
Still, millions in federal funds for salmon are months overdue.
I'm John Ryan, reporting.
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OH: A new grant will make plans for a new Salish School campus more sustainable.
The nonprofit Indigenous language immersion school is getting more than 700 thousand dollars from Avista Utilities to install solar panels and battery storage at its planned site along the Spokane River.
Former executive director LaRae Wiley is the school’s elder linguist.
LaRAE WILEY: “It's part of our cultural outlook to be stewards for the land and to leave as little impact as we can. And so I really feel like having this solar project is a step in the right direction. And I'm hoping that we can be a model for other nonprofits who are working in language revitalization.”
OH: Wiley says the planned solar project on the school and community building will be able to produce enough energy to power about a dozen homes a year.
And she says the battery storage will hold enough power for about 10 homes.
LW: “We wanted to use our community and recreational center as a climate resiliency spot for people in the community. So, like, if they don't have electricity or if there's a climate event or smoke event, that that facility could be used to help people in our community.”
OH: The Salish School is still based at its location near Shadle Park High School as it raises the last two million dollars it needs for the new campus.
A groundbreaking for the new school and community buildings is set for mid May.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
This is a time when many local news organizations are reducing the frequency and range of their services.
But one eastern Washington outlet that specializes in covering religion is expanding to cover all of the Evergreen State.
SPR’s Doug Nadvornick talked with its founder.
DOUG NADVORNICK: FaVS News started as an online publication in Spokane in 2012. When founder Tracy Simmons took a job at Washington State University, she moved its home base to Pullman.
TRACY SIMMONS: And then all of a sudden our readership and our coverage expanded there, and then we started to overflow a little bit, of course, into, you know, North Idaho.
But some of our reporters have moved from the Spokane or Palouse area to Seattle area, and they wanted to keep writing for us. And then, you know, we just started connecting with other publications who wanted to, you know, see if they could run our content.
And so, we thought, you know, let's make 2026 the year that we intentionally make this move and go statewide.
DN: That’s not to say FaVS News is flush with money. Simmons keeps it going through contributions from readers.
TS: We also do charge for our newswire service for some publications who are able to pay for it. So, that helps us as well, and of course, we're always looking for grant money and sponsorships.
DN: So, you've lined up a specific group of cadre of reporters around the state. Where do you have people lined up?
TS: Yeah, we have obviously a bunch of reporters still in Spokane, some in Moscow, Idaho, some in Pullman. We have someone in Boise, which is, of course, not Washington, but we have a reporter in Seattle. We're starting to work with a reporter in Vancouver, and we have someone in Newcastle, and which I had to look up on the map.
I didn't know where that was, and we are actively recruiting more Westside reporters as well as reporters who want to cover some of the more rural areas.
DN: Are there stories in particular you're looking for over on the west side?
TS: Well, I just talked to a publisher yesterday who's really interested in working with us, and he said, you know, I understand that you're probably looking for a lot of statewide stories. He's like, but we really care about local news, and they don't have the staff to cover local religion news, and so I think our role would be to kind of look for publishers like that who are the eyes and ears of their community, but they cannot cover local religion news like they would like to, and so they can ask us to do it for them, and so I think that's two things.
I think we're looking for those really local stories that we can kind of highlight at a statewide level, but then we're also looking for stories that impact the entire state.
DN: So why do you think people are reading more of your publication and spending more time with it?
TS: I think religion news is having a moment, and I'm afraid that moment is not for a good reason, right?
There's a lot of talk right now about religion and politics, Christian nationalism, immigration, you know, all those things have a tie to religion or at least values and ethics, and so I think those things are kind of getting people more interested in reading about religion.
And I think publishers are realizing that readers want to hear and read more about religion issues, and so it's keeping us really busy.
DN: Are you continuing to solicit commentaries from folks from a whole different variety of faith traditions?
TS: We are. So right now we have, I think, 36 opinion writers who are writing about current events from their faith perspective, and a lot of those are, of course, east side folks. I'm sorry, west side folks, but we're looking to expand that.
So I just got a pastor from Seattle, actually two pastors from Seattle just started writing for us, so I love that we're going over there, but we're also looking to diversify our voices, so we would really like to get more like Muslim writers, Jewish writers, even more evangelical writers.
DN: What are your most popular stories these days?
TS: I do a lot of reporting on Doug Wilson, who lives over in Moscow, so whenever we write about Doug Wilson, those stories get a lot of traction, but we're also seeing that people are looking for kind of like uplifting stories, because the news, as you know, this is what you do for a living, is so depressing right now.
And so I think if we can find stories of really cool positive things that are happening, people really like that, and then people also like the commentaries about how can we come together as a community and as a society.
DN: Tracy Simmons is the founder and executive director of FaVS News, which is expanding its coverage to the entire state of Washington, as well as parts of north Idaho.
I’m Doug Nadvornick reporting.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
OH: SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Sarah Mizes-Tan, Doug Nadvornick, Monica Carrillo-Casas, John Ryan and me, Owen Henderson.
I’m also your host and producer.
Thanks for listening.
It’s SPR.
