Today's headlines:
- Three Spokane protesters are guilty of conspiracy, a jury says after reviewing the defendants' interactions with federal immigration officers last summer.
- Public defense tops priorities as Spokane city officials prepare for budget season.
- KCRCC elects former Post Falls mayor to chairmanship, completing the ouster of Brent Regan.
- DOJ sues Washington and Oregon over refusal to issue undercover license plates to DHS agents.
- Graduate loan caps threaten to reduce an already shrinking number of primary care physicians in Washington.
- WSU Cougars take on OSU in NCAA regional, hoping for a first College World Series appearance in 50 years.
Plus, wildfire season has arrived a little earlier than usual in the Northwest. The Spokane and Confederated Colville Tribes are trying to prevent unnecessary disasters by largely banning fireworks on their reservations. SPR’s Doug Nadvornick speaks with Confederated Colville Tribes Executive Director Cody Desautel.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting was contributed by Doug Nadvornick, Eliza Billingham and Owen Henderson.
Owen Henderson hosts and produces the show. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
TRANSCRIPT
[THEME MUSIC]
OWEN HENDERSON: From Spokane Public Radio, it’s SPR News Today.
I’m Owen Henderson. It’s Friday, May 29, 2026.
On today’s show, the three Spokanites facing federal conspiracy charges for actions during last year’s anti-immigration enforcement protests have been convicted.
Plus, Washington health officials are warning that an incoming limit on student borrowing will mean fewer medical school graduates will go into primary care.
And wildfire season is starting sooner than usual this year.
The Colville Reservation has seen nearly a million acres burn in the last decade.
We’ll hear from the Confederated Colville Tribes’ executive director about how his community is planning for summer after a dry winter.
Those stories and more, coming up on SPR News Today.
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Three Spokanites convicted of federal conspiracy charges yesterday now await their sentencing.
Jac Archer, Justice Forral and Bajun Mavalwalla II were arrested for trying to prevent federal officers from transporting two detained immigrants to Tacoma.
The trio—dubbed the “Spokane 3”—were among hundreds who responded to a Facebook post by former City Council president Ben Stuckart.
Nine, including Stuckart, were arrested on conspiracy charges. He was among six who took guilty pleas for reduced sentences.
After a jury handed down the verdict yesterday, Spokane State Rep. Natasha Hill thanked people who supported the defendants through the nearly two-week trial—but called out Stuckart.
NATASHA HILL: “It’s not the people in positions who have a lot of power. It wasn’t Ben Stuckart. I ain’t seen him. You started this and you couldn’t even show up to finish it. So I call on you and I call on others to do what you said you were going to do and stand up for your community because the fight is not over with this conviction.”
OH: The father of one protestor says federal attorneys wanted to make an example of his son.
Bajun Mavalwalla, Senior, who is running for Congress, says the federal government is trying to deter people around the country from speaking out against immigration enforcement policy.
BAJUN MAVALWALLA: “The right to protest, the right to dissent, the right to assemble. All of those things are now in question because of this case. In other cases across the country, the juries were not tainted and the cases have been thrown out.”
OH: Mavalwalla says he hopes that will happen in this case as well.
Defense attorneys say they expect to appeal the conviction.
The protestors face up to six years in prison and up to 250-thousand dollars in fines.
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As Spokane County and its public defenders are locked in a lawsuit over pay and caseloads, city officials say they need to “lean in” to funding public defense.
Budget director Kate Fairborn is collecting funding priorities from council members.
Public defense currently sits at second highest on that list.
KATE FAIRBORN: “The Washington State Supreme Court has come out with mandates that will be incrementally increasing the number of public defenders by decreasing caseload ratios per public defender. So the city will definitely need to lean into the funding of public defenders more than we have.”
OH: The top Council priority right now is increasing funds to Municipal Court.
Reserve accounts and libraries also rank highly.
Fairborn says while city revenue will likely increase by about 3%, expenses will likely increase by at least 5%, especially due to rising employee benefits costs.
That will put Spokane back in a situation where cuts will be needed to balance spending.
Spokane City Council will need to finalize and send its budget priorities to the mayor’s office by July 1.
The mayor will then craft her initial budget proposal in the fall.
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The Justice Department is suing Washington, Oregon and two other states for refusing to issue undercover license plates to some federal agents.
DOJ says the states are illegally undermining immigration enforcement.
Washington’s A-G last week told DOJ the constitution doesn’t require states to help the administration take “lawless acts.”
Oregon officials say issuing the plates the Department of Homeland Security agents may violate the state’s sanctuary policies.
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The Kootenai County Republican Central Committee’s far-right leader has now lost his posts both as precinct committeeman and chairman, The Spokesman Review reports.
Former Chair Brent Regan was eligible to run for leadership but wasn’t nominated in last night’s election.
Instead, the KCRCC elected former Post Falls Mayor Ron Jacobson over state Senator Ben Toews by a wide margin.
Both candidates called for unity in the party.
The election comes after this month’s precinct elections saw candidates backed by the far-right Kootenai Freedom Caucus and more traditional North Idaho Republicans each win about half of the county’s precinct committee seats.
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Federal limits on student loans go into effect this July. That could affect the future of primary care in Washington.
SPR’s Eliza Billingham reports.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: Washington’s Health Care Authority says growth in the primary care sector is slower than specialist areas, thanks to fewer entry-level clinicians, more retirements and more burn out.
Chief Medical Officer Judy Zerzan-Thul says another looming factor may slow the pipeline even more.
ZERZAN-THUL: “Limits in borrowing for health professions and new lifetime limits on graduate degrees across health professions…I think could limit the number of people, especially if they are not of a high income, that are able to complete this type of education.”
EB: The Working Families Tax Cuts Act, previously called the One Big Beautiful Bill, put a lifetime borrowing cap of around 250,000 dollars for most graduate students.
A Princeton Review study says the median cost of a public four-year medical school degree is closer to 270 thousand dollars. The private school median is more than 350 thousand.
Zerzan-Thul says she expects even more graduates will now be pressured to seek specialist jobs instead of primary care, since specialists get paid more.
I’m Eliza Billingham, reporting.
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OH: The Washington State baseball team takes a step toward the College World Series today.
The Cougars play longtime rival Oregon State in a first-round NCAA regional game in Eugene.
The Beavers have won three national championships in the last two decades.
The Cougs haven't been to the College World Series in 50 years.
After the Pac-12 Conference broke apart in 2024, OSU became an independent in baseball, while the Cougars joined the Mountain West Conference for two years.
Here’s WSU Coach Nathan Choate during this week’s Cougar baseball podcast.
NATHAN CHOATE: “And it’s just crazy, like, two years ago, we’re in the same spot and here we are, playing on Friday, in the same spot. We’ve just taken different paths to get there.”
OH: The winner of this weekend’s double elimination tournament will move on to a best two-out-of-three super regional series next weekend.
The Cougars and Beavers play today at noon. Oregon and Yale play this afternoon at 5.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
Wildfire season has arrived in the Northwest, a little earlier than usual.
The Spokane and Confederated Colville tribes have taken a proactive approach by banning fireworks in most settings. SPR’s Doug Nadvornick reports.
DOUG NADVORNICK: Cody Desautel, the Colville Tribes executive director, says the tribe decided, with a busy summer ahead, needed to make a decision early about fireworks.
CODY DESAUTEL: If it looks like it's a bad idea, we'll make the decision proactively early in the year to ban those so that people know ahead of time, don't go buy fireworks from outside vendors or tribal vendors buying them to sell at a later date, and again, just trying to be as proactive so that the folks in the community are aware and can make other plans accordingly so that we don't run into those few individuals sometimes that make bad choices because they already had them and they want to use them and they think it's probably going to be okay. That's not always the case.
DN: And what do tribal members think about the ban?
CD: Largely what we've heard from our membership is support for it. I think they recognize a potentially bad season on the horizon and so what we've heard so far is good decision. We're glad you did it now.
Colville has more experience with catastrophic fire than anywhere else in the state. If you go back to even just 2015 for us, we've seen 900,000 acres of a 1.4 million acre reservation burn in a decade, so our membership is particularly aware of the potential of wildfire and what those impacts are.
DN: So what's this spring been like so far in terms of fires?
CD: Fairly light, although our snowpack was really low. Looking at the snow tail data, so we've got a site that measures snowpack and snow water equivalent. We were at about a third of where we typically are. So we recognized that early and we had a little bit of prescribed fire done this spring. Not as much as we'd have liked to, but recognizing we were coming into a potentially dangerous wildfire season and that other parts of the country were starting to warm up, that it maybe was best that we not have any holdover fires from prescribed fire this spring. So we got a little bit done, but not as much as we'd have liked to. With the conditions forecasted for the summer, we thought it was probably best to go ahead and stop early. And make sure we had everything buckled down and ready to go into July and August, which is typically the heart of our fire season.
DN: Desautel says the Colville Tribe’s experiences over the last decade have changed how it approaches fire now.
CD: We do a good job with land use planning, so we don't allow people to build out in the wildland urban interface, but lots of other places do. So when we see suppression resources get allocated, they tend to send them to places like Lake Chelan or Cle Elum and places that have a lot of development out in the wildland. What that means is we can protect our communities, but once it's kind of burned away from the communities, we tend not to see a lot of support. We end up being low priority because we don't have life and property at risk, which is always priority number one outside the initial attack when they're determining where suppression resources should go. That's a challenge for us, so we try to do as much work ahead of the season as we can to keep fires either small or reduce the post-fire impacts. I think that's really been a shift in our management over the last four or five years that we thought we were doing the right things for a long time, and then the 2015 fire season hit and we burned 255,000 acres and have since reconsidered what we're doing and kind of shifted our focus more from fire prevention and suppression to how do we create landscapes that can accept fire and you have post-fire conditions that are more consistent with what we've seen historically when tribal people got to use fire on a very regular interval, keep fuels reduced, keep fire risk reduced, and shifted our focus towards that. But it's a bit challenging because that's not really the way the regulations are written or the way that fuels funding gets allocated through the BIA, so we're hoping to correct some of those things with this new wildland fire service.
DN: Are you in better shape now than you were 10 years ago, 11 years ago?
CD: Absolutely. We've started to see the switch. So although we're seeing fairly large acreages still burn at Colville, we're seeing much lower percentages of high-severity fire. And we did better than most because of the work we'd done since, really, the 1980s when we shifted our forest management approach. If you look at much of that Swawilla fire from 2024, although it was over 53,000 acres, more than half of it was really beneficial fire. So that's really become our goal. How do we recognize that we're not going to get resources? How do we create a landscape that is resilient to fire and post-fire impacts that are more consistent with what we'd have seen historically.
DN: Cody Desautel says the tribes have about 100 people available to fight wildfires this summer. If it needs more, it has agreements with the state and federal government to bring in others. But with the new U-S Wildland Fire Service, Desautel isn’t sure how or whether the tribe will be able to call on the feds for help.
I’m Doug Nadvornick reporting.
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OH: SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Doug Nadvornick, Eliza Billingham and me Owen Henderson
I’m also your host and producer. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
Thanks for listening, and have a good weekend. We’ll be back in your feeds on Monday.
It’s SPR.
