Today's headlines:
- There are times when the Spokane River runs high and there are times where parts of it don’t run at all. This is one of those times.
- School begins Wednesday in Spokane’s Central Valley district. Several buildings have new security features.
- Washington community college officials plan to ask the legislature for more operating money next year.
- North Idaho’s Upper Smith fire is one of the longest burning of the season. We’ll talk about it with its outgoing incident commander.
We’ll have those stories, coming up on SPR News Today.
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Part of the Spokane River has run dry for the second consecutive year. The affected stretch is in Spokane Valley, between Barker Road and Sullivan Road. SPR’s Audrey Nelson has more.
Conservation groups first noticed the phenomenon in mid August 2025, after the Post Falls Dam decreased its releases by 100 cubic feet per second. That happens every year — but before last year, the river had never dried up.
This year, the dam decreased releases on August 7th. Two days later, the river began to disappear, says Katelyn Scott. She’s with the conservation group Spokane Riverkeeper.
Katelyn Scott: It’s extending further and further upstream. We still don’t really know why…It could be all kinds of things. It could be sediment change in the river. It could be water temperature. It could just be our good friend climate change that is wreaking havoc across our region.
Scott says that while the Post Falls Dam may not be the single cause of the dry river, it could hold the solution. A federal license regulates releases from the dam. This year, she says, Spokane Riverkeeper will explore how to update that license to keep more water flowing into the river.
The river is expected to resume its normal flow after September 8th. That’s when the federal license will require Avista to release water.
I’m Audrey Nelson, reporting.
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Students in five Central Valley schools will start the school year tomorrow in facilities that are more secure than when they left in June.
The district upgraded the entrances of four elementary schools and Bowdish Middle School, adding one more set of doors for an extra layer of security.
Melanie Kilgore says her school, University Elementary, received a newly-expanded office with more windows so that secretaries have a better view of people entering.
Melanie Kilgore: “They’ll still buzz in at the front door and then they will come into a secure entrance and into the office, whereas in the past, they were able to enter straight into the school building. Now they have to stop in and see the secretaries before they can continue down into the hallways.”
Kilgore says the district made similar improvements to five schools last year.
District officials say these levy-funded projects were completed five years earlier than planned. They say there are two benefits to that. The schools are made safer now and the construction costs are less expensive than if they followed their original schedule.
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As community colleges in Washington face rising operating costs, their governing board will ask the legislature for help with the basics…even as state budget leaders call for cost cutting. Anna Marie Yanny from KNKX has more.
Arlen Harris is the Legislative Director at the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges. He says inflation is a big problem for colleges…especially when it comes to utilities.
Harris: If you think about running a welding lab, doing advanced manufacturing, running a nursing lab, that is compounded up and over again.
He asked the board to make a “keep-the-lights-on” request to the legislature, similar to one they made a year ago.
The board’s Operating Budget Director Stephanie Winner says they’re hoping to get state help with both personnel and utility costs.
Winner: “Without the additional state funding, our colleges must continue to absorb these costs. They can't not pay those bills. They can't not turn the lights on.”
Both Harris and Winner acknowledge the biennial budget request might be a tough sell…as lawmakers face a looming and large shortfall.
I’m Anna Marie Yanny, reporting.
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The latest step in installing an income tax in Washington came yesterday.
An 18-member committee appointed to oversee the process met for the first time in Olympia.
The group is chaired by state Representative April Berg, a Democrat from Snohomish County. It includes legislators from both parties, employees from state agencies, private sector tax attorneys and tribal representatives.
The Income Tax Advisory Workgroup is tasked with figuring out legal and regulatory issues that must be solved before the tax can be levied on Washington’s wealthiest residents, beginning in 2028.
The group will issue reports at the end of this year and the end of next year.
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One of the longest burning fires in the Northwest this summer is the Upper Smith in the mountains of north Idaho, near the Canadian border. It began with a lightning strike on July 8. In terms of acreage, the fire is not one of the largest in the region. It’s only 4,200 hundred acres. But it’s been one of the most persistent.
Kip Shields is the incident commander of the North Idaho Blue Team that has been in charge of battling the Upper Smith.
Kip Shields: The Selkirks are a geographic area with big, tall mountains that have really steep drainages. There has been some fire history in some of the drainages, and some of the drainages have no fire history, so that means that there hasn't been a fire in there for a long time. So, there's bigger trees around there with more dead and down underneath the canopy, and there's other areas where there's been fire within the last 10 years kind of stuff, where there's regeneration of regrowth of various types of tree species, and then there's also logs and timber that fell from when the fire burnt through.
So, the terrain is actually pretty difficult to walk through up and over the logs and that kind of stuff. So, it's a big country. The terrain that we're in, the valleys, are really affected by winds. They can go all kinds of different directions, whether it be nighttime or daytime, the diurnal winds. Then you have bigger up above transport winds that also make a difference as to where the smoke goes, and then that creates where the embers go if there is a big fire push happening, and then what kind of receptive fuel bed these embers would be landing on and what it would do and where that fire lands.
DN: All of that adds up to a fire that is still burning seven weeks after it started. Some of the Upper Smith’s footprint is next to an area that went up in flames in 2015. The teams who have worked it have tried to use that burn scar to their advantage.
During the fire’s lifetime, it has been seen several management teams that have cycled in and out of the area.
Yesterday was Kip Shields’ final day as incident commander. For him, it was kind of a homecoming.
KS: I'm from this area. I was raised here, so I know a lot of these drainages, a lot of the lakes, and I've seen fire behavior before I even got into fire here.
I've been in the business since after my first year in college, so that was in 1998. I was a hotshot crew member for five years.
I was a smoke jumper for 15 years, and then after that I took a job where I went to large incidents, and I was usually a supervisory level person on those fires. So I've been in it for a while. I've seen a lot of fire behavior.
I know what things can do nationally for fires as winds come, humidities and all that stuff. I'm a national resource, so I can go from Southern California to the western tip of Alaska, all over the United States, and I've been at it for a while now.
DN: Now he gets to go home to Alaska for a short rest before someone else will call him to go somewhere else.
KS: Yeah, it’s a rinse and repeat. I've been doing it for long enough that I can go back into a new area, get back time with my family. My kids just started school on Tuesday, a little time with them. My wife's also a firefighter, so one of us will probably go out on assignment after I get back home.
DN: And if he does go out again, he’ll only need a short time to get up to speed on his new assignment, as he did when he arrived in Bonners Ferry.
KS: I had a good handoff from the previous team. They gave us a good briefing of what's going on. They gave us a lot of resources that they had used, so they already knew what was going on out there.
It took going to a reconnaissance to see what the fire is doing. I have a good feel for what the fire is doing after the first day. We have a shadow period. We have time to get caught up with everything that's going on, and then thereafter, you take over the fire. I felt confident on this one right away with the good handover that the previous team had given us, and I hope to do the same thing for the incoming.
DN: That’s Kip Shields, the incident commander for the North Idaho Blue Team. His last assignment was the Upper Smith fire near Bonners Ferry. Who knows where the next one will be.
The Upper Smith, by the way, is about 38% contained and could continue to burn well into the fall.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Audrey Nelson, Anna Marie Yanny and me, Doug Nadvornick. I’m today’s host and producer. Web support is provided by Anna Gyure Havlek.
Thanks for listening to the podcast today. This is SPR News.
