Today's headlines:
- Washington state joins a multi-state lawsuit against the Postal Service regarding mail-in ballots.
- Washington’s Ecology Department says three Spokane government entities aren’t doing enough to address PFAS contamination on the West Plains.
- Spokane’s Shalom Ministries say goodbye to its longtime downtown home.
- Audrey Nelson talks with the head of an Oregon organization that will soon come to Spokane to help wildfire survivors find urns and cremains lost in burned out areas.
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Washington Attorney General Nick Brown is suing the U.S. Postal Service. The suit is part of a multi-state coalition that challenges USPS’s recent mail-in voting rule.
The rule is a response to an executive order that President Trump issued in March. It requires states to register eligible voters with USPS. The Postal Service has said it will not deliver mail ballots to people not on these eligibility lists.
Brown claims the move is unconstitutional. He also says it’s unnecessary.
Nick Brown: In Washington, we’ve had mail-in voting since 1983. And we’ve almost exclusively voted by mail since 2011. Our elections have run smoothly, through multiple administrations. Our system is safe. Our ballots are secure.
The USPS lawsuit, which Brown announced today, is separate from another one that challenges President Trump’s executive order itself. That order first directed the Postal Service to establish a national voter eligibility list.
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Washington and Idaho each stand to get a big chunk of money from a legal settlement between 47 states and Meta.
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown says his state will be allocated between $237 and $339 million. Raul Labrador says Idaho could receive anywhere from $90 million to $127 million.
Brown says, more importantly, Meta has agreed to change some of its practices on Facebook and Instagram to lower the risk of harm to younger users.
Nick Brown: “And Meta knew about these harms. They knew about these harms and they did not stop what they were doing. Instead, they were dishonest about the harm that they were causing and obstructed efforts, sometimes by their own workers, to address these issues.”
Labrador says Meta’s strategy was to hook young people to get them to become long-term customers, regardless of the dangers they were exposed to.
The attorneys general say Meta pledges to reduce the amount of time children can spend on its platforms each day, including overnight hours. It also agrees to strengthen controls over content that may harm young people.
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Washington environmental regulators are calling out some of the parties responsible for P-FAS contamination on the West Plains.
The Department of Ecology this week issued a letter to Spokane city and county and the airport. The letter says all three have made insufficient progress in areas related to investigating and planning to address contaminated sites.
Nick Acklam is Ecology’s section manager for the toxics cleanup program in Spokane.
Nick Acklam: “We need to get to a point where we can commit to a schedule implementation to install or, you know, just completing those elements of that long-term interim action because ultimately with a site like this it's about risk and we want to make sure people are getting safe water as soon as possible.”
Acklam says his department felt that the three parties did not incorporate some of Ecology’s long-term management plans. But he says representatives from each organization met yesterday and made progress in resolving their differences.
SPR reached out to the three parties for comment. The city provided a one-sentence statement that says it is reviewing Ecology’s letter. It says it continues to find ways to get clean drinking water to West Plains residents. The county and airport have yet to respond.
Ecology says it will support the local parties as they apply for nearly 24-million in state money to fund the clean up.
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Shalom Ministries served meals to the unhoused for years in downtown Spokane. They were also able to provide much more than that. SPR’s Lisa Leinberger talks to people who will miss the organization most.
Shalom Ministries had a 32-year mission of providing breakfast four days a week to hungry and homeless people like Thomas Oganga.
Oganga has been coming to Shalom for about 18 months. He says he’s living in a shelter, but stops by to get breakfast after working the night shift.
In 2025, the organization served 85 thousand meals and was expected to serve the same this year. But it wasn’t only meals the guests could find at Shalom.
OGANGA: "We get bus passes every now and again. For those who smoke, there are people kind enough to share their cigarettes. Clothing is there. You can always ask for something, a pair of shoes, some pants."
Emily Hutchens has been a volunteer with Shalom for two years.
HUTCHENS: "People have job interviews. They have appointments to meet with housing specialists. They’re seeing family that they haven’t seen in a while. Or they are freezing and they’re wet and cold."
Susan McFadden is a nurse practitioner who comes once a week to treat their feet.
McFADDEN: "One of the things that the folks who are unhoused deal with in the summertime are burns and the winter is frostbite. And our motto is no toes left behind."
She said treatment could be as simple as just trimming toenails that have been traumatized by being in an ill-fitting shoe. They sometimes treat a fungal infection or just get the guest a clean pair of socks. Sometimes, they refer the guest to CHAS for deeper medical care.
Suki Goldman is the operations director for Shalom. Six years ago, she was homeless herself and often came to Shalom for a meal or to check in with friends living on the street.
GOLDMAN: “So, now we’re being forced out, and now we’re being forced to make a better habitat for ourselves. So, that’s why I think it’s kind of a good thing.”
It’s an old building that has very steep stairs, a broken elevator and air conditioning that didn’t work. She believes they WILL find a new location, and thinks it could be a blessing in disguise.
I’m Lisa Leinberger
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When Spokane residents fled wildfires on August first, some left behind urns containing loved ones’ cremated remains. Next week, a team of out-of-state “disaster archaeologists” will arrive to recover those cremains. SPR’s Audrey Nelson spoke with Chelsea Rose — the director of the Southern Oregon Laboratory of Anthropology — to understand how her Alta Heritage Foundation finds ashes among ashes.
IN: AUDREY NELSON: Can you say just a little bit more about what it is exactly that the Alta Heritage Foundation does?
CHELSEA ROSE: So in 2017, archaeologists living in Santa Rosa responded to the catastrophic fires there — the Tubbs Fire — when they got wind that some folks had lost urns containing previously cremated individuals and loved ones.
They got creative and came up with a methodology for — basically — disaster archaeology. So, using the skill sets that archaeologists have to help people recover from wildfires.
The loss of cremains can really weigh heavy on people, because it's not something that you think about in an emergency. Like when you're evacuating, you grab your purse, your laptop, whatever. And the reality of what happens after houses burn is those areas are demolished and razed, and all of that material is mixed with the toxic components of just our everyday lives. And it gets sent to a toxic waste dump. And that can be really an additional trauma on folks that just lost everything.
We've done over a dozen fires across California and Oregon. This would represent our first trip up into Washington. And we've recovered hundreds of remains, helping, you know, I think over 350 families to date.
At first, the thought was, “That was an anomaly. Oh, my God, how crazy that this part of the town burned.” But as we've seen, this is now something that people need access to regularly. Annually!
NELSON: Given that — given the scale of what we're facing now in these summer wildfire seasons — how do you decide where your team is going to go?
ROSE: We've really stuck to California and Oregon because, you know, like I said, this is a new methodology, and so there's not people trained outside of this immediate area. So during this devastation in Spokane, I mean, we had a meeting a couple of weeks ago and just decided, you know, we want to respond. We want to be available. And part of that effort, that response, is training up our colleagues that live in the Spokane area so that they can spread this work to other communities as these kind of unfortunate events arise.
NELSON: Yeah, I want to get into the specific methodology in a second because it's really interesting. But I want to ask first kind of what your timeline is for arriving in Spokane, what that training process of local archaeologists will look like. Walk me through all of that.
ROSE: Basically, from our experience over time, about 10 percent of families or homes have cremains in them. And so if you guys are looking at, you know, 900 homes burned, that could be close to 100 households that might need our services.
And really, we've already had a couple requests for this service, but we want to spread the word because there's a really fine timeline for when we can do this successfully. So first of all, it has to be safe to access these spaces. And so once these areas are cleared, we need to get back in there before people start clearing ashes or going through ashes, because it's really important that the scene is untouched when we get there.
NELSON: I do want to ask about the specific methodology now. If someone requests your services, what happens?
ROSE: Yeah, so it's really important to note that we are not looking for people that died in the fires. We are only looking for previously cremated human remains. We don't do pets, unfortunately, because that's a common ask. I know that also could be a devastating loss.
And then we schedule a time to access the site with the homeowners. We'd like to have them or a representative on site with us. And then the archaeologist works to come up with a plan to try to find them. And we do also incorporate canine forensic teams as well.
You know, it's really surprising. Over the hundreds of recoveries we've done to date, we've really developed techniques for recognizing ashes within ashes. So there's a lot of different tricks that we use to kind of narrow in on an area and then to carefully excavate the debris away from the location so that we can recover those cremains.
But it's challenging. And then, of course it's a toxic environment. So we have to be fully outfitted in PPE to enter these areas.
So it's a really dangerous undertaking and it needs to be done really carefully. But it can be successful, which is pretty—
OUT: You know, we've all seen firsthand how powerful it can be when people feel like they have, like — there's so much that's beyond their control and that's lost, and that that could be so devastating. But being able to just have this one success can really have a really tangible impact on folks taking that next step towards rebuilding their lives.
That’s Chelsea Rose, the director of the Southern Oregon Laboratory of Anthropology. She talked with SPR’s Audrey Nelson.
Spokane residents can request the Alta Heritage Foundation’s services by visiting altaheritagefoundation.org.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Audrey Nelson, Lisa Leinberger and Doug Nadvornick, today’s host and producer. Web support is provided by Anna Gyure Havlek.
This is SPR News.
