Today's headlines:
- Avista asks Washington state regulators for authority to lower natural gas rates this fall, even though it has already filed a request for a longer-term increase.
- The Coeur d’Alene City Council gives the go-ahead for a big development project.
- A new site has been chosen for a new criminal justice center in Colville.
- Washington state workers stage a walkout to protest budget cuts.
We’ll learn more about an effort to save and preserve Washington history through its newspapers.
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Avista is asking Washington state regulators for permission to lower customers’ natural gas rates this winter.
The utility has filed a rate adjustment with the Utilities and Transportation Commission. A company spokeswoman says the lower rates would reflect the lower costs the company incurred in providing natural gas service. It says the specific decreases will be different for different customers, but average about 11%. Avista says it also filed a rate adjustment for electric service, but it’s so tiny that customers likely won’t see any difference.
The company says the state commission is expected to make a decision on the rate decrease sometime this fall. If approved, customers would see the difference on their bills by November 1.
This issue is separate from another Avista request now before the state commission. That asks for increases in the utility’s electric and natural gas rates from 2027 through 2030.
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The Coeur d’Alene City Council voted 5-1 last night to deny an appeal related to a major development project.
Coeur d’Alene’s Planning and Zoning Commission approved a preliminary plan for a subdivision of the Coeur Terre project on July 14. Madelyn Knutson, a resident of the adjoining Indian Meadows neighborhood, appealed the decision earlier this month.
Knutson says she and many of her neighbors aren’t opposed to the broader Coeur Terre development, which will lie between Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls. Her appeal focused specifically on traffic and safety concerns.
The hearing lasted more than five hours, with nearly three hours of public comment. Now that the council has denied the appeal, Kootenai County Land Company can continue planning the Coeur Terre development.
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The Stevens County Board of Commissioners has approved a location for the county’s new justice center. It will be just south of the current county commissioners’ building in downtown Colville.
A volunteer committee first recommended the downtown site in early June. But commissioners considered a parcel that became available after the siting committee made its recommendation.
Board chairman Greg Young says engineers who examined that second site found structural issues, including mud and unexpected groundwater.
Commissioner Mark Burrows says he knows it’s been a long process.
Mark Burrows: I think we did our due diligence in looking at that site. And not surprised we ended up back home here. I think there will be advantages to that.
The jail facility will cost an estimated $73 million and is set to be 55,000 square feet.
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Washington state workers walked out over proposed budget cuts yesterday. KNKX’s Sarah Mizes-Tan has more.
Unionized employees who work for the state are negotiating a new contract amidst a massive budget shortfall. Ashley Fueston is vice president of the union.
FUESTON: Budgets are a sign of someone’s priorities. We understand the money may not be there, but there are other ways to protect and support the workers besides the money, and we’re not seeing him even doing that.
Governor Bob Ferguson has warned that cuts could be coming to state agencies. Earlier this year he said to pause new programs.
The governor blames the state’s money problems on cuts from the federal government, inflation, and slow job growth.
The union and the governor’s office must reach a contract agreement by October first.
I'm Sarah Mizes-Tan reporting.
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Washington Governor Bob Ferguson has added five eastern counties to a list of seven previously covered by his emergency wildfire declaration. The five are Whitman, Columbia, Grant, Benton and Kittitas. They join Spokane, Stevens, Ferry, Okanogan, Chelan, Douglas and Yakima, which were the original jurisdictions covered by a declaration on August 1, the day Spokane’s wildfires broke out. The emergency designation gives people in those counties access to some forms of state assistance. That includes, for the next 60 days, the ability to procure some forms of state identification for free if they lost their original documents because of fire. Tenants can also get some protection from eviction if they’re displaced from their homes by fire.
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The western end of Spokane’s Riverfront Park may be getting a new amenity. The city parks department says the Central Lions Club has raised two-thirds of the money needed to create a learning center to be located in the shelter that sits near the Post Street Bridge. The club says the facility will be renovated to include amphitheater seating, garden with native plants, and better infrastructure for the groups and others that use it. The cost is expected to be about $300,000. The club says it has two-thirds of that. It hopes raise the rest soon and get started on the project.
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Earlier this summer, the Washington State Library hit a milestone. Its digital newspapers project reached a million pages in its project that converts old newspapers into digital files that people can access online.
Shawn Schollmeyer is the project coordinator.
Shawn Schollmeyer: “We have a state RCW mandate to collect and preserve newspapers published in our state and my particular role is the digital side. So I work with communities to help digitize their community newspapers and then I archive those to cloud storage where we preserve them for disaster recovery. And part of that is to also make them available online with publisher agreement so we can make them available to researchers.
DN: And so you've now hit a million pages that have been archived. Tell me about that.
SS: That's correct. We have a variety of different ways that we digitize our newspapers.
My Washington Digital Newspapers website is where I host as many as I can. I have a lot more that are going to be available soon.
I partner with newspapers.com is one of the organizations I work with. They can digitize newspapers for me very quickly. And then they will host them for a little while. I agree to a three-year embargo and then once that expires, then either papers that are in the public domain prior to 1931 right now can go up online on our site. Those that might be under copyright agreement, then I work with the publishers to make sure that we've got their permission to put them up online for researchers.
That all goes to another vendor who hosts these for us and we have a nice little update. Since we hit this milestone, they have right on the front page the 1,067,536 pages that are available to people now. (Editor's note: That's now more than 1,070,000 pages.)
DN: I noticed one in the list in the press release, there was the Newport Miner, and I think there was another one in the Spokane area, Spokane Valley, or something like that. So how do you come to agreements with newspapers like that, that you get a certain amount of their access to a certain amount of their stuff?
SS: Yeah, there's a number of different ways. One of these is the Industrial Worker. It's a labor paper. I've partnered with the University of Washington, who helped provide the microfilm for me to digitize. That one was published in Spokane and Seattle, and that's in public domain.
The Fig Tree is another newspaper in Spokane. It's kind of a non-denominational Christian newspaper that is very positive in its news and approach, and I'm working with that publisher directly. She may retire soon, so it's something that she feels is important to make sure it's available to people to research. So I work with her. I'm adding more issues over the next couple months from her paper.
The Newport Miner is one that I work with the publisher directly also, and so that publisher, Michelle Nedved, is someone who is happy to have us display and host that so people can look through the back archive, so I have an agreement with them. They are also working with me to start depositing more recent issues.
So some of those agreements go up to the last 30 days of publication, where after it's on their site for a little while, then they drop that e-edition directly to me in a certain software portal, and then my web vendor will help me make sure I comply with that 30-day agreement, and then we can put them up online directly.
So it's kind of a neat way to collect things directly from the publishers because they want to make sure that these are available to other researchers and journalists, educators, students—there's a variety of different users who have access to the newspapers once they're online.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Audrey Nelson, Sarah Mizes-Tan, and Doug Nadvornick, today’s host and producer. Web support is provided by Anna Gyure Havlek.
