Today's headlines:
- Officials in Hayden, Idaho are trying to agree on a law enforcement contract with the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office — after failing to renew their last one.
- During the upcoming legislative session, SeaPort Airlines will offer nonstop flights between Spokane and Olympia.
- SPR’s Doug Nadvornick chats with physician-scientist Andrew Trister, who was in town recently to give a talk on medicine and artificial intelligence.
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The city of Hayden does not have a current law enforcement contract with the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office. That’s after the original contract was not renewed by the city council more than a month ago.
The city says one of the reasons it was not renewed is because it wants to see how deputies are spending and tracking time in Hayden.
The Kootenai County Board of Commissioners took up the contract during a Tuesday meeting. There, officials with the sheriff’s office proposed using a program called PatrolFinder.
ZACH SIFFORD: “Dump sites, school districts, the rural areas of the county, other cities — this will provide in-depth reports, not necessarily just total number of hours, but it's going to be able to break down what car, what deputy was there for an x amount of hours.”
The sheriff’s office says it wants to start this as a pilot program in Hayden. Officials are expected to give more details about the program to county commissioners in the next couple of weeks.
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It’s about to be a lot easier for Eastern Washington state legislators to get to work. As SPR’s Audrey Nelson reports, SeaPort Airlines is launching a new Spokane to Olympia route.
The flight service will begin on January 8, just ahead of the 2027 legislative session. Flights will depart Spokane at 3:25 p.m. on Sundays and Olympia at 5:10 p.m. on Fridays.
The flights cost $279 one way and do not require security screenings. SeaPort Airlines says passengers can arrive just 20 minutes before flights take off. The trip takes about an hour.
Flights to Olympia will depart from Spokane’s Felts Field. SeaPort also provides a direct flight to Seattle out of Felts.
The new service is set to last through the end of the legislative session — April 27.
I’m Audrey Nelson, reporting.
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Latah County election workers have finished re-counting more than 18,000 ballots.
The Idaho Secretary of State’s office says the second canvassing effort didn’t bring about any changes from the first election night count.
The recount was ordered after more than 2,300 ballots were discovered on a thumb drive a few days after the initial count was posted. State officials say the votes had been cast early in person, but mistakenly not included in the numbers released on election night.
One candidate learned about the mistake and asked for a full recount in her race. Yesterday’s work was livestreamed by the county clerk’s office and witnessed by community members and reporters.
On Friday, state election officials will decide in which counties they will conduct their routine post-election audits. Those will likely be done next week.
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Cody Easterday is now under home confinement.
Easterday is the rancher and farmer who defrauded companies out of more than $244 million of beef cattle and went to federal prison for it. NWPB’s senior correspondent Anna King has the details.
During his home confinement, Cody Easterday will be under federal supervision. But he’s back in the Columbia Basin in time for Thanksgiving. The farmer-rancher was sentenced to 11 years in prison back in 2022.
The 55-year-old was transferred to home confinement on November, overseen by the Bureau of Prisons Seattle Residential Reentry Management Office.
Easterday made up “ghost cattle” on paper, from his Eastern Washington ranch. He also gamed the cattle futures market. It’s one of the largest cattle frauds in U.S. history.
His two companies went into federal bankruptcy.
In his absence over the last several years, his three sons have been running a dairy and farming business. They grow mostly potatoes and onions.
Ultimately, after creating a Northwest farming empire, Easterday is coming back to a smaller operation — a fraction of what it used to be — run by his sons.
I’m Anna King.
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Veteran’s Day celebrations took place all over the Northwest yesterday. The Washington State Department of Veterans’ Affairs held a ceremony at the capitol building in Olympia.
David Puente is the department’s director. He says honoring veterans should include taking action.
DAVID PUENTE: "It means ensuring access to health care, education, employment and strong community connections. It means reaching out to the veterans in our neighborhoods, the ones at events like this, the ones quietly contributing every day and the ones who may feel unseen."
Speakers at the event also included Thurston County Superior Court Justice Sharonda Amamilo and 15-year-old Eagle Scout Oliver Hayes.
Hayes, a Lacey resident, presented a project featuring interviews with 80 Washington veterans.
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Artificial intelligence is now well established in most areas of our lives. That includes health care. SPR’s Doug Nadvornick called physician-scientist Andrew Trister to learn more about how doctors are using AI.
ANDREW TRISTER: Right now, AI helps with most of the paperwork. So doctors spend hours a day typing into a computer, and AI can help to write those visit notes and hopefully let doctors look at you again, rather than put their back to you while they're typing away.
DOUG NADVORNICK: That’s Dr. Andrew Trister, a physician-scientist and now AI executive. He is the chief medical and scientific officer at the tech company Verily. Trister was in Spokane last week to speak about AI and medicine at a University of Washington-Gonzaga health partnership event.
Trister is bullish about the value of AI in medicine. One application is to help speed up the process of testing and preparing prescription drugs for the marketplace.
AT: The most recent commissioner of the FDA began efforts to start to really speed up the ability for companies that make new medicines to submit, which is a very large and technical element of the work to check to make sure that medicines are safe and effective. Those are the two things that we check for.
But in running clinical trials, and in reporting the results of those trials, in order to determine what's safe and effective, there's a lot of opportunity to use AI, not just to build the longer reports. These things can be hundreds of thousands of pages long. So it's really about pulling out the salient data and understanding how that may impact people once things are on the market.
So the FDA is really at the forefront of thinking through this. And a lot of the pharma companies are behind that as well, already integrating some of these tools in the approach that they take to ensuring, you know, the safety and efficacy of medicines.
DN: Trister says AI can also help doctors determine the most effective ways to treat patients. He says that’s especially true for cancer patients who might benefit from targeted remedies.
DN: So you're very bullish about AI in medicine. Where do you have the greatest concerns about it?
AT: I think my greatest concern there is twofold. So one is, the opportunity for the AI to be trained in a way that is unbiased and ensures that we keep the most vulnerable in mind. And so fairness is a feature that we have to build from the beginning. And that's not necessarily the way that we have begun in a lot of the tools to date.
And then that is where the second piece comes in. If we don't do that, there is a possibility that these tools actually exacerbate what already exists in terms of the divide of the haves and have-nots. And one could imagine an always on, kind of almost ubiquitous AI tool that is part of your care team that is always watching over you and maybe even helping to prevent disease, kind of nudge you in a direction that could tell you to put down a piece of cake and eat some broccoli. I don't know, maybe it'll work.
But if those are things that cost a lot of money or were built specifically for those that were represented in the data, who overwhelmingly might have other people or coaches or others that could help them to make these decisions, those products are not going to help the people who are at the greatest need. But harnessing it in a way that really keeps people fair or at least equitable access is the most important thing that we can think through right now.
DN: Dr. Andrew Trister is the chief medical and scientific officer at the tech company Verily. He spoke at a UW-Gonzaga health partnership event last week.
You can hear more of his thoughts about AI and health care today at 12:30 on Inland Journal.
I’m Doug Nadvornick, reporting.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Audrey Nelson, Doug Nadvornick, NWPB’s Anna King and Ember Braun, today’s host and producer.
Web support is provided by Anna Gyure Havlek.
