Conservative Spokane council candidates attack liberal majority at church's candidate forum

Yahoo

5 days ago

Jul. 23—Voters got a better look Tuesday at some of the conservatives running for Spokane City Council at a forum hosted by Calvary Spokane, where they were asked about a wide range of topics, including the church's role in politics and whether buses are worthy public investments.
The two candidates who attended — Chris Savage, running in northwest Spokane, and Jonathan Bingle, an incumbent running for re-election in northeast Spokane — railed against the council's liberal supermajority to an applauding crowd of roughly 100 packed into the spacious church. The conservatives criticized the majority's advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community, incentives to boost apartments and dense housing over single-family units, investments in bus lines and reforms to prioritize outreach over enforcement for homeless people camping in public.
And though there are currently four members of the council majority coalition, and two more progressives running for a seat, Savage and Bingle focused almost exclusively on a single man: Councilman Zack Zappone, who Savage is running against. Bingle made no mention of his own opponent, abortion rights organizer Sarah Dixit.
"Four years ago, we had a $4 billion surplus at the state level, and this year, they're asking for $17 billion in state taxes, something (Savage's) opponent supported ...and that's why Zack Zappone's got to go, right?" Bingle said.
"... Zappone needs to be ousted from office," Savage said at another point. "He goes out there with his own personal agenda, trying to help out with the LGBTQ and all these small groups that really don't have a huge population here in Spokane, and wasting your tax dollars on stupid stuff like transgender bathrooms ..."
The council has not approved any spending on "transgender bathrooms." Savage later clarified in a brief interview that he was referring to stray comments made during debate over an April ordinance Zappone sponsored that, among other things, guaranteed continued insurance coverage for gender affirming care for city employees; Bingle introduced a failed amendment to prevent transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice.
In an interview, Zappone rejected what he called "DOGE-like cuts" to state or local services in order to balance the budget and called Savage's comments troubling and personally hurtful. Zappone was the first openly gay candidate ever elected to the Spokane City Council.
"That is, sad and troubling ... that Christopher Savage is talking about people, particularly minorities in our community, not mattering," Zappone said. "I believe that we've seen people under attack. I've personally been a victim of these sorts of attacks — I've had people throw things at me while I'm walking down the street holding my partner's hand."
Private cigar lounge co-owner and retired Air Force instructor Cody Arguelles — whose last name moderator Pastor Drew Johnson first struggled to pronounce and later had Bingle say for him at every mention — is also running against Savage and Zappone. Arguelles did not attend due to a scheduling conflict, but sent in a brief video introduction discussing his background and platform.
Alejandro Barrientos, chief operations officer for the SCAFCO Steel Stud Company and candidate for south Spokane running against former prosecutor Kate Telis, was originally listed as an attendee but did not attend the event for "personal reasons," he said.
Ballots have already been mailed out for the upcoming Aug. 5 primary election. While all three Spokane council districts have a seat up for election this year, only the northwest district, where Zappone is facing challenges from Savage and Arguelles, has more than two candidates and will appear on the primary ballot.
Homelessness
Bingle and Savage argued that the city council had significantly watered down homelessness laws by prioritizing service provider outreach instead of enforcement, pointing to the package of laws approved by the majority in July to replace a voter-approve anti-camping law struck down by the state Supreme Court on technical grounds in April.
"There is no real enforcement mechanism in our city laws anymore," Bingle said, arguing that many of the chronically homeless were suffering from a "brokenness of the human spirit" that required forced treatment and potentially jail to extract them from a death spiral.
"Personally, in my family, I saw as a brother of mine who struggled seriously with addiction, jail is what got him clean," Bingle said. "Jail is what helped him get his mind right."
He conceded that high housing prices were contributing to homelessness, but argued the first step to make housing more affordable was for the state to stop raising taxes.
Savage argued the City Council should reinstate the exact language of the voter-approved anti-camping law and that the city, particularly downtown, would benefit from increased law enforcement presence and "harsher laws" to remove the homeless.
"We need people coming downtown, patronizing our businesses and making sure that they are enjoying the downtown, because that is their downtown," Savage said. "It's not the homeless' downtown, it's theirs."
The city should also change which nonprofit service providers the city works with, moving away from housing and shelter services like those provided by Jewels Helping Hands and Catholic Charities and toward providers like Adult and Teen Challenge, a year-long faith-based residential addiction recovery program, which Savage claimed had better rates of success for their participants.
Bingle, meanwhile, argued the city should get out of funding homeless services altogether.
"Government should not be in the homeless business at all, that should be done by other entities ... what government exists to do is provide for the public safety and provide for the infrastructure," neither of which the city does well, Bingle said.
Public transportation
Bingle alone was asked about funding for the Spokane Transit Authority, a regional agency which the city is a member of.
"People have seen as little as three or four riders on a bus at a time, and they want to continue to increase funding for it — what's going on?" Johnson asked.
Bingle noted that his district has the highest ridership in the city and didn't want to say "transit is bad," but argued the agency and advocates for greatly expanded public transit were living in the past.
"There's a lot of people who are interested in infrastructure from 1910 for some reason — we're still talking about building trains in 2025, or light rail to Seattle...fly there like an adult, OK ?" Bingle said.
He argued that buses were inefficient and the central City Line's $82 million cost was wasteful.
"I think we could probably save a bunch of money if we just contract with Uber and say, here you go, for our tax dollars," Bingle argued. "You don't have to stand at a bus stop in the snow or in the rain or, god forbid, there's somebody sleeping in (the bus)."
Fund the police
Both Bingle and Savage argued the city needed more officers, but didn't need to turn to a voter-approved tax increase last year to do so.
"I opposed this measure, and the reason isn't because we don't need more police, we absolutely do...but that doesn't need to be done through a tax increase," Bingle said.
Both candidates argued that campaigners had misled the public last year when they pitched the sales tax, meant to fund police, fire and related services, arguing it lacked the promised transparency that would make it easy to follow how the money is being spent. Instead, they claimed the city had simply transferred the money into the general fund, implying it had turned into a slush fund.
It is true that campaigners claimed it would be easy to track how the money would be spent, though Bingle arguably mischaracterized the purpose of the general fund transfer. City officials had argued earlier this year that portions of the tax spent on staff needed to be transferred to the budgets of the relevant departments, which are contained within the general fund, because salaries would inevitably increase faster than a sales tax, leading to layoffs.
City spokeswoman Erin Hut provided documentation to The Spokesman-Review showing the positions the city anticipated funding with the tax for the next five years, which align with how the tax was sold to the public. Hut noted the documentation is available to the public and would be reviewed in upcoming budget discussions.
Bingle also claimed that Zappone had signed a pledge in 2020 to "defund the police," but had since distanced himself from that pledge as it became politically inconvenient.
Zappone did sign a June 2020 pledge created by progressive organization Fuse Washington that called for, among other things, no longer providing military equipment to the police and to "redirect police department funding to community-based alternatives."
Zappone, along with the rest of the city council, approved on Monday a $430,000 purchase of a replacement for a military surplus armored vehicle that was totaled last summer during a high speed chase. He has also repeatedly voted in favor of budget and salary increases for the Spokane Police Department during his first term.
"I've been in office for 3.5 years and that's demonstrably false, and the people trying to spread those lies are trying to scare people," Zappone said.
Savage argued the city could significantly increase police staffing by cutting other costs in the city, starting with the city council office itself. He specifically called for cutting the positions of Lisa Gardner, the council's communications director, and Christopher Wright, the council's policy adviser.
"We can look into our own budget and pass on those savings to help out more people and more officers become part of SPD, because...we are understaffed majorly," Savage said. "We need more officers in the city of Spokane right now, and we can do that by also helping put people like myself on City Council...we need people up there that are backing up our SPD."
Churches in politics
The first question of the evening in Calvary Spokane was not about city policy, but about whether churches like Calvary should be involved in politics.
"We get a lot of pushback at the church anytime we do an event like this," Johnson said. "People say the church shouldn't be involved in politics, we should stay in our own lane. What do you think about that?"
Savage argued that churches should feel welcome to engage in politics "when they allow a bunch of other religions (at City Hall) to be practiced and freely done."
Savage noted that the City Council has intermittently cut off people's testimony at meetings when they have begun to read Bible passages at length.
"But come down there with the Quran or some sort of Buddhist sutra, they'd probably allow it," Savage claimed.
It's not immediately clear if anyone has ever attempted, at least in recent memory, to read any other religious text beside the Bible at a Spokane City Council meeting.
Bingle, a former pastor himself, argued that Christians have not just the right, but the responsibility to "represent your God at the ballot box," arguing their collective voting bloc could significantly sway elections from the local to state level.
"I think one of the things you're going to see is that — church isn't getting more political, OK, politics is getting more theological," Bingle argued. "When they start saying that a boy is a girl and a girl is a boy ... that's not a political statement, that's a theological statement. They're attacking the very creation of God."