Latest news with #SpokaneValley
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Spokane Valley City Council pulls public safety funding to cover costs of struggles with Councilman Al Merkel
May 28—The Spokane Valley City Council clawed back funding intended for public safety Tuesday to help cover the costs of the ongoing legal struggles with a member of the governing board. Controversy has followed Councilman Al Merkel throughout his first year and change in office. Bickering between Merkel and his opponents on the council has become a mainstay of Tuesday meetings, and two independent investigations into his behavior were launched last year following complaints filed by his peers and city employees. One found Merkel repeatedly disrespected city staff, often engaging in "intimidating behavior." The latter found Merkel's use of the social media platform NextDoor was likely in violation of state public records law and city code, and is the root of a lawsuit the city launched against him in February. The council on Tuesday voted 5-1 to approve amendments to more than a dozen city funds to reflect a $5.4 million increase in revenue due largely to grant awards, as well as a nearly $14 million increase in expenditures. Merkel was the lone dissenting vote; Councilwoman Jessica Yaeger was absent. Several of the increases in expenditures are from obligated spending of the grant awards on projects, like various energy efficiency and clean building grants or affordable housing and homeless services awards. Others are for ongoing projects, like the $4.6 million budget left for the Spokane Valley Cross Country Course, or are due to an error in calculations, like the nearly $1 million loss of license tab fees the city planned to collect this year based on faulty data from the Department of Licensing. The line item that drew the most attention, however, was the $350,000 in legal costs associated with Merkel. The council elected to transfer funding away from vehicle replacements and an unfilled civilian analyst position for the Spokane Valley Police Department to fill the hole. Spokane Valley voters will decide later this year if they're willing to pay more in sales tax to help cover public safety, after the council voted to place a 0.1% sales tax measure on the Aug. 5 ballot. The transfer approved Tuesday will result in 12 replacement vehicles for the department instead of the planned 14, and it does away with the sole civilian position approved by the council in February 2024 as part of the board's ongoing efforts to expand the department. The budget amendment passed with little comment from the council Tuesday, but was discussed in detail while still a proposal at an April 29 meeting. Mayor Pam Haley said reallocating the public safety funding was a result of a tight budgeting process last year in which every city department saw cuts, except for public safety. There simply wasn't another place to find the funding to cover the costs associated with the complaints, investigations and lawsuit Merkel is at the center of, she said. "When we did our budget, we were very clear that we were cutting all departments, and all departments did a great job — our employees didn't take raises this year because they knew how tight we were," Haley said. "There is no money to take to pay the legal bills, except to take money that was going to be spent on something new. The only thing we have that's new are those things." Since November, the city of Spokane Valley has been tracking expenditures related to Merkel in a spreadsheet. The total is around $350,000 to date, according to the report. The report differentiates the expenses into four categories: "actions taken to protect city employees," like the $40,000 renovation of City Hall to separate staffers from Merkel; "nonproductive uses of staff time," which includes the time spent responding to the litany of public records request related to Merkel; "the actions taken to protect the city from legal risk," including the ongoing public records lawsuit launched against him; and an "investigation of Merkel's unfounded complaint against Councilmember (Rod) Higgins and Mayor Haley." "I think that it shows the city's goals here, when they're defunding public safety to pay for their vendetta against me," Merkel said, before positing the city's pavement preservation fund "could be used for that same political vendetta purpose." The preservation fund was already slashed to make funding available for the wave of Spokane Valley Police Department positions approved by the council last year, as reported by The Spokesman-Review. Haley said the little over $7 million in the fund needs to be used for its intended purpose, and that it is "not just a little slush fund that you can go in and take whatever money out you want." Yaeger, who filed the complaint against Merkel about his social media use that has resulted in the public records lawsuit the city launched against him, said in April she was disappointed by Merkel's actions and the loss of public safety funding. "I really think that we could have put this money to better use for our city," Yaeger said. "He claims that he's a victim and he's not. He's actually victimizing our citizens, and it's pretty frustrating."
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
100th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee: Four-time returning speller from Pullman to compete with Spokane Valley home-schooler
May 26—Brogue, Osprey, Drumlin, Gastronome, Eucalyptus, Rapscallion, Lithophone. These are a handful of words that secured Spokane Valley's Gabriel Aguirre one of 243 spots in the upcoming Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. on Wednesday and Thursday. The 11-year-old home-school student finished runner-up in the Inland Northwest Spelling Bee, behind Sandpoint's 14-year-old Andrew Ford, also home-schooled and also headed to D.C. Competition will be fierce as ever as 14-year-old Navtaj Singh, of Pullman, is competing for the fourth straight year, his final year of eligibility. His best finish was in 2023, when he tied for 12th place. Gabriel misspelled the word "Sobersides," while Andrew got it correct in their 12th round at the qualifying contest hosted at North Idaho College. Asked if he has a strategy to improve his spelling, Gabriel came up empty. "I bet there might be a formula, but I just try to practice," he said. Gabriel uses practice spelling apps on the phone, but beyond trying to memorize the whole dictionary, he's at a loss for how to better his game. He's a natural, said his mom, Whitney Aguirre. His mom doesn't push him to practice, knowing her son learns better independently, when "left to his own brain," she said. "He graduated from all the spelling books that I could find for him, so he has a natural ability to spell pretty well," she said. Gabriel taught himself to read at the age of 4, watching his older brother explore the written word and figuring he could, too. At the age of 9, he'd outgrown the curriculum for home-schooled high-schooling, stumping his mom on where to go from there. "A couple years ago, I stopped even teaching him spelling," she laughed. Gabriel isn't sure how he got so good, he said. Aguirre said part of it is a God-given ability around language, as well as memorization. When rules and patterns are involved, "his mind is like a steel trap," she said. "Gabriel has an interesting ability to comprehend a lot of details. His curiosity, coupled with that ability, have made him go way to the top," she said. Asked his favorite thing about spelling, "I like correcting people," Gabriel said with a grin. Whitney home-schools all four of her kids, Gabriel the second oldest. He enjoys it, he said, and feels like he could be limited in a typical public school setting. Learning independently allows him to move at whatever pace he likes and pick whatever interests him next. He's advanced in math and working on Italian. "It can be a little bit less formal than a school can, but he's still learning, and he's doing it in a way where he takes ownership for what he's doing," Aguirre said. Gabriel and his mom are excited for their trip to D.C., looking forward to the contest but also time to jaunt around the nation's capital with 242 of the best young spellers in the country, including Navtaj, seeking to beat his record of 12th place. "One thing that I've learned is that I've managed to refine my strategy when I'm actually competing," Navtaj said in an interview, explaining that, whereas in past years he was improvising. "Now I've actually kind of come up with a strategy that I think will help me." Ever the competitor, Navtaj didn't disclose that strategy, but he said this year's Bee will be about more than just how high he finishes. "When I'm actually there, I kind of just want to take everything in," he said, "seeing as I can't go back again after that." This year marks the 100th anniversary of the National Spelling Bee, which has grown from a field of just nine contestants in its first year to a nationally televised spectacle featuring hundreds of elite spellers. The increasing degree of difficulty is evident in the winning words over the years, from "croissant" in 1970 and "luge" in 1984 to "guetapens" in 2012 and "scherenschnitte" in 2015. After the 2019 Bee ended in an unprecedented eight-way tie when even words like "pendeloque" and "auslaut" proved too easy to eliminate the accomplished spellers, organizers have made several changes in an effort to winnow the field. The 2022 competition increased the emphasis on the meaning of words, with a vocabulary round that required contestants to choose a word's definition in a multiple-choice format. That year's Bee ended with a series of increasingly obscure proper nouns, including "Senijextee," an archaic alternate spelling of Sinixt, one of the 12 bands of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Scott Remer, who finished fourth in the 2008 National Spelling Bee and now coaches spellers, said this year's Bee will have a preliminary test for the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic. That test, he said, should help the organizers choose words that challenge the spellers without eliminating too many of them in the early rounds. "I think the hope is that the preliminaries test is going to allow the word panelists to have a better feel for the general level of the field, which will help them to calibrate the word list appropriately," he said. Twenty-six of Remer's current students qualified for this year's Bee, he said, in addition to eight of his former students, including Navtaj. Navtaj said that although he isn't working with a coach this year, he has changed how he's preparing for the Bee. "Whereas the previous years, I was focused more on memorizing patterns, this year I'm still trying to memorize a lot of patterns and stuff, but I also think it would be helpful to just see a lot of words," he said. "In a way, it's kind of like learning how to play an instrument without playing the instrument, whereas now I'm playing the instrument a lot more." Remer said that approach makes sense, because a speller's knowledge of the linguistic underpinnings of the English language tends to make spelling feel more natural — even the most obscure entries in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary from which the Bee's words are chosen. "There's something to be said for the power of intuition and kind of just feeling the word or letting the word speak to you," Remer said, adding that what feels like intuition is often the result of lots of practice and the mind unconsciously recognizing patterns. "There's kind of an interplay between intuition and conscious training," he said. "For spellers, once they've hit a certain critical mass of words that they've done — and language rules, and Latin and Greek stems and stuff like that — that's sort of when these unexpected connections occur, and when it starts becoming more fluid, and where you start realizing you know how to spell something even though you actually haven't ever seen it." Elena Perry and Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Contests for Spokane Valley City Council shaping up (and other updates for candidate filing week)
May 8—While a couple days remain for interested candidates to throw their hats in the ring, it's already clear the Spokane Valley City Council will look a little different next year. And if one councilman has his way, the council may look drastically different. Councilman Rod Higgins, the longest continuous serving member of the board, said he does not plan to run for re-election. Higgins, 82, was appointed in 2013 and won the seat in an election later that year. He was re-elected in 2017 and 2021. The conservative council mainstay served as mayor of the Spokane suburb from 2016 to 2020. Higgins cited his age and a desire to get fresh perspectives and voices on the council in disclosing his decision not to seek re-election. "I can tell you firsthand, no, I don't think I'm Joe Biden, at least not in that bad of shape yet," Higgins said. "But I can feel that I'm losing a step and stuff, and it's time for somebody else to get in there." Two Spokane Valley business owners, each with prior campaign experience, launched their bids for Higgins' soon-to-be-vacated seat well before filing week, during which candidates across Spokane County declare their intentions to run for public office. Candidates have until 5 p.m. Friday to file to run for city councils, school boards, fire commissions and other local offices. Kristopher Pockell, a software engineer and co-owner of Elixir Sauce Company, and Mike Kelly, an entrepreneur who serves as chief financial officer for Salem, Oregon-based KT Contracting, each hope to win the open seat following the November election. Both ran for the state Legislature in the district encompassing the Valley last fall. Pockell unsuccessfully challenged state Rep. Suzanne Schmidt as an independent, while Kelly fell short in a race for an open Senate seat eventually secured by fellow Republican state Sen. Leonard Christian. Kelly, despite carrying endorsements from several local prominent Republicans, lost steam in his campaign after details of a 1990 drug arrest in his hometown of Portland came to light. Kelly was appointed to the city's planning commission last year by Mayor Pam Haley, after moving to the Valley in 2019. He owns and operates several property management and real estate holding companies, and has worked as a consultant, financial adviser, paralegal, investment counselor and a certified tax preparer. Pockell, a graduate of Spokane Valley's Central Valley High School, said he hopes to focus on supporting first responders, developing the region's economy and ensuring the Valley's infrastructure continues to match pace with the rapid rate at which the city has grown over the past two decades, if elected. Pockell's already started to prepare for the position, he said, by regularly attending council meetings and budget discussions, meeting with the current iteration of the council to come up to speed on big ticket items and through the lessons learned through his campaign last year. "It doesn't have to be as polarizing as you see on a national level," Pockell said of campaigning. "There's room for different voices at the table, and we learned a lot talking to people, learning what they care about and thinking about ideas to solve the problems that we all see all the time." On Wednesday, Lisa Miller, a member of the Spokane County Board of Equalization, became the third candidate vying for Higgins' open seat. While it's her first bid for office in Spokane County, the California transplant previously served two terms on a neighborhood council in Los Angeles. "I love my city and I love Washington State, and I would like to use whatever skills I have to help," Miller said. With experience as a law professor, an administrative hearing officer and general counsel for California Community Colleges, Miller said she has a wealth of legal knowledge to draw from. If elected, she would focus on "supporting public safety in a meaningful way," while maintaining her values as a fiscal conservative, she said. Miller catches as many council meetings as she can, and said she looks forward to connecting with voters on the issues they care about. She pointed to a lengthy debate about laws surrounding electric scooters in Spokane Valley at Tuesday's council meeting as an example of how civically minded Valley residents tend to be. "People really care in this town, and it doesn't really matter if it's a scooter or a tax increase, people care," Miller said. "And I do too." As for the remaining board seats on the ballot this fall, Spokane Valley City Councilwoman Laura Padden and Mayor Pam Haley have filed for re-election, as has Councilman Ben Wick. No one had filed to challenge Haley as of publication deadline, according to state records, but Padden and Wick will have to contend with candidates backed by one of their fellow board members. Councilman Al Merkel won't be up for re-election until 2027, but that hasn't stopped him from getting involved in the 2025 races early. Chaos and controversy have plagued the council since Merkel's arrival, as he's repeatedly butted heads with the board over construction projects, grant applications and the complaints and investigations related to him. Last May, an independent investigator found Merkel repeatedly disrespected city staff and fellow board members, often engaging in "intimidating behavior." In a later, separate independent investigation, Merkel was found in violation of state law and city code regarding public records for his social media activity. Those findings were later upheld by the city's hearing examiner following an appeal by Merkel, and are the basis of a lawsuit the city launched against him earlier this year that alleges he is still not in compliance with state law. After months of failing to find common ground with his peers, Merkel recruited candidates to replace them. Wick, a councilmember from 2012 to 2015 before rejoining the council in 2017, has drawn a challenge from Daryl Williams, an employee of Fairmount Memorial Park who goes by "The Karaoke Guy" while operating his local karaoke pop-up business. Williams, 74, said he has always had an interest in politics and local government and thinks "there is room for improvement" on the Spokane Valley City Council. He believes his general demeanor and approach could help alleviate some of the tension and communication issues between council members, issues that have plagued the board since Merkel joined in January 2024. The West Valley High School graduate added that Merkel encouraged and helped him file to be a candidate for the position. "You're there to represent the people who voted for you, not to pat yourself on the back," Williams said. "I just want to get involved in my community." Merkel's also helped Brad Hohn, manager of the salvage yard High Mountain Horsepower, in his attempt to unseat Padden. Hohn said the council members are good people "for the most part," but he believes they "are losing focus of what the people really want." As an example, he does not believe the city is prioritizing the right infrastructure projects, pointing to the lack of completion of an overhaul of the Trent Avenue and Sullivan Road interchange that's been in the works for years. "You get a lot of people who complain about many different things, or how things should be ran, but yet they don't vote or try to do anything themselves," Hohn said. "It's put up or shut up, you know?" City of Spokane The Spokane City Council will have three seats on the ballot this fall, which continued to draw more prospective candidates as filing week stretched on. The South Hill is home to the only open seat, which is being vacated by Councilwoman Lili Navarrete. The race included two candidates as of Wednesday evening: Alejandro Barrientos, chief operating officer at SCAFCO Steel Stud Company, and Kate Telis, a former deputy prosecutor in New Mexico. For the seat representing northeast Spokane, incumbent Jonathan Bingle filed for re-election and is being challenged by social justice advocate Sarah Dixit, organizing director for Pro Choice Washington and co-chair of the Spokane chapter of the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition. Northwest Spokane Councilman Zack Zappone has a pair of challengers as he seeks reelection: private cigar lounge co-owner Cody Arguelles and Meals on Wheels board member Christopher Savage. The city's three municipal court judges, Kristin O'Sullivan, Mary Logan and Gloria Ochoa-Bruck, each filed for re-election Monday. As of Wednesday evening, Logan was the only to draw a challenge — from former Spokane City Attorney Lynden Smithson. Smithson oversaw the prosecuting side of the office before taking on the top role in an interim capacity in 2022. The council named him city attorney in 2023, a role he held until Mayor Lisa Brown took office in January 2024. Local school districts In the county's largest district, Spokane Public Schools, all four board members in seats up for re-election have filed to retain their seats. Incumbents Nikki Otero Lockwood, Hilary Kozel, Nicole Bishop and Jenny Slagle have yet to draw a challenge in their respective races. East of the county seat, Spokane County GOP Chair Rob Linebarger and Dr. Allen Skidmore, who has a family medicine practice in the Valley, are hoping to join the Central Valley School District. The positions' incumbents, Pam Orebaugh and Tere Landa, respectively, have yet to file for re-election. Beata Cox, Jonathan Horsle and Mike Bly, board members of the East Valley School District, have all filed for re-election and have yet to draw a challenger. Local Subway store owner Carolyn Petersen, who lost a bid to current district 3 seat holder Justin Voelker in 2021, is the sole candidate who's filed for the position as of Wednesday evening. The West Valley School District did not have a contested race as of publication. Incumbents Bob Dompier and Pam McLeod have filed to retain their positions, according to state records. The Mead School District's five-member governing board has two seats up for election this year, and Vice President BrieAnne Gray was the sole candidate to have filed by end of day Wednesday. Gray is seeking re-election for the first time. In southwestern Spokane County, incumbent Elizabeth Winer will contend with Jessica Davis, owner of Airway Heights eatery Wolffy's Breakfast Burgers and Brew, for a seat on the Cheney School District's governing board. Kyle Belock, husband to Cheney City Councilwoman Jacquelyn Belock, filed to run for a separate seat on the board Wednesday.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Yahoo
Law enforcement investigating suspicious death in Spokane Valley
May 7—Spokane Valley law enforcement is investigating the suspicious death of a man found in an RV, according to a news release from the Spokane County Sheriff's Office. Deputies responded to a report of a deceased person inside a motor home parking lot around noon in the 6500 block of East Broadway Avenue. They found a man's body inside, the release said. The man's cause of death was unknown at the time. The Spokane County Medical Examiner will release the name of the deceased and the cause of death.
