Inlander 04/20/2023

SEVEN THINGS WE CAN ALL DO TO

INSIDE

EDITOR’S NOTE

W

Would it be easier to do nothing? Yes. The world we live in is built on ease and convenience. Frankly, that’s part of the reason we are where we are, facing an uncertain future threatened by decades of wildfires and rising oceans, crop failures and a diminished supply of safe drinking water. But for this Earth Day, is it worth the effort to change your life — even just a little bit, even if it’s inconvenient — to ensure a better future? Without a doubt.

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e live in convenient times. We can buy anything we want, go anywhere we please, and be distracted by any number of shows, movies, games, podcasts or songs. Not everyone is as fortunate as us, here in the U.S., and some of us are better off than others. But we all can make better choices in our lives. As this week’s cover — SEVEN STEPS FORWARD — shows, our daily decisions do make a difference. Simple things like eliminating meat from our diet or riding a bike to work — even just one day a week — can lessen the impact we have on our world. More expensive things, like buying electric vehicles or installing heat pumps in our homes, are also worthwhile, especially if you can afford them.APRIL 20, 2023 INLANDER 3 48 52 55 ppgwni.org Easily book appointments online, anytime. 1.866.904.7721 Se habla español The Spokane-Coeur d’Alene area is served by two Planned Parenthood health centers offering the same broad range of services. 12211 E Broadway Avenue, Suite 4 Spokane Valley 509-924-3459 HEARING LOSS IS THE THIRD MOST COMMON CHRONIC PHYSICAL CONDITION IN THE U.S. Consequences of Untreated Hearing Loss in Adults include Dementia • Risk of Falling • Depression Shorter Lifespan • Tinnitus Call Today to schedule your FREE hearing evaluation and consultation Meet the People Who Shaped the Inland Northwest Now on sale at these Inland Northwest retailers! Inlander Histories Vol 1 & 2 • Atticus • Auntie’s • Boo Radley’s Inlander.com/books

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WHAT STEPS DO YOU TAKE TO LIVE MORE SUSTAINABLY?

JOHN DOTSON

It is a lot of reduce, reuse, recycle. Otherwise, it’s the simple stuff, you know, keeping lights off when I’m not in the room, keeping AC and heat off when I’m not using it.

SAMUEL ORTEGA

I try to cut the amount of times I drive, make sure that I’m actually taking care of my trash and putting it in the correct places if I need to recycle it and such. And being conscious about the amount of water I use when I’m washing my dishes because I feel like it’s easy to be wasteful when you’re doing that.

GRANT CASADY

I purchased a home that was close to where I work, and so I almost always walk. And when I don’t walk it’s because I’m going somewhere else and I have a short commute and so it reduces my greenhouse gas emissions.

KASSIE THIERAUF

I think the biggest one that I do is I try and reduce my overall single-use waste when it comes to most things.

What is your biggest concern when it comes to protecting the planet? Legislation should be made to back up these things, because I don’t think individual impact is big enough.

MIRA WIBEL

I live very close to both school and my job, so I walk to school every day and try to walk to work as much as possible. I am going to grow a garden this year, and I’m really excited about that, maybe not because it’s sustainable but more as a fun hobby, but I think it’ll be fun to eat those foods and veggies.

Opportunity Costs

Understanding that doors don’t open the same way for everyone is itself a way to put your foot in the door

BY CMARIE FUHRMAN

“They’ll take away my scholarship,” the student said when I told her she needed to spend more time on her schoolwork. In her voice was something I had heard before. She told me she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to finish her degree if she didn’t say yes to yet another one of their opportunities.

“You know how it is,” she said, “if you don’t keep the door open, they’ll close it for good.”

I do know. And I know “for good” means exactly what it sounds like. In my last job interview, a white woman asked, “You have your fingers in a lot of pies. What will you give up if you are offered this job.” Jokingly, I replied, “Housework,” because I feared that had I told the truth, if I had corrected her and said it wasn’t fingers despoiling pies, but feet propping open doors, that I wouldn’t get a chance at the job — another door closed. And not just to me but possibly to any “good” that I may be able to do for others behind that door. I stayed angry at that question and found myself avoiding the woman who asked it, even after I got the job.

But the thing is not the door, of course, nor the key that unlocks it, but the hand that penned quotes like, “When one door closes another door opens,” “Opportunity is knocking…” or “Knock, and the door will be open to you.”

Inspirational, undoubtedly, in that pull-yourself-up-bythe-bootstraps kind of way offered to Americans born with that silver key in their hand, whose teeth and notches fit precisely those locks made by the dominant culture. For those not born into the right socioeconomic status or ethnic group, getting that foot in the door is everything.

And opportunity does often lie behind a door. This is why the student was tired. She was presented with a multitude of opportunities. Opportunities to moderate panels, speak at conferences organized by non-Native

The Working Families Tax Credit will put up to $1,200 cash back in the hands of families and individuals that qualify beginning 2023. Find how you can claim this money. Please visit the Washington Department of Revenue’s booth during the Festa Italiana event to see if you qualify.

professors, write essays for anthologies curated by non-Native editors, dance for white audiences, compose opinions about policy and show up for photoshoots directed by campus marketing. And because she wants to represent her tribe and educate others about Native issues, she does it, the extra work — and everything else expected of a university student — extra work that has put her far behind on her classwork.

And yet the opportunities keep coming, and she can’t keep up. And when the doors are thrown wide open, the opportunities behind them look like precisely what they are, opportunities for the dominant culture. Opportunities that can be another form of oppression, that tend to benefit those giving them equally or more greatly than those for whom they are intended.

Because of this, I have realized that a foot in the door isn’t enough. Recently, I facilitated a conversation leading to a substantial donation that would support bringing a Native student to a weeklong class. Months later, with a student in mind for the opportunity, I asked if the scholarship was available.

“We haven’t figured out how to award it, so nothing is available this year.”

I think this is where Audre Lorde, the poet, author and civil rights activist, would caution against using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. To make sure that opportunities are indeed equal, we have to forget about finding the right keys or knocking on the right doors, but instead, start building establishments for the nondominant culture that are at the very least equitable and at their very best bastions of opportunity whose doors once opened never close and the only expectation for those who pass through is to leave the door unlocked for the next person.

It took restraint not to tell the student to simply say no to further opportunities. For as good as it sounds, it’s not so simple. And though I understand the work of decolonization is not the job of those being colonized, I also know that there is no one more capable. And as much as I love the metaphor of doors and the ideas about this house we need to dismantle, I also see a deeper meaning in what Lorde said: It is not the master’s tools, but the masters themselves who must dismantle the house. It is replacing the house with a community and the doors with people. People who open, who are opened by a new way of being, less interested in protecting what is behind the door with trials and expectations, and more interested in building an equitable community. And though I cautioned the student against taking too much on, I also understood.

“You all are always so busy,” the same white woman who was at my interview said to me recently as we listened to a Black writer talk about his work and the many organizations he partnered with.

I now have the job and my fear of losing it has become less than my fear of closed doors. So this time, rather than making a joke or turning away, I opened up to my way of thinking about the work; I invited her to step into a new way of being together. n

CMarie Fuhrman is the associate director of the graduate program in creative writing at Western Colorado University, where she also directs the poetry program and teaches nature writing. She is the current Idaho Writer in Residence and author of the collection of poems, Camped Beneath the Dam, and co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology and Poetry. She resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho. Visit CMarieFuhrman.com.

And yet the opportunities keep coming, and she can’t keep up. And when the doors are thrown wide open, the opportunities behind them look like precisely what they are, opportunities for the dominant culture.

JOINUS F O R LUNCH!

Annual Benefit Luncheon hope builders

Thursday, May 11, 2023 11:30am

Readers helped answer a question staff writer Nate Sanford wrestled with: Is Spokane’s Pavilion actually cooler than the Seattle Space Needle? (“World’s Not Fair,” 3/30/2023):

MICHAEL SALSBURY: That’s like comparing apples and salmon.

BRADLEY BAYSINGER: No. The Space Needle can’t serve as an amphitheater.

PHILIP PORTWOOD: Both are lasting icons from World Fairs. The IMAX movie was awesome and educational.

BLAISE BARSHAW: Are shrooms legal in Washington now?

KEN KUSZMAUL: No. The Space Needle is much better than a glorified sun shader.

ALEX JAY CASTRO: Yes, because it’s free.

SCOTT RYAN: Nope not at all. The Pavilion doesn’t have a cool restaurant to eat at the very top.

ASHLEY LILYSON: I can’t decide which one is cooler.

BIRDIE BYRD: No. One is an engineering marvel, the other looks like a pole was erected with a net thrown over it. n

please register online!

Together, we can raise funds to build hope for Spokane families as they change their lives through a ordable homeownership so they can thrive. habitat-spokane.org/HBL

Proudly presented by Banner Bank

Readers respond to the online version of our question of the week: What’s your favorite rock? (4/6/2023):

PATRICK HAYES: Columnar basalt

KATHY FLUAITT SCHAAL: Diamonds

BRIDGET FREEMAN: Either the Bowl or the Pitcher

JON SKINNER: Big Rock

MICHAEL BENTON: Fraggle Rock

BRENDAN FLYNN: Doom metal

HEIDI MASTERS: Obsidian n

When you compare World’s Fair icons, ask yourself: Who were these built for? YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

Working at MacDonald’s F

BY DANIEL WALTERS

or nearly 30 years, Lori Patrick loved working for the city of Spokane. Having risen from a clerk to the office manager overseeing the city’s permitting team, she was proud of her reputation as the “Mama Bear” of the office. She outlasted eight mayors. She weathered the rise and fall of multiple planning directors and division heads. She was overseeing the team that cut permitting times in half under the administration of former Mayor David Condon.

But the pandemic left her reeling. She needed a break. Her doctor told her as much.

“You’re gonna continue to get worse unless you do something,” she recalls her doctor saying early last year.

Just a week or two of vacation wasn’t enough. So in March 2022, she sent her employees a long email apologizing for leaving them at such a crucial moment — and went on federally guaranteed medical leave.

It was when she came back in June that she learned her job wasn’t waiting for her. She met with the city’s recently hired community and economy development director, Steve MacDonald, who told her she’d no longer be supervising the permit team.

The woman who’d replaced her, Patrick says, told her she wouldn’t be supervising anyone at all anymore. From everything she knew about the federal law around medical leave, it seemed illegal.

Patrick wrote a lengthy email explaining that she was “horrendously saddened.” In the email, Patrick also raised “the very real issue of gender inequality” and said she’d suffered “retaliation” for taking protected leave. She quit a month later.

But that summer, she got a call from attorney Kathleen Haggard, the independent investigator who had previously cleared a city official of charges of racism. And she had some questions for an investigation she was conducting into MacDonald.

Months later, when Patrick asked to see the results of Haggard’s investigation into MacDonald — as she’d seen provided to complainants in a previous investigation she’d been involved in — the city flat-out refused.

“Because the investigation was performed for both personnel and legal reasons, I am unable to provide you with a copy of the report or further disclose any personnel actions,” Assistant City Attorney Mike Piccolo wrote in his reply to her.

Piccolo later told her the report was “inconclusive” and said the city had taken “appropriate action in alignment with” its practices.

But both state law and the investigator’s own contract was clear: While names of complainants and witnesses could be

An “inconclusive” investigation reveals the chaos and conflict that chased veteran employees away from Spokane City Hall

redacted, the investigation itself was a public document.

So the Inlander made a formal records request, and got the investigation documents.

The investigation shows that Patrick wasn’t the only one with concerns: Multiple employees had raised concerns about MacDonald’s leadership, including Kris Becker, the development services director who had performed MacDonald’s role for 18 months before he’d arrived. Above all, the report exposes a bitter rift that ran down the middle of City Hall, driving out longtime employees, and contributing to the internal chaos that has come to define Mayor Nadine Woodward’s first term.

BEND IT PAST BECKER

From the outside, MacDonald’s hiring in fall 2021 has seemed like a smashing success. City Council members, often critics of the Woodward administration, have been singing his praises. Council member Karen Stratton calls him one of the mayor’s best hires, applauding him for promoting women in his division.

“I have seen the faces of the employees in his department, it feels like it’s a far more positive environment to work in,” says Stratton. “I don’t have employees coming to me talking about how their feelings got hurt or yelled at.”

But behind the scenes, records and interviews show, the relationship between MacDonald and key members of the development services center went rapidly from dysfunctional to downright toxic.

“I feel like there was a big change when Steve came on,” Patrick says. “Him starting at the city impacted people that I worked for.”

Conflicts reverberated throughout the leadership chain.

MacDonald quickly began clashing with Becker. Both were strong-willed leaders with their own fans and detractors.

Becker reported that her one-on-one meetings with MacDonald would be repeatedly moved or canceled. One was merely eight minutes. She said that MacDonald would invite male colleagues to lunch, but not her.

MacDonald would accuse her of withholding information from him, Becker said, after she’d twice emailed him a report containing the supposedly withheld information.

Becker says she felt she couldn’t effectively communicate with him, that it seemed like in his eyes, she “couldn’t do anything right.”

“Anytime I reached out, it seemed like whatever I did made things worse,” Becker says.

Becker — who had overseen parking, code enforcement and the development services center at the same time — didn’t file a formal complaint, complain to the press or want an investigation. But she did seek guidance from the city’s Human Resources Department.

“The working relationship between you seems to have broken down,” City Administrator Johnnie Perkins told MacDonald, according to notes from a February 2022 HR meeting.

MacDonald declined interview requests to tell his side of the story, though he did provide a short statement. But in his comments to HR, he came across as equally frustrated, accusing Becker of dishing out excuses and delays.

Distrust between the two grew. MacDonald declared that Becker was trying to “sabotage” planning director candidate Spencer Gardner, and so he cut her out of the planning hiring process. Gardner was appointed to the role in January 2022.

“I wanted people who were fair-minded,” MacDonald told HR, according to the report.

But Becker says she had nothing against Gardner. It was about the consistency of the hiring process: Other candidates with more relevant experience hadn’t received interviews, she says. She was also uneasy about MacDonald taking Gardner out to dinner — an opportunity that other candidates didn’t get.

Becker helped lead the COVID team that set up about seven homeless shelters and isolation centers. She’d been part of the mayor’s “strike team” tasked with keeping the community housing and human services department afloat after the entire homelessness team had quit.

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Cinco de Mayo

And yet, in December 2021, after she raised concerns about putting a proposed homeless shelter on Trent Avenue — a heavy industrial zone — MacDonald cut her out of major discussions.

“I was actively trying to make sure that problem was addressed before the city signed a lease,” Becker says.

Ultimately, the City Council had to change the zoning for the building. It opened in September 2022.

Becker was alarmed with the way MacDonald would go around the chain of command to push through his agenda. And she wasn’t the only one.

The Haggard investigation shows a development services clerk wrote a letter last year raising the alarm that even though key inspections on an apartment complex apparently hadn’t been completed, MacDonald declared that a temporary certificate of occupancy needed to be issued anyway. The clerk described MacDonald’s approach as “hostile” and said multiple staff members were fretting that the “highly irregular” process could expose the city to serious liability if things went wrong.

Any government regulator faces this kind of ethical tension: The same responsiveness to complaints that can make a division director a hero to a City Council member or a business owner can also mean that those who complain — or have political connections — receive special privileges.

“It’s not fair to the little guys,” says Patrick.

Across the three decades she served at the city, Patrick says, she always despised seeing the way that “somebody could go upstairs and skirt around requirements or jump to the head of the line” if they had connections.

“Employees hated seeing, you know, a school get a [temporary certificate of occupancy] when it’s not safe to

be occupied yet,” Patrick says.

But this time, this sort of thing was happening when their department was already overwhelmed. The staff was simultaneously dealing with the lingering psychological trauma of the pandemic, the backlog of permits that had built up during the lockdown and the inevitable problems integrating remote work.

“People didn’t have the capacity anymore to be able to deal with small things that would happen,” Patrick says.

Becker, Patrick and the department’s operations manager, Jacque West, all went on medical leave in March 2022. All ended up leaving the city.

“Quite a coincidence,” MacDonald snarked in an email, uncovered by one of Patrick’s own records requests.

GOODSPEED AND GOOD LUCK

Patrick knows she could have sued.

She knows what happened to Nancy Goodspeed — how Goodspeed went on medical leave in 2015 only to see her job filled by a police spokeswoman who’d quietly accused the police chief of sexual harassment, got a transfer and a $10,000 raise. When Goodspeed returned and wasn’t given her job back, she sued — the city settled for $165,000.

Goodspeed’s attorney, Kevin Roberts, tells the Inlander that the Family Medical Leave Act would have usually guaranteed that an employee gets their job back — or an equivalent job with the same authority and duties. If Patrick was overseeing employees when she left, in other words, she’d need to oversee employees when she got back. (Interviewed for the investigation, MacDonald

MEET THE DOCTOR NEXT DOOR

claimed both that he hadn’t intended to make permanent changes to Patrick’s job, and that, in the long term, he did intend to remove the permitting team from Patrick’s supervision.)

But Patrick didn’t sue. Even if she successfully protected her job, Patrick thought, she’d just have her position eliminated during budgeting. She’d watched it happen. But Patrick wasn’t expecting much from the investigation either.

“Many times over the years, people would remind you: HR is not there to protect you,” Patrick says. “HR is there to protect the city.”

Once the Inlander showed Patrick the investigation, it did little to contradict her cynicism. Though Patrick says she was willing to speak to the investigator again more thoroughly, Haggard claimed that, because she’d been unable to interview Patrick “in full,” she could not draw a conclusion.

Still, Haggard hoped the report was useful to the city’s legal interests.

“I hope this report was useful to the City should any tort claims or lawsuits be filed,” she wrote in the report, “or should the City feel the need to make personnel decisions.”

But the report also alluded to a broader crisis rippling through City Hall. In fact, Haggard noted, all three human resources employees who’d discussed the issue with MacDonald had themselves left the city before the report had been finished.

That included the human resources director — Woodward’s third HR director to quit in as many years.

“Meaningful change in an organization can be difficult,” MacDonald wrote in his statement to the Inlander

AMY EDDY, M.D. UW School of Medicine ’10 Internal Medicine Residency Director, Spokane Teaching Health Clinic

“WORKING AT MACDONALD’S,” CONTINUED...

“Our staff is thriving under a very capable leadership team that is committed to common sense process improvements that benefit both customers and employees alike.”

In his interview with Haggard, MacDonald suggested many employees were happier with Becker, West and Patrick gone.

Still, within a six-month span last year, six different Development Services Center employees had resigned or quit.

The city of Spokane had more resignations in 2022 than in 2019 and 2020 combined — and that doesn’t even include Becker or Patrick, who both technically retired. By July 2022 the city had 282 vacancies — about 14 percent of its workforce. The gaping hole wasn’t just in the Development Services Center or HR. It was in planning. Community housing and human services. Accounting.

Mayoral candidate Lisa Brown has made the chaos at City Hall one of her key attacks on Woodward’s leadership, arguing that the vacancies in the planning and housing departments have crippled the city’s ability to respond to the homelessness crisis.

“The lack of staffing and turnover has been problematic in getting a lot of good ideas off the ground,” says Brown.

COVID was part of the explanation. But to veteran employees like Patrick and Becker who had wanted to stay, leadership shared in the blame.

“I always had this vision of how I was going to leave,” Patrick says. “It was going to be this retirement party. It was going to be this great thing.”

That party never happened. But today, she reports, she has a new job she loves, working for a state agency. It’s a little like how dating someone new can show you can reveal just how bad your ex actually treated you.

“Only in hindsight, do I realize how long I was treading water in toxic sludge,” she says. n

danielw@inlander.com

Out of Sight?

As Spokane’s health district moves its opioid treatment program to a new building, a City Council member asks if sobriety comes with marginalization

BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

After more than two years of preparation, Spokane Regional Health District plans to move its opioid treatment program later this year.

Opened in 1990, the program currently operates out of the health district’s main building north of the Spokane River, providing regular doses of methadone or buprenorphine to people addicted to opioids.

Moving to the building at 312 W. Eighth Ave. — near Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center — will allow the staff to offer more services to patients and will expand access to all who need the medication-assisted treatment, says Misty Challinor, treatment services division director at the health district.

The health district pays about $34,000 a month to rent the new space, which was owned by Spokane County until March 2022. The health district, which began paying rent in October, is run by a local health board with elected officials and health care representatives approved by the county commissioners.

While rent for the 25,000-square-foot space is directly paid by taxpayers, all of the opioid treatment program costs (including rent) are recouped by reimbursements from Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance and out-ofpocket charges to patients.

Spokane County sold the building in March 2022 to a company called JP Spokane VIII, which is owned by Texas-based Jaffa Parks, a real estate investment company that owns multiple Spokane properties and is based out of a mobile home park in Austin, according to county records.

Previous tenants moved out after the sale, including a detox program run by Spokane Treatment and Recovery Services, which had to close its withdrawal management beds in the building in May last year after rent increases.

The district made upgrades to the space, including new paint and renovations to ensure the dispensing area will meet pharmacy and Drug Enforcement Administration guidelines, Challinor says.

After the district gets its certificate of occupancy, which could happen by the end of this month, the Washington State Department of Health and other licensing agencies will ensure it’s ready to go.

It’s been a long time coming, says Challinor. When she started with the district 15 years ago, the opioid treatment program regularly served about 200 patients. As it grew, more space was needed.

Currently, every day but Sunday, 500 to 600 people arrive at the health district building to get their dose starting at 5:15 am, which lets people get to work or school on time. Participants wait their turn in chairs in the building’s large main-floor foyer, overflowing from the distribution area.

Because of the space limitations for patients and staff — there aren’t more offices to put new hires in — the program has held steady at about 1,100 patients in recent years, Challinor says.

“It’s not because the opioid crisis has plateaued,” Challinor says. “We have a limit on how many staff we

can bring in to provide services.”

The program hasn’t been able to hire ready-to-go positions such as a resource navigator, who can help participants with everything from resume building to signing up for a bus pass. The new building will have space to finally hire that person as well as a psychiatric nurse practitioner who can prescribe other medications for patients who need them, Challinor says.

Other services like mental health counseling could also expand in the new space.

TRANSPORTATION, NEIGHBORHOOD CONCERNS

One of the immediate concerns that Spokane City Council member Lori Kinnear had when she recently learned about the plan to move the program was how patients would get there.

While there used to be a bus stop right in front of the building, the closest stop is now about a block-and-a-half away. However, Challinor says the district hopes to work with Spokane Transit Authority to get the stop moved back in front of the building.

Unlike the current location, the new space also has enough parking for all of the staff, Challinor says, in addition to about a dozen parking spaces for patients.

Kinnear also wondered whether the move had anything to do with negative feedback from the district’s Kendall Yards neighbors. A fence with three gates that have been locked for years blocks pedestrians from accessing My Fresh Basket grocery store from the health district property.

“Are we now marginalizing people based on their wanting to get clean and sober?” Kinnear asks. “What is the message you’re delivering by putting this fence up? I don’t know the answer to that.”

Challinor says she hasn’t heard concerns from Kendall Yards and that the neighborhood hasn’t been part of the conversation to move. Instead, she says the motivation is purely coming from within the district, which hopes to

better serve those struggling with substance use disorder. Neighbors of the new space will get the chance to learn more at a community meeting that will be organized by the state Department of Health, possibly early this summer, Challinor says.

As the director of the program, Challinor is well aware of the misconceptions people have about its participants, and she says that telling an addict that going cold-turkey is the only way to quit is like telling a diabetic to just make more insulin.

“People are coming to us to better their lives,” Challinor says. “The likelihood of it being someone that you know or your neighbor is very probable, because opioid use disorder doesn’t differentiate.”

Opiates and opioids, the family of drugs including heroin, morphine, hydrocodone, oxycodone and fentanyl, are particularly hard to quit because the substances physically alter brain chemistry over time. With the brain seeking more of the happy endorphins the drugs produce, opiate addicts not only build up a tolerance, but also require a much higher baseline just to feel “normal,” let alone high.

Medication-assisted treatment helps break the cycle of seeking the next dose and is an effective strategy for many people, Challinor says.

Participants in the program have to show up regularly (at first daily, then as little as two times per month after earning take-home doses over time), attend counseling, keep their take-home doses in a locked container, report any medical changes, and submit to random drug and alcohol testing.

“It’s helping them to sustain that feeling of normalcy so they can go to work, they can go to school, they can raise their family, they can be a productive member of society, whatever that looks like for them,” Challinor says. “It’s really about meeting the patient where they’re at. It’s not about enabling, it’s really about helping people.” n

samanthaw@inlander.com

The opioid treatment programs helps about 1,100 patients a year. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

Latte Labor

A Spokane Starbucks tries to join the national labor movement. Plus, the city inches closer to new bike parking standards; and police warn of violent teens “roaming in packs”

One of the largest labor movements in recent history is coming to Spokane, as workers at the Shadle Center Starbucks on Wellesley Avenue filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to unionize with Starbucks Workers United on Monday. If the NLRB approves the request, they’ll join nearly 300 other stores across the country that have voted to unionize as part of a national campaign that began in late 2021. “We are tired of being treated as expendable, replace able, and frankly disrespected,” the Spokane workers wrote in a letter to Laxman Narasimhan, who took over as CEO of the Seattle-based coffee chain last month. The previous CEO, Howard Schultz, has pushed back against unionization efforts at his stores — leading to accusations of union busting, refusal to bargain in good faith and retaliation against pro-union workers. The NLRB has issued 80 complaints against Starbucks over its response to recent union activity. Jamie Jordan, a barista at the Spokane store, said in a Monday news release that unionization will give workers the “respect and dignity of fair wages, hours, and the ability to make our voices heard.”

(NATE SANFORD)

BETTER BIKE PARKING

Get your u-locks ready, because last week the Spokane Plan Commission approved recommendations brought forward by city staff that would create better bicycle parking throughout the city by allowing bicycle parking to substitute for some of the required vehicle parking spots in new buildings, differentiate between facilities for long- and short-term bike parking, and provide standards for how bike parking can be built. If approved by the City Council, new buildings could swap out up to 25 percent of required car parking spots for long-term bike parking, which must be inside of a building or protected in some way. The changes are part of a citywide effort to quadruple ridership over the next 15 years, with a goal of 5 percent of commuters riding a bike. The changes have already been reviewed and approved by the city’s Bicycle Advisory Board, and will be before the City Council in a couple of weeks. About 250 people responded to an online survey about the changes. Most supported the update, but many noted that protected bike lanes as part of a connected network was more important to them. (NICHOLAS DESHAIS)

A CLOCKTOWER ORANGE

Gangs of children. Street fights. Robberies and assaults. There were echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 dystopian film A Clockwork Orange last Thursday, when Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl told reporters that armed juveniles were “roaming in packs looking to prey on other people” near downtown Spokane and Riverfront Park. The chief said large groups of teens as young as 14 had been involved in four recent attacks, including a stabbing last Tuesday on the Monroe Street Bridge. Police said they’ve arrested 14 of the young people involved in those incidents and are still looking for more. During an unrelated walkalong with a pair of Downtown Spokane Partnership security ambassadors on a foot patrol last Wednesday, they also voiced concerns about trouble caused by large groups of youths. “There’s groups that will clash with each other,” said Chris Seim, one of the security ambassadors. “Some of these kids though, it’s better down here than at home. Their home life is real bad.” (NATE SANFORD)

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SEVENFORWARDSTEPS

Whenever new technology or policy comes along in hopes of cleaning up the environment, Americans tend to meet the news with more than a healthy level of skepticism. Will spending more on my new heater even help, or will I end up freezing during the winter? Are pricey electric vehicles good for anything other than in-city driving? Why should I cut out meat one day a week if it’s only going to make a small dent in the methane-heavy food chain?

Not only do we answer those questions in the coming pages, but it helps to recall how far we’ve come as a country. By 1970, communities started to realize, boy, industrialization with little regulation has a high environmental cost. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, regularly covered in oil slicks, had literally caught on fire several times throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1969 Cuyahoga fire prompted Congress to create the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and Earth Day was started months later. The same year, the Clean Air Act gave the EPA power

to regulate pollutants pumped out by manufacturers and vehicles. The Clean Water Act of 1972 completely revamped the country’s water regulations.

Since then, what’s happened? Cities like Spokane saw smog all but disappear as new car emissions are now 99 percent cleaner than the polluting tailpipes of the 1970s. Communities stopped using rivers and bays as their municipal garbage dumps. The Silver Valley, once a barren wasteland of yellow hills after smelter fog acidified the ground and killed all the plants, is once again filled with lush green trees made possible by ongoing superfund cleanup. The U.S. saw its overall greenhouse gas emissions decrease 7 percent from 1990 to 2020, despite its population growing by 80 million people.

Still, there’s more to be done. Plastic production continues to increase exponentially, despite the fact that little of it is ever recycled and it takes hundreds to thousands of years to decompose. Our addiction to cheap goods has driven a fast fashion industry that’s creating mountains of discarded clothing around the world. And the majority of our emissions still come from transportation, even though e-bikes and transit can easily replace some of our trips in the car. Each of us can do better, and each tiny step in the right direction can translate to big changes if we work together.

— SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL, section editor

Heat pumps, which look a lot like HVAC systems, can warm or cool homes even as temperatures range from negative 14 to hotter than 110.

HEAT PUMP BUMP

ratchets

BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

While engineers and environmental activists have been aware of the climate-friendly potential of heat pumps for years, recent efforts to aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions are bringing the appliances to the forefront of home heating discussions in Washington.

Electric heat pumps can both heat and cool homes, as well as provide hot water. With state guidelines pushing the electric grid away from fossil fuels and new models proving more efficient than ever, heat pumps offer one more way to help reduce our impact on climate change.

SO, WHAT’S A HEAT PUMP?

Rather than generating heat by burning natural gas or heating an electric coil to warm up air that’s pumped through a home, heat pumps pull existing heat from the air or ground, amplify it, and transfer it inside or outside a building.

You can think of it kind of like a refrigerator, which pulls heat out of the fridge by passing a refrigerant that boils at extremely low temperatures through a compressor and coils. Hold your hand behind the fridge, and you’ll feel the heat that’s being transferred out.

Many heat pumps operate similarly and can work in either direction, warming a home in the winter and cooling it in the summer.

Even at minus 14 degrees or hotter than 110, newer heat pumps can still warm or cool homes, although, like gas furnaces or plug-in air conditioners, they get less efficient as temperatures reach extremes. Some heat pumps also have a backup system to produce electric resistance heat (like the electric coil mentioned above) when necessary.

WHY IS WASHINGTON PROMOTING HEAT PUMPS?

In 2019, state lawmakers passed the Clean Energy Transformation Act, putting Washington’s utilities on a path to provide completely renewable, non-emitting electricity by 2045.

About 55 percent of the state’s electric power already comes from hydroelectric dams. Transitioning off the fossil fuels that supply much of the remaining electricity is a key part of the state’s strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent (from 1990 levels) by 2050.

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The Washington State Building Code Council voted last year to require electric heat pumps for home heating and hot water in new residential construction, with natural gas hookups or resistance heat only intended to serve as backups. New commercial and multifamily construction will also need to rely on heat pumps under the rules, which could take effect this summer, but a lawsuit has been filed by builders to block the changes.

Powering our homes, offices and shops produces about a quarter of our emissions statewide, explains Kelly Hall, the Washington director for Climate Solutions, a nonprofit focused on climate policy. Heat pumps not only help reduce emissions by using less electricity, but they can also help us get off natural gas appliances that may leak carbon monoxide and contribute to health issues, Hall says.

The new code doesn’t force anyone to choose to get off gas right now, she says.

“The state building code does require efficient heat pumps in new buildings,” Hall says. “It does not ban a natural gas hookup, or a natural gas stove. It pushes us toward the most efficient appliances.”

DO THEY WORK IN THE INLAND NORTHWEST?

Winters like the one we just had often dip into the single digits or colder.

Counterintuitively, there’s still plenty of heat to be captured from cold air, says Sam Rodell, a local passive house architect who designs extremely efficient airtight homes. That style of construction, which also uses better insulation and provides better air quality through mechanical ventilation, only needs about 10 percent of the power a built-to-code home requires, he says. Heat pumps can work extremely well for that style.

“We are able to keep the interior climate right where we want it with simple, small equipment, and heat pumps do the job perfectly,” Rodell says.

But say you have a far less efficient, drafty old home like many of those found throughout Spokane. Can heat pumps still get the job done?

The simple answer is yes. The key, experts say, is to make sure that your heat pump system is designed to your home’s specific needs by a trained professional.

CAN THEY SAVE MONEY?

Local homeowner and environmentalist Fawna Slavik says she and her husband weren’t sure if a heat pump would work in their century-old home, even though they wanted to replace their old furnace with a climate-friendly option.

“One winter a few years ago, it was really, really cold, and our gas bill was insane,” Slavik says. “It made me feel bad every time I paid the bill, and it was like, ‘This is really terrible for the environment.’”

So she was pleasantly surprised to learn a heat pump would work. They made the switch two years ago while renovating, and she says the system has saved them hundreds of dollars over those two winters and kept things comfortable all year long.

“The technology has come pretty far,” Slavik says. “It’s been fantastic. We didn’t have an air conditioning unit at all, so now when it’s smoky or super hot we’re not dying.”

HOW EFFICIENT ARE THEY?

Heat pumps are incredibly efficient, putting out as much as three to five times as much energy as they require — that’s 300 percent to 500 percent efficient, which is a big difference over high-efficien-

cy natural gas furnaces that are about 90 to 99 percent efficient.

Parts of the country that get more electric power from coal and gas wouldn’t necessarily see significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions if everyone switched to heat pumps. But in Washington, which has some of the cheapest electricity in the country from mostly renewable energy sources, the switch can save a significant amount of climate-warming gasses from being emitted.

WHAT OTHER PERKS ARE THERE?

Environmental groups are pushing state lawmakers to offer rebates, particularly for those with low to moderate incomes. The House’s proposed budget includes $115 million for heat pumps and electric appliances.

“It’s really important to us that finances aren’t the barrier for electrifying your home,” says Hall with Climate Solutions, noting that state funding can unlock up to $14,000 per home in federal heat pump incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act. “We’re hopeful there will be a good amount of money put toward electrifying our homes in the final budget.”

Local installer Gavin Tenold, who owns Northwest Renewables, specializes in projects that save customers money on their electric bills and help decarbonize the environment. Many of his customers want cleaner air as well.

“We live in a city with an older built environment. Lots of homes were built in the early half of the last century, and they don’t have nice, new modern ductwork,” Tenold says. “Ductless [heat pump] solutions are excellent for that.”

Premium heat pumps will be more expensive than installing traditional heating, he says, but the efficiency over traditional appliances can save on monthly bills. Plus, heat pumps are far quieter.

“Are we going to panic buy window-rattling ACs?” Tenold says. Heat pumps “are quiet and more efficient than the electric air conditioners that people are comparing them to.” n

“HEAT PUMP BUMP,” CONTINUED...

Heat pumps could help save money, and the world, in the long run.

Just in time for Earth Day!

PLUG & WAIT

Stop and smell the roses while you stop and charge the Leaf

BY DANIEL WALTERS

Driving an electric car used to be a bit harrowing for Andrew Biviano. Not the safety aspect, mind you. But the battery gauge aspect.

“I had real anxiety,” says Biviano, a Spokane County District Court judge. His Nissan Leaf’s battery only had enough juice to get him 60 to 80 miles. “It really wasn’t physically possible to drive your Leaf across the state.”

It’s called “range anxiety,” says Lindsey Perkins, spokesperson for the electric vehicle advocacy group Plug In America. But as electric vehicles have become more popular and common, that problem has dwindled significantly.

For instance, Biviano’s now on his third electric car, a Tesla Model 3 with an effective range

of 200 miles, a common range for today’s EVs. And so with a little bit of planning, he says, you can drive across the whole country — at least the north-south route.

“I drove to San Francisco and back,” Biviano says. “It’s actually very convenient.”

Bit by bit, new networks of electric vehicle charging stations have been laid down across the country.

“They’ve got one in Ellensburg,” Biviano says. “There’s one in Moses Lake. One in Wenatchee.”

To be clear, some of those are limited to Tesla owners — the charging station plugs don’t fit other brands of cars, though the federal government is requiring them to abide by a power-sharing

agreement in the future. But there’s a lot more coming, too. The state of Washington obtained $71 million in federal funds to build out charging stations along I-90.

But there’s no getting around it: Even the fastest chargers — superchargers — can take 15 to 20 minutes to reach the desired level of charge, a lot longer than it takes to fill up a tank of gasoline. The slower outlets can take hours. And if the station is already filled up with other EVs charging, add additional time to the schedule.

That creates a whole new requisite ritual: passing the time while you’re waiting.

So while gas pumps are often just paired with, say, nomnoms or other convenience stores, electric vehicle charging stations are often placed near shopping malls and coffee shops.

In Ellensburg, Biviano grabs a coffee at Starbucks while his Tesla charges. He doesn’t linger too long though. Some stations start fining you — up to a dollar a minute — if someone is waiting behind you after you’re all charged up.

But other locations offer “destination charging” — slower charging, but often with free electricity to incentivize you to stay and shop a while. Plug in to a charging station outside Huckle berry’s on the South Hill and grab a Mediterranean omelet while you wait. Charge up while catching an Indians baseball game at the fairgrounds. Plug in at Kendall Yards, and read the latest copy of the Inlander

And for those who love the nostalgic magic of small towns, charging stations provide an excuse to, say, check out Newport on the Idaho-Washington border. Tonia Buell, a spokesperson for the Washington State Department of Transportation, gives a shoutout to the picturesque charging station in Rosalia on the way to Pullman.

“That one is really cool because it was one of the first gas sta tions in the state,” Buell says. “Now it’s a new age fuel [station] for charging electric vehicles.” n

Elizabeth Fobes returns a charging plug after removing it from her 2018 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. YOUNG

BUY AN E-BIKE

BY NICHOLAS

If you don’t know it by now, you should: Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Most of that comes from passenger vehicles, and the vast majority of car trips — 76 percent — are done by one person alone in a 4,000-pound vehicle.

A new federal bill may help convince Americans to finally swap their car keys for a bike helmet.

The Electric Bicycle Incentive Kickstart for the Environment (EBIKE) Act was introduced last month and, if passed, would cover 30 percent — up to $1,500 — of the purchase price in refundable tax credits for new pedal-assist bicycles.

A similar bill was introduced in 2021 and was part of the Inflation Reduction Act before being stripped out in final negotiations in the Senate. Now, though, the bill looks like it has a better chance of being approved, thanks to new support from bicycle and environmental groups that gave it tepid backing last time around.

“There is a much larger number of national organizations that are behind the EBIKE Act this time around, and that has a lot to do with the growth in their popularity in the last few years,” says Noa Banayan, director of federal affairs at the nonprofit advocacy group People for Bikes.

For years, groups like the Sierra Club and Environment America embraced national policy supporting electric cars and better gas mileage, but they only recently shifted toward lobbying for less driving and getting people out of their cars, electric or otherwise.

That shift in support is due to the obvious success of similar rebate programs around the country. More than 100 state and local gov-

ernments have begun offering e-bike discount programs, according to research from Portland State University.

Last year, Denver launched a program to give $400 to any resident, and $1,200 to low-income residents, purchasing an e-bike. More than 5,000 people have so far redeemed the e-bike voucher. According to the city’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency, people who took the rebate rode an average of 26 miles each week, replacing 3.4 car round trips as well as 100,000 vehicle miles traveled each week.

Despite the clear local advantages — e-bikes make it much easier to climb the South Hill, for instance, or ride from the Valley to downtown — Spokane and Washington state have no similar programs. Yet. The state Senate transportation budget this session includes $3 million for an e-bike point-of-sale rebate.

While a number of electric utilities around the U.S. offer rebates, no local utilities do. Avista’s manager of electric transportation, Rendall Farley, says he’s “monitoring micro mobility.” But he says that Avista is more focused on making sure its grid can handle the load as cars and trucks switch from gas to electric.

This shift to electric vehicles may help the environment, but even that’s questionable. Behind transportation, the second-largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions is electric power, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The answer, says Banayan, is the e-bike.

“They make things efficient, and they bring people joy,” she says. “The climate impact is a bonus, but when people ride bikes, it’s truly — wow — transportation is joyful.” n

Electric cars are becoming more common thanks to government support — but bolstering e-bikes would have a bigger impact

DESHAIS

E-bikes can replace many commutes done by car.

MEATLESS MONDAYS MATTER

Food and agriculture play a big role in climate change, producing up to 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to a 2016 study by researchers in the U.K.

Red meat accounts for approximately 47 percent of the emissions from American diets, and all animal-based products, including meat, dairy, fish and eggs, account for 82 percent of dietary emissions, according to a 2020 study from the University of Michigan.

A vegetarian diet would reduce individual diet-related emissions by at least a third, according to a 2019 Johns Hopkins report, but you don’t have to fully cut out meat to reduce your footprint.

The report states that the “Meatless Monday” movement to not eat meat one day a week reduces individual emissions by about 4.8 percent.

Recreational res.

Learn before you burn...

Recreational res include open re pits, chimneas and other devices that burn charcoal, dry rewood, or manufactured logs and pellets. The re must:

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• Be attended at all times.

Wood-fueled res must be 25’ from structures and other combustibles. Most outdoor res are restricted during the re danger season.

Other rules apply. Learn more at SpokaneCleanAir.org/outdoor-burning

Eat your veggies.

That might not seem like an astounding reduction, but the report states that even if only about two of every five Americans participated each week, that’d be like taking more than 1.6 million cars off the road each year.

Plus, studies have shown that small changes are more likely to last than significant lifestyle changes, so Meatless Mondays are likely a more sustainable option than going plant-based cold turkey.

“Our university has Meatless Mondays and … one thing it does is it raises awareness,” says Gregory Keoleian, a researcher who was part of the University of Michigan study. “I think it’s a matter of trying to limit and explore some of these alternatives.”

— SUMMER SANDSTROM

Less is more.

The way to a more sustainable energy future is to use less energy. It’s why Avista teaches its customers how to save energy, rewards them for upgrading to energy-efficient equipment and adopting weatherization measures, and promotes new sustainable technologies. By optimizing energy efficiency, we’re reducing energy usage as well as carbon emissions for a cleaner future.

Learn how you can save energy at myavista.com

ONE MAN’S TRASH

Almost all clothing donated to thrift stores get reused or recycled

BY ELLIE ROTHSTROM

Macklemore got it right in his hit song “Thrift Shop” when he said “One man’s trash, that’s another man’s come up.” Thrifting offers an afterlife to many discarded objects through an impressive process of collection, sorting and resale. Items that don’t sell are usually recycled.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of our clothing ends up at the dump, and with fast fashion producing more

In 2018, 18 billion pounds of textiles went to a landfill. N. HANACEK/NIST

clothing than ever, that’s a big problem. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent report on waste and pollution, textile production surged from 1.3 million tons in 1960 to 13 million tons in 2018, a year that saw 9 million tons of textiles disposed of in landfills.

Fast fashion brands such as Topshop, Zara and Forever 21 generate millions of tons of clothing, with stores and customers rapidly discarding clothes. H&M recently got heat for burning some of its unsold clothes, while Nike has received criticism for slashing shoes they discard, rendering them useless.

The unsold clothes that don’t immediately make it into landfills in the U.S. are “donated” to other countries, such as Chile and Ghana, which have become dumping grounds for textile waste. One such place is Chile’s Atacama Desert, once a vast expanse of unobscured landscape of vibrant red-orange rock canyons and peaks. Now, as far as the people of Alto Hospicio can see, the desert bears a new geographical feature: mountains of clothing.

Due to its duty-free ports, Chile receives millions of tons of clothing from the U.S., Europe and Australia, resulting in an overwhelming amount of discarded textiles that the country can’t keep up with.

Thankfully, all hope is not lost.

Consumers can do as Macklemore, and turn to thrift stores. Not only do secondhand stores help reduce the need for clothing production as items get reused, but most of these stores ensure that clothing is recycled when it doesn’t sell.

Brent Hendricks, executive director of Global Neighborhood Thrift, explains that his store — a local nonprofit that provides job training to refugees — takes any and all donations in an effort to divert items from landfills.

“If you think, ‘No one’s gonna want to wear this,’ still donate it to us, and we will get what we can out of it,”

Hendricks says. “We will find a place for it that, 95 percent of the time, is not in a landfill.”

Outside of the thrift store, there’s an entire textile recycling ecosystem that most people don’t get to see, he says.

Once items make it through a rigorous grading system at Global Neighborhood Thrift to determine their value, they are either sold in the store, sold to other vendors through a commodities broker, or taken to other facilities to be fully recycled into industrial rags, insulation, carpeting, and more.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which promotes American innovation and industrial competitiveness, reports that while 85 percent of our clothing currently gets thrown away or burned, the 15 percent that gets donated is almost entirely reused in some way. Only about 5 percent of what’s donated still makes it to landfills or incinerators.

This cycle also benefits Goodwill and other secondhand stores, because textiles are a commodity they can sell. Hendricks says that it makes practical sense for thrift stores to ship their textiles to be recycled.

“If you can make a couple cents a pound off of it instead of paying a couple cents to get rid of it, it just makes

good business sense,” he says.

Hendricks encourages everyone to go to Global Neighborhood Thrift and other thrift stores to stop the cycle of fast fashion, and to get high quality, long-lasting clothing.

“After you donate the stuff that you’re getting rid of, choose to come in and buy clothes in a thrift store instead of just perpetuating the cycle,” he says. “We have 25,000 square feet full of clothing for sale. We have so much stuff, and if you buy it from us, you’ll save money and you won’t perpetuate that cycle. It’s kind of a two-forone.” n

Global Neighborhood Thrift diverts the vast majority of clothes people donate from the dump. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

What’s the most eco-friendly way to travel from Spokane to Seattle?

Transportation accounts for 27 percent of nationwide emissions, with personal vehicle trips creating well over half of that impact.

According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, here’s how many pounds of carbon dioxide each method of transportation emits on average per passenger-mile, or one person traveling one mile:

PERSONAL VEHICLES: 0.47 POUNDS

BUSES: 0.39 POUNDS

AIRPLANES: 0.34 POUNDS

PASSENGER TRAINS: 0.30 POUNDS

The actual emissions vary widely. For instance, the report notes that transit buses holding only a fraction of their capacity average 0.95 pounds of CO2 per passenger-mile, while intercity buses average 0.15 pounds of CO2 per passenger-mile. Popular cars ranged from 0.60 pounds of CO2 per vehicle mile to 1.18 pounds for pickup trucks.

There currently aren’t any studies detailing the carbon emissions for a trip from Spokane to Seattle, according to Jonathan Olds, environmental program manager at

the Washington State Department of Transportation. He says using the national data to draw conclusions will be relatively accurate, but factors may vary, such as how an airplane’s cruising altitude affects its emissions.

A trip from Spokane to Seattle is approximately 279 miles when traveling on I-90. Based on the national data, a solo one-way trip to Seattle would emit about 131 to 167 pounds of CO2 by car, about 42 to 109 pounds when taking a bus, or about 84 pounds by train.

According to Google Flights, which calculates carbon emissions that vary by type of plane, a flight from Spokane to Seattle emits between about 105 and 170 pounds of CO2.

“We tend to travel in the way that we perceive as the easiest,” Olds says. “If people want to invest in more choices, then we’ll see a change.”

— SUMMER SANDSTROM

Plastic

COFFEE CUP CALCULUS

In the U.S. alone, about 50 billion coffee cups get thrown away each year. In theory, bringing a reusable cup with you whenever you buy coffee would combat the excess waste produced by single-use products, but does it?

Disposable paper coffee cups (which are lined with plastic film and can’t be recycled) degrade after about 30 years, and plastic cups can take more than 400 years to

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The Little Festival That Could

Get Lit! celebrates 25 years of creating literary magic in Spokane

BY MADISON PEARSON

When Christine Holbert came up with the idea for Get Lit!, Spokane’s annual literary festival, she wasn’t met with overwhelming support.

“It took some major convincing,” Holbert says.

“However, I was a rambunctious graduate student with all sorts of ideas.”

Her idea was to create a celebration of all things literature in Spokane, something that had yet to be done in the area.

“I wanted to create a literary vortex,” she says.

Holbert’s then-graduate adviser at Eastern Washington University, Christopher Howell, warned her of the roadblocks she might encounter while establishing the festival. Having founded a Portland poetry festival, Howell tried to discourage Holbert from getting in over her head.

Holbert had hardly any experience in the literary world besides the knowledge gained from her near-complete degree in publishing, but she wasn’t about to give up so quickly.

“I couldn’t get the idea out of my head,” she says. “So I just kept nagging him until he finally agreed to help me get the permissions I needed from the administration. He was there to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid.”

Holbert and Howell took off running and in 1998, the very first Get Lit! Festival was held at the Bing Crosby Theater over the course of one day.

The festival was originally intended specifically for MFA students from EWU. Holbert thought learning from established authors was just as helpful as what graduate students were learning in the classroom.

Now, Get Lit! is celebrating its 25th anniversary as Spokane’s premier literary festival. Taking place April 20-23, the festival is open to the public, and events are spread out at venues across downtown Spokane.

In the 25 years since its inception, Get Lit! has experienced both growing pains and extreme triumphs. While the festival has hosted bigname authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Roxane Gay and Denis Johnson, children’s programming has shrunk, and the pandemic forced 2020’s event to cancel, and 2021’s festival to convert to a completely virtual format.

But each year, the festival perseveres.

“[Get Lit!] continues to be possible through lots of hard work and fundraising each year,” says Kate Peterson, the event’s director. “We don’t get an operating budget from the university, so we raise the funds via grants, sponsorships and community partners.”

At one point, Get Lit! grew enough to warrant spreading events over the course of a week. Now, it’s just four days long. Peterson says future festivals will likely continue to shrink in size, but only due to new ventures behind the scenes.

“We are very likely going to be growing to join forces with Eastern’s Visiting Writers program and their Writers in the Community program,” she says. “So, we will be back to doing more youth events, including sending writers into local schools, hospitals, shelters, etc.”

25 Years Later: Celebrating the Festival’s Founders

Sat, April 22 from 10-11 am, $20 (included with event pass), Montvale Event Center

More at getlitfestival.or

“The festival will be just as dynamic and fun if we end up going back to our roots as just one big day of events. But it means that folks should really come out and take advantage of all of the opportunities we’re offering this year for our big anniversary.”

The opportunities Peterson speaks of are diverse and specifically targeted at Spokane’s avid readers. One look at this year’s schedule,

and attendees may have a hard time choosing just a few events to attend: the annual book fair with 25-plus local booksellers, a discussion about freelance journalism featuring regional journalists, and a festival-goer favorite, Pie & Whiskey, hosted by Kate Lebo and Sam Ligon. The list goes on and on and on… (see page 30 for more of our top recommendations).

The author lineup for this year’s festival doesn’t disappoint in terms of hyper-local talent. Featuring local authors like Laura Read, Jess Walter, Leyna Krow and Chelsea Martin, attendees have the chance to learn more about the writers who make the Inland Northwest a literary powerhouse.

“We’re not just focused on readers,” Peterson says. “But both readers and writers. We offer access to highly sought-after writers from around the country, but in an intimate setting where attendees are able to chat with them after events — maybe see them at more than one event over the course of the weekend.”

As for a big-name draw for this year’s author lineup, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón takes the cake. Limón is the first Latina to be appointed as U.S. poet laureate and has authored six books of poetry. In addition to her mainstage event with Laura Read and Gabrielle Bates at the Bing Crosby Theater on Saturday, Limón is also hosting a class on how to begin to write a poem. Who better to learn about poetry from than the nation’s current poet laureate?

“I’m most excited about bringing Ada Limón to Spokane,” Peterson says. “I’m always excited to show off our beautiful city to the authors who visit from out of town. Having 70-plus writers all participating together and getting to meet and connect in our community, and ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over how beautiful Spokane is in the spring, is really special.”

As Get Lit!’s legacy becomes stronger, it’s clear that the word “special” defines what the festival has been about from the beginning.

“The festival has gone through lots of changes over the years,” Peterson says.“But, the core mission and goals of celebrating the power of the written word have always been the same.” n

Get Lit!’s director, Kate Peterson. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

Choose Your Own Word-venture

Can’t decide what to attend during Get Lit!’s 25th run? Consider these seven events

For its 25th occurrence, Eastern Washington University’s Get Lit! Festival once again offers something for readers and writers of all kinds with more than 40 unique events. From author readings to hands-on writing workshops, sessions on storytelling, journalism, podcasting, poetry, creative writing and more, the toughest challenge for attendees is squeezing everything in across the event’s four-day run.

After perusing this year’s expansive programming schedule, here are seven recommendations, in addition to the two Get Lit! events featured in this week’s Inlander: a lookback on the festival’s 25 years (page 28), and an evening of poetry with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, alongside Laura Read and Gabrielle Bates (page 32). For complete details and registration, head to getlitfestival.org.

PIE & WHISKEY

Thu, April 20 at 8 pm, $5 (ages 21+), Montvale Event Center

After a three-year hiatus, this beloved facet of Get Lit! returns, offering the trifecta of pie, whiskey and whiskeyinfluenced writers. Hosted and created by esteemed local writers Sam Ligon and Kate Lebo, this year’s event showcases poetry and prose by 13 regional writers, among them Jess Walter, Emma Noyes and the Inlander’s editor, Nick Deshais. Besides the evening’s reader lineup, Pie & Whiskey — of course — includes home-baked pie and whiskey from Dry Fly Distilling. This popular event is known to hit capacity each year, so get there early to snag entrance.

BY CHEY SCOTT

WOMEN WRITING IN FULL COLOR

Fri, April 21 at 7 pm, free, Central Library’s nxʷyxʷyetkʷ Hall

The most crucial element of writing (and reading) is that it allows us to share experiences and perspectives far beyond our individually limited world views. Three Northwest writers who excel at prompting readers to empathetically expand their minds are spotlit during this reading. The writing of CMarie Fuhrman, Toni Jensen and Jane Wong is united by interwoven threads of race, culture and underrepresented voices in both literature and society. Jensen explores gun violence and the experiences of Indigenous women, and Wong examines what it means to be a Chinese immigrant in America, while Fuhrman writes about the West from an Indigenous perspective. They’ll each read and talk about how their identities inform their work.

CASCADIA FIELD GUIDE: ART, ECOLOGY, POETRY

Sat, April 22 at 1 pm, $20 (included with event pass), Montvale Event Center

A captivating setting can both literally and figuratively center a piece of writing. Here in the Northwest — or, more broadly, the Cascadia region of the U.S. — this sense of place is vast with possibilities, from the unfor-

giving, sagebrush-dotted scablands to the lush coastal rainforests. This event celebrates the Cascadia Field Guide, an anthology of art, poetry and stories that root readers in this vast ecoregion. Cascadia spans 2,500 miles of the Pacific coast from southeast Alaska to Northern California, encompassing all of Washington and bleeding into western Montana. At this session, anthology editors and contributors read from their musings on Cascadia’s primitive beauty. A second event on Sunday, April 23, at 4 pm (free) heads outside for a guided walk from High Bridge Park to some of the places that inspired these writers.

LILAC CITY POETS

Sat, April 22 at 1:30 pm, $20 (included with event pass), Montvale Event Center

Spokane’s poetry scene is flourishing. Look around, and the evidence is everywhere: Oodles of open mic and community readings happen on the regular, and poets from the area are frequently publishing new collections and winning serious accolades for them. Two poets who’ve helped nurture this thriving poetry community in the past decade are Mark Anderson, former Spokane poet laureate (2017-19), and Connie Wasem Scott, a writing instructor at Spokane Falls Community College. Poets of all levels (anyone can write poetry) can learn more about the craft, like where to find inspiration and how to get involved in the local poetry scene. Get Lit!’s Poetry Salon directly follows this session, too.

Pie & Whiskey returns after a three-year hiatus. RAJAH BOSE PHOTO

FINDING THE FACTS: A READING & CONVERSATION ON FREELANCE JOURNALISM

Sat, April 22 at 4 pm, $20 (included with event pass),

Montvale Event Center

Being a journalist is not for the faint of heart, especially in a time when public trust in the media is shaky at best, and the distinctions between truth, opinion and objectivity keep getting blurrier. But being a journalist can also be really rewarding, and it’s this that motivates freelance journalists Leah Sottile (author of When the Moon Turns to Blood and former Inlander staffer), Sindya Bhanoo and Vanessa A. Bee. All three women will be in conversation with Spokesman-Review reporter Emma Epperly, talking about the obstacles they face — as women, as journalists, as freelancers — and how they tackle difficult stories.

GET CRIT!

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS LIVE

Sun, April 23 at 10 am, $20 (included with event pass), Montvale Event Center

Last year, to much success, Get Lit! showcased the crucial element of creative storytelling in role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (which is still experiencing a huge resurgence) with a live, on-stage gaming session. It’s back this year, featuring a group of players from the creative sphere who all share a love of gaming. (Two of them, in fact, happen to work for the Seattle-area company, Wizards of the Coast, that produces D&D.) The rest of the party is made up of actors, educators and writers who’ll team up for a train heist scenario from Wizards’ Keys to the Golden Vault campaign. If you love D&D, also don’t miss Saturday’s event, Dragon Talk: A Conversation on D&D, at 10:30 am.

SPOKANE STORIES

Sun, April 23 at 7 pm, free, Central Library’s nxʷyxʷyetkʷ Hall Capping off another year of Get Lit! is an evening with local authors Jess Walter and Leyna Krow, whose two recent novels — The Cold Millions and Fire Season, respectively — are each set in the rowdy, early days of Spokane’s urban founding. Each novel boasts equally raucous characters navigating historical moments of great uncertainty. Walter’s tale is set during violent clashes over free speech and labor rights in the early 1990s, and Krow’s in the aftermath of the Great Spokane Fire of 1889. On stage, the two chat with fellow author Sharma Shields, who also has an affinity for centering her own novels in places and eras of Inland Northwest history. n

Leah Sottile HOLLY ANDRES PHOTO

Jess Walter Leyna Krow

A Little Like Jane

Spokane’s Laura Read celebrates the debut of her latest poetry collection, But She is Also Jane

BY AILEEN KEOWN VAUX

Spring in the Inland Northwest has its sure signs, like balsamroot bursting up along hiking trails, the Spokane River’s water crashing beneath bridges — and hundreds of writers descending on the city to celebrate our vibrant literary scene at the Get Lit! Festival. This year, former Spokane poet laureate and prize-winning poet Laura Read is launching her new book, But She Is Also Jane, and participating in Get Lit!’s headlining event with current National Poet Laureate Ada Limón and emerging Seattle literary star Gabrielle Bates. We sat down on a recent Sunday to discuss Read’s approach to using humor in poetry and how to manage writing honestly in a community where almost everyone knows her name.

INLANDER: This is a funny book in spite of, or maybe because of, the intensity of its subject matter — workplace harassment, the ways in which women are perceived in the world, aging — how do you approach writing humor into your poems?

READ: I think it is a fine line to walk in poetry. You want humor to catch your reader by surprise, to make them laugh, which moves them in a new direction. For a long time I didn’t believe humor belonged in poetry, but now I think there are ways to do it well, which helps a reader consider what you want to say with some complexity.

What convinced you that humor does belong in poetry?

It has something to do with the fact that anger and humor live close to one another. When you think something is outrageous, sometimes you laugh, you know? I feel like those two emotions go so well together.

What shows up in your new book that requires that kind of emotional companionship?

Writing about women’s bodies is not always valued or taken seriously, which is enraging, so I’m making an argument with this book that these subjects are worthy of art. I’m not making that argument on my own either — there are many women, men and nonbinary people who write about this today and have done so historically, making sure that the domestic sphere is getting our attention.

These are some of your most brazen and vulnerable poems. What’s allowed you to access this level of vulnerability?

The older I get the more I believe I should say the things I want to say. I think, too, watching my kids grow up and leave the house, living through the pandemic, family members dying — that kind of pain and change has made me bolder. I want to talk about things we aren’t supposed to talk about, like aging or the medical establishment. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to put my life on social media, but I do want to tell a story and

contribute to the bravery of others who are talking about these life-changing experiences.

Much of this book involves memories of your childhood, deeply rooted in Spokane. How do you grapple with memory in your writing while also living in the community where those memories were formed?

I don’t feel like I would write poems if I didn’t have all these different points of connection. When I’m writing I want to make sure there are enough pieces attached to that experience to give the poem complexity. Memory is one of those layers. I see memory as adding dimension to a poem. It can be uncomfortable when people come to my readings who have known me since childhood because they have their own experiences with the places and events I am writing about. But my writing represents versions of me that exist in a specific moment in time, which creates some distance I find comforting, especially when I have to do the risky business of reading in public.

I wonder if time is the material poets work with the most? Outside of words, of course.

Definitely. For me, the impulse to write a poem is like the impulse some people have to take a picture. I want to capture how I feel when I experience all of these memories colliding with each other. Even when I’m writing about other people in my life, ultimately, I’m writing about who I’ve been and who I am now.

You’ll be sharing a stage with Seattle poet Gabrielle Bates and current National Poet Laureate Ada Limón at Get Lit! How do you prepare to have conversations with other poets in front of an audience?

I think a part of preparation is settling the nerves. Reading in public can be intimidating, but on the other hand, you already wrote the words, so you know what

An Evening with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Laura Read & Gabrielle Bates

April 22 at 7 pm, $25, Bing Crosby Theater

More at getlitfestival.org

you are going to say. We are going to have a conversation on stage, which is great, from an audience perspective, because you get to know the writers a little more intimately. I think focusing on the importance of sharing our work and giving people an opportunity to connect helps me get over any fear I have of performing. Also, Ada and Gabby write poetry that is very sincere and accessible. It can be challenging sometimes to experience a poem live, but I think this lineup knows how to welcome an audience and make them feel at home. n

Laura Read’s new poetry collection grapples with how women are perceived by the world.

SUMMER PLAYLIST

These six trending musicians are an ideal soundtrack for fun in the sun

BY ELLIE ROTHSTROM

As we enter into warmer months, everyone wants an album they can sing along to with the windows down. As a writer with poet sensibilities, I’m a sucker for well-written lyrics, and am here to guide you to the best new albums by my favorite singer-songwriters. If you’re in the mood to sing loudly in your bedroom, slow dance in the kitchen, cry while eating Ben and Jerry’s, I’ve got you covered. From pop stars to fresh viral voices, treat your ears to these new albums.

STICK SEASON, NOAH KAHAN

Although most listeners might recognize Noah Kahan from his recent viral TikTok hit “Stick Season,” the title song off his 2022 album, he’s been making music since 2017. A storyteller by nature, Kahan’s songs tell of heartache and nostalgia, with lyrics that capture the feeling of rural living, such as “Spend the rest of my life with what could have been, and I will die in the house that I grew up in. I’m homesick.” His folk-infused pop songs feel like fog in the pine trees, a warm campfire, and a strong cup of coffee (or whiskey). See Kahan in action this summer at the Pavilion on Aug. 18.

FIVE SECONDS FLAT, LIZZY MCALPINE

With her delicate, crooning voice and bittersweet love songs, Lizzy McAlpine sings to broken hearts everywhere. The artist recently went viral for her song “ceilings,” a whimsical piece that’s as captivating lyrically as it is instrumentally. A recent TikTok trend associated with the song features women running outside in their best dresses as violins swell, the drums pick up, and McAlpine’s voice fills the space — perfectly capturing the emotional release that one naturally feels listening to this artist.

EAT YOUR YOUNG, HOZIER

Every Hozier song feels like an attempt to put a spell on you, and his new EP, Eat Your Young, is no different. Known for his soulful lyrics and wanting someone to take him to church, Eat Your Young is delightfully heretical and sinister, featuring stunning lyrics like

THE BUZZ BIN

CIVIC ENGAGEMENTS

Community theater is special, and in Spokane we’re lucky to have multiple such establishments that produce consistently stellar shows, one of which is the SPOKANE CIVIC THEATRE. The Civic recently announced the first slate of shows for its fully loaded 76th season. Kicking off the season on its main stage is The Addams Family in September, followed by Dracula in the Studio Theatre. Next up is A Sherlock Carol, a Dickens-meets-Doyle holiday mashup, and She Loves Me, the basis for the film You’ve Got Mail Merrily We Roll Along opens in the new year, followed by Good People and Amadeus in February, with even more shows to be announced. Season tickets are now on sale at spokanecivictheatre. com, with single-show tickets available closer to the beginning of the season. Break a leg, Civic actors! (MADISON PEARSON)

“Skinning the children for a war drum, putting food on the table selling bombs and guns, it’s quicker and easier to eat your young.” Playing with themes of gluttony, heresy and loss, the EP hints at a full-length album that Hozier claims will be centered on Dante’s Inferno, which sounds hella (and hellishly) engaging.

SOS, SZA

SZA is R&B’s It Girl, with a 17-weekslong reign on the Billboard chart to prove it. SZA’s album SOS delivers an impressive list of 23 songs, ranging from breakup anthems (“Kill Bill” and “I Hate U”) to questions about her own humanity (“Ghost in the Machine”) to even jazzy love songs (“Snooze”). The R&B queen’s velvet voice, catchy lyrics, and keen sense of rhythm and instrumentals all serve to pull listeners into the deep end with her, as she explores topics of anger, regret, sex, and love.

DAYLIGHT, JORDY SEARCY

Jordy Searcy is refreshing and boyishly charming. This young singer-songwriter allows his earnest tone and heartfelt lyrics to shine by keeping his instrumentals simple, relying on his trusty guitar, keyboard and the occasional splash of drums. His hit song “Love and War in Your Twenties” is all about the fear and joy of being a young adult, a theme that embellishes his newest album, Daylight. Searcy’s ability to speak to young adulthood is unmatched by my standards, and his songs truly feel like a sunny day.

ENDLESS SUMMER VACATION, MILEY CYRUS

Whether you know Miley Cyrus from her years as Hannah Montana, her various acting roles, or her family connections to both Billy Ray Cyrus (her dad) and Dolly Parton (her godmother), you’re probably familiar with her country-roots-turned-pop star story. Cyrus’s new album, Endless Summer Vacation, showcases her raspy tone and strong vocals, accompanied with heavy synth and keyboard instrumentals. Striking the balance of retro and modern, the album invites listeners to a dance party (in the U.S.A) with Miss Cyrus herself. n

INLANDER ON OLIVER

This past Sunday, HBO’s LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER ran a segment on the migrant farmworkers who prop up America’s agriculture industry — often for low pay and dangerous working conditions. Oliver cited an Inlander story I wrote in 2021 about labor challenges in Washington’s farm industry. Migrants make up much of the workforce because most Americans, frankly, don’t want to do it. Quoting from that article, Oliver noted that the state Employment Security Department’s efforts to recruit domestic farm workers in 2021 resulted in zero hires. They were a bit more successful last year, with 10 hires. (NATE

SANFORD)

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST

Noteworthy new music arriving in stores and online on April 21-22 .

RODRIGO Y GABRIELA, IN BETWEEN THOUGHTS…A NEW WORLD. The world’s preeminent virtuosic, shredding classical guitar duo return with some electronic and orchestral elements folded into the mix to further expand their soundscape. (SS)

SUGA, D-DAY. BTS’s Suga returns as his alter-ego Agust D for his first full-length solo album, boasting old-school hip-hop rhythms as well as sweet, subdued melodies over self-produced beats. (MP)

JASON ISBELL & AMANDA SHIRES, THE SOUND EMPORIUM EP. The husband and wife singer-songwriter duo are this year’s official ambassadors for Record Store Day (April 22) and are releasing a collaborative EP to celebrate the occasion. (SS)

Dinner and a Friend

How one Spokane woman fosters connections while exploring local restaurants with her project Meet & Eat

BY CHEY SCOTT

While traveling through England on a solo trip last fall, the highlight of Vanessa Shintah’s explorations wasn’t all the famous places she visited, but the numerous strangers-turned-friends she encountered along the way.

After returning home to Spokane, Shintah realized how deeply those interactions impacted her, and how much she’d missed meeting new people during the pandemic years. She yearned to re-create the natural, sincere connections she’d made during her travels, this time with like-minded locals.

Meet & Eat founder Vanessa Shintah wants to make authentic connections. ERICK DOXEY PHOTO

To her surprise, plenty of folks in the Inland Northwest are hungry for the same thing. After pitching her idea on social media to meet up with local strangers over a meal, a project Shintah dubbed Meet & Eat, more than 100 people responded.

“I wasn’t really thinking that there would be that many people interested in doing this, plus, the interactions that I’ve had in Spokane… it wasn’t necessarily like everybody was really excited about meeting a new person,” Shintah says.

In late January, she coordinated the first meetup for Meet & Eat. Since then Shintah has met with about 15 different people at various restaurants in the Spokane area, writing about each experience on her website, radsmeetneat. blog. She’s been to the Bad Seed in Hillyard with a woman named Ashley, tried Indigenous Eats near Gonzaga with Robyn, went to the Garland Pub & Grill with Isaac, and even organized group “field trips” with fellow Meet Eaters, as she’s dubbed the project’s alums, to Fluffy’s Candy and Red Dragon.

For this story, too, I ask Shintah to treat our meeting as if I’m a regular Meet & Eat guest. When setting up these friend dates, she lets guests pick the location, asking them to consider their favorite restaurant, somewhere they’ve never been but have always wanted to try, or a brand new spot. If they can’t decide, she’ll turn to her “magic wheel” app to randomly pick. For our meetup last week, we landed on Wooden City downtown, which hosts happy hour from 4 to 5:30 pm daily.

For Shintah, the food enjoyed together is nearly as important as each new human connection, and she encourages sharing in order to sample a wider selection of the menu. And any Meet & Eat guests’ dietary preferences, such as being vegan or alcohol-free, aren’t seen as limiting, but enlightening.

At Wooden City — which I suggested because I hadn’t been there in quite some time, yet covered for the Inlander when it opened back in summer 2020 — both I and our server recommend ordering the Hungarian stuffed peppers, a sausage and cheese-stuffed green pepper recipe by the restaurant’s co-owner and chef Jon Green. In addition to the prosciutto toast with ricotta and chili jam, we also split an order of another popular item, the beet ravioli. Our server even let us in on a special secret: If you share this dish, it comes with one extra ravioli total for an even split.

As we dig into our appetizers, Shintah laughs as she says that she’s usually the one to asking most of the questions, not the other way around. In true Meet & Eat tradition, though, she also blogs about our meetup from her perspective.

Beyond her desire to make authentic connections with folks from many different backgrounds, Shintah hopes Meet & Eat encourages more people to see past each other’s differences — whether that’s appearance, social background, sexual orientation, political ideology or anything else.

Originally from Oroville in north-central Washington, Shintah has lived in Spokane since moving back from Las Vegas in 2013 to be close to family as her nephew grows up. In more recent years, though, she says she’s had several unwelcoming experiences as a half-Native, halfwhite person.

“I have all kinds of different stuff going on, you know, I’m tattooed, I’m pierced, I wear funky glasses, I dress differently. And I’m Brown and I’m tall and I’m big, and when my sister and my mom and I are together, we’re really loud and we laugh a lot. We’re a lot, I feel, for most people,” she says. “But when we got here, I noticed that we kind of backed off from being that, and we really shelled up from like 2017 on until probably the past two years. It felt like we weren’t accepted, or maybe tolerated. And so we just cut ourselves off” from the world.

During the heightened social tensions of the Trump presidency, and then COVID, Shintah and her family felt more isolated than ever. It wasn’t until that solo trip to England last fall that her perspective on getting out and interacting with strangers totally changed.

“I met people every day, and it was super organic,” Shintah recalls. “I’ve wanted that. I want to be social, and I want to interact with people and meet new people. It’s exciting and fun, and here, I felt like I couldn’t do that, by myself at least. But I can’t travel all the time, so I was like ‘What can I do?’ I wanted to figure out a way to do that here, and not feel so trapped. And over there, food was a major factor that went into meeting everybody. And here, there’s so many places around here that I’ve never been.”

To find people who felt the same way, all Shintah had to do was be brave enough to simply ask.

FOLLOW MEET & EAT

Website: radsmeetneat.blog

Facebook: Meet & Eat (public group)

“The people who opted in to try this out, they’re not any of the people I’ve been worried about,” she says. “I had just been so focused on how uncomfortable and off-putting the people were that I’d seen online the past two years. So it was a really personal thing, to get out and find these people and share. It’s interesting, because a lot of the people that I’ve met so far have told me that this is something that they’d never do unless prompted. They’ve thought about wanting to go out and meet new people and, I guess, friend date, but it’s just been too intimidating.”

For Meet & Eat, Shintah tries to arrange a meetup at least once a week, and currently is working her way through that list of 100-plus initial respondents. She’s created a Facebook group for the project, where past series’ guests can connect with each other and share great dining discoveries around the area.

While her own Meet & Eat adventures are constrained by her personal schedule, Shintah hopes others — even those just discovering her project — feel empowered to set up their own dining adventures with a stranger.

“I’ve told them, any time that any of you want to hang out, I’m not the only one that can facilitate it,” she says. “It’s just really cool to see the interaction that’s come out of that, like these people would never have met each other without me meeting them and introducing them. That’s where I really want this to go, for people not to be scared anymore.” n

High Stakes

Spokane chef Kadra Rose Evans competes on the Food Network; plus, recent restaurant openings

BY CHEY SCOTT AND CARRIE SCOZZARO

There’s a lot Kadra Rose Evans can’t say yet about her long-awaited appearance on the Food Network’s competitive cooking series Supermarket Stakeout

What the chef-owner of Little Noodle restaurant and Itty Bitty Buddha bar in the Garland District can say is how excited she is for friends and family to finally see how she fares. The Supermarket Stakeout episode in which Evans competes premieres April 25 as part of the series’ fifth season. To celebrate, the Garland Theater is hosting a public watch party (doors open at 8 pm, show at 8:45 pm), admission to which is a donation of nonperishable food for a local food bank.

“Basically, you’re given a $500 budget, and you have to buy groceries from people coming out of the grocery store, and you don’t get to see what’s in them,” Evans says. “Then, the first round, you’re competing against three other chefs.”

Not only do competitors have no idea what ingredients they’ll end up with, but each round has a culinary theme and chefs only get 30 minutes to convince a stranger to sell them the groceries they’ve just purchased and cook in a makeshift kitchen in the parking lot, no less.

“They said ours was one of the toughest episodes, because we got geographical spots,” Evans says, adding that the first challenge was a cuisine — Italian — she’d never professionally cooked before.

Supermarket Stakeout is hosted by chef Alex Guarnaschelli, who’s also appeared on Food Network’s Iron Chef, Chopped and The Kitchen, and owns Butter, a high-end American restaurant in Manhattan. Ultimately, the winning chef on Supermarket Stakeout gets a year’s worth of groceries for their restaurant.

Evans was initially courted by Food Network back in 2019 when she was interviewed as a potential competitor for either Chopped or Guy’s Grocery Games

“They booked my flights, and then COVID hit,” Evans says. “I was supposed to fly out in April 2020, and so then I didn’t hear from them until this [past] September, and they were like, ‘We’re still really interested in you.’”

Evans flew down to Los Angeles for filming in January.

“I loved it, it was exciting,” she says. “The biggest part I think was that I was just so, so proud of myself for even being asked to be on the show. I went down there thinking, even if I get voted off, but I don’t cut off a finger or fall in the parking lot, I’ll be happy.” (CHEY

SCOTT)

OPENINGS

All the way from Seattle, DRUNKY’S TWO SHOE BBQ (6412. E. Trent Ave.) is slinging some serious barbecue in Spokane Valley in a spot that long housed Daley’s Cheap Shots bar and, more recently but briefly, Haymaker Kitchen & Tavern. Other than collard greens and a few salads, it’s mostly meat here, from pulled pork and ribs to beef brisket and smoked salmon. With its industrial vibe, funky outdoor space and meat-centric menu, this looks to be an especially fun place to hang out in warmer weather. Visit twoshoebbq.net.

North Spokane’s new CAFÈ BOKU COFFEE & CREPES (915 E. Hawthorne Rd.) specializes in tapioca flour crepes, served rolled into cones and filled with sweet treats like Nutella, as well as savory foods like chipotle chicken and cheese. Tapioca flour is popular as a gluten-free alternative, and has a light texture and neutral flavor similar to rice flour. At Cafe Boku, another popular item is “croffles,” or croissant-waffles, topped with flavored whipped cream and sweet toppings. Follow this cafe on Facebook by searching for Café Boku Coffee & Crepes.

Downtown Coeur d’Alene has a new wine bar. RIVAURA (505 E. Sherman Ave.) recently replaced the former Liveforblue gallery and wine bar, featuring wines from the Hewett family’s Lewiston-area Rivaura Estate Winery. The Coeur d’Alene tasting room is a long, narrow space flooded with light, and filled with assorted tables and seating areas ideal for sampling wine, nibbling on a modest menu of light bites, and listening to live music. Visit rivaura.com. (CARRIE

SCOZZARO) n

Chef Kadra Rose Evans is on the Food Network.

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

HERO WORSHIP

Guy Ritchie turns the action movie

The Covenant into a dull military tribute

BY JOSH BELL

Have Guy Ritchie and Jake Gyllenhaal switched places with Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg?

Maybe that could explain Ritchie and Gyllenhaal’s new film The Covenant, a grim, plodding tribute to American military heroism that plays like one of Berg and Wahlberg’s true-life patriotism dramas. Although it tells a fictional story, The Covenant recalls fact-based movies like Berg’s Lone Survivor and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, complete with onscreen text of statistics and photos of real people shown during the closing credits.

Releasing a little over a month after Ritchie’s last movie, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, The Covenant is the opposite of that quippy, globe-trotting spy adventure, almost entirely devoid of humor or cleverness. Instead, it’s a slow, straight-faced military drama set in the later years of the American war in Afghanistan. Gyllenhaal plays Sgt. John Kinley, whose unit is tasked with locating and neutralizing sites where the Taliban is manufacturing or stockpiling weapons. After an attack at a checkpoint leaves the unit’s interpreter dead, Kinley selects Afghan local Ahmed (Dar Salim) as a replacement, and Ahmed quickly proves to be a shrewd and loyal member of the team.

That loyalty is put to the test during an ambush at a Taliban compound, which leaves Kinley and Ahmed as

the only two survivors. Cut off from communications and transportation, with Taliban fighters in pursuit, Ahmed carries the wounded Kinley dozens of miles across the desert to safety, at great risk to himself. Although Ritchie spends the first half of the movie with Kinley, Ahmed and their fellow soldiers, there’s little sense of camaraderie or personal connection, so Ahmed’s extreme dedication to Kinley lacks emotional resonance. There are some rudimentary family bonding scenes between Ahmed and Kinley and their respective wives, but otherwise they’re more archetypes than fully formed characters.

Social commentary has never been one of Ritchie’s strengths, and in The Covenant he tries to have it both ways, criticizing the U.S. government for its broken promises to Afghan military interpreters while holding up individual American soldiers and commanding officers as self-sacrificing heroes. Both Kinley and Ahmed are so noble and diligent that they’re practically saints, although both actors attempt to portray the internal anguish the characters carry back from the battlefield. After he’s rescued, Kinley returns home to California, but Ahmed has to go into hiding with his family, and Kinley vows to do anything he can to bring them safely to the U.S.

Rated R

In its final third, The Covenant goes full-on Rambo, when Kinley returns to Afghanistan as a one-man army, determined to pay his debt to the man who saved his life. This is more a story of obligation than friendship, and tacking on the dictionary definition of “covenant” at the end isn’t enough to create a convincing brotherhood between the two men. Gyllenhaal delivers overwrought speeches about duty and honor, but it all rings hollow.

THE COVENANT

Directed by Guy Ritchie

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Dar Salim

At the same time, Ritchie remains an excellent director of action, and when he focuses on shootouts and chases, he delivers a tense, gripping thriller. It’s easy to understand the danger that these characters are constantly facing, and while the movie’s conception of the war may be simplistic, it provides for clear, life-or-death stakes. Ritchie didn’t need to adopt Berg’s smug sanctimony in order to tell an engaging story about soldiers risking their lives for a questionable purpose.

With a more balanced ensemble, better pacing, and maybe a tiny bit more of Ritchie’s typical sardonic humor, The Covenant could have been a solid if forgettable thriller. Instead, it’s a dour lecture punctuated by some rousing action sequences. n

The Covenant’s shaky patriotic aim misses the mark.

Explosive Cinema

The tense heist drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline might be the film of the decade

BY MARYANN JOHANSON

Even before I saw How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I thought it had a good chance of being the film of the year. Of the decade, even. I wondered if this might even feel like the first movie of the 21st century, zeitgeist-wise. Like, in 2099, when we start looking back at what the past hundred years have been about, the ideas that shaped them, will historians and culturewatchers point to this movie and say, “This is where things really kicked into gear”?

I think it’s entirely plausible. I also hate that it requires a shit-ton of optimism to even suggest. And now that I’ve seen the movie, I believe my pre-screening suppositions remain credible.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline — it’s an incendiary title for an incendiary film. It’s a little bit like a horror flick, in that it’s about a varied group of young people who get together and find themselves in a dangerous situation in which they might be killed. The situation is both of their making and not of their making. The nice green planet they’re living on, with its temperate climate and drinkable water and breathable atmosphere, is being trashed beyond all recognition by people older and more powerful than they are. So they decide to express their displeasure with their environmental inheritance being destroyed in the only way left to

them: by f—ing shit up, violently.

The planet is Earth, of course, in the here and now. I don’t mean to suggest that the film pretends to be science fiction or that it withholds this information. It doesn’t. It starts off feeling like a low-key drama about disaffected young people the likes of which we’ve seen plenty before, only not with the stakes this high. I am trying to impart to my global-warming-denying, or just plain inexcusably complacent, GenX peers and elders that, in many ways that really matter, we are bequeathing to future generations a planet that is already intrinsically alien to human life as it has existed since we evolved into something like our current form.

Sasha Lane, Marcus Scribner. We can see (without the film being an infodump) that, for the most part, these young people from nonwhite backgrounds have not been served well by the supposed American dream. So they plan to blow up an oil pipeline in Texas.

ALSO OPENING

BEAU IS AFRAID

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE

Rated R

Directed by Daniel Goldhaber

The film draws inspiration from the Andreas Malm’s 2021 book of the same name, which is not a novel but a nonfiction manifesto about how the time for nice gentle placid protest has passed, and it’s time to violently let the fossil-fuel industry know that their vampire-capitalist BS is no longer welcome. So all the characters here are invented for the film, played by a deliciously diverse array of fab young actors: Ariela Barer (who also co-wrote the script), Forrest Goodluck, Jayme Lawson,

Starring Ariela Barer, Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane

Pipeline is a heist drama, and an incredibly tense and intense one. But this is a movie that transcends mere entertainment, even while it is incredibly entertaining. It is about young people who are enormously desperate and have nothing to lose because their elders have specifically engineered a cultural and physical environment that makes them desperate. “We don’t have time for divestment,” one of the kids says.

I say “kid,” but only because I’m old and they’re young. They are adults who fully comprehend the future they are facing. This is a movie about how nihilism is optimism. Are they gonna blow themselves up in the process of manufacturing their own improvised explosives? Maybe. “I don’t really care,” one of them says with a resigned shrug when the topic is brought up. They have no other choice n

In the latest from modern horror titan Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary), Joaquin Phoenix stars as the titular paranoid Beau, who embarks on a completely surreal, frightening journey home for his mother’s funeral. Rated R

CHEVALIER

The unlikely historical tale of Chevalier de Saint-Georges — the son of a slave and plantation owner who, despite his race, rose from prodigy violinist to conduct the Paris symphony under the watch of Marie Antoniette before getting caught up in the French Revolution — gets a grand big-screen adaptation. Rated PG-13

EVIL DEAD RISE

The fifth feature in the horror franchise takes things away from the cabin-in-the-woods setting, as a woman is visiting her single-mom sister and her three kids when the gruesome demonic forces are unleashed on the family’s L.A. apartment. Rated R

Environmental activism goes to the extreme in How to Blow Up a Pipeline

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Strength in Numbers

The HIRS Collective and its deep roster of famed pals help deliver messages of trans survival via hardcore punk

BY SETH SOMMERFELD

The rebellious underdog spirit of punk rock has long made the genre a safer space than most for people who feel marginalized. When the rest of the world sees you as a disposable other, a punk community can sometimes be the only place that will welcome you with open arms and gleefully toss you into the mosh pit with your outsider kinfolk.

So it’s not surprising that a lot of the most prominent transgender musicians operate in the punk sphere. Whether it’s Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace coming out publicly as trans in Rolling Stone back in 2012, the trans thrashers of Olympia’s G.L.O.S.S. making a ton of noise and burning out like a bright star, or We Are the Union melding trans identity with ska music, it’s one of the few creative outlets that really allow trans folks to thrive while being unabashedly themselves.

Jenna and Scott bring the thrash when the HIRS Collective performs live. CHRIS SUSPECT PHOTO

Philadelphia D.I.Y. hardcore punk outfit the HIRS Collective also fits into that mold-breaking paradigm. The two-person core of the group is vocalist Jenna, a trans woman, and guitarist Scott, who identifies as queer (both prefer not to use last names). But the “Collective” part of the Philadelphia-based group’s name is no misnomer. In March the band released its latest LP, We’re Still Here, which features 35 guest musicians. And that lot includes plenty of recognizable names including Shirley Manson of Garbage, Frank Iero of My Chemical Romance, Damian Abraham of F—ed Up, Soul Glo, and Geoff Rickly of Thursday.

Perhaps it’s apropos that HIRS looped in Rickly, as We’re Still Here — to quote a Thursday title — kind of sounds like understanding in a car crash. With 17 tracks that barely clock in at 30 minutes combined, it’s a frenetic barrage of grindcore noise blasts. Jenna’s throat-scraping screams brawl with Scott’s heavy riffs for a combative, clobbering concoction. It’s pure snarling energy that never relents. But under that abrasive exterior are lyrical messages of community and acceptance. While oppressed rage has certainly been a driving force on past the HIRS Collective releases, We’re Still Here finds Jenna leaning hard into finding joy and celebrating survival in these tough times.

“The first track (“We’re Still Here”) is a song Scott wrote, and I just knew that I wanted that to be the first track on the record,” Jenna says. “I love how it started, and I just loved everything about it. And when I listened to it, this is cheesy, but the ‘We’re still here’ part at the end just came to me.”

“We’ve been doing this band for 12 years now,” she continues. “And it started off with so much angst and aggression and anger, which we still have, but when I had the ‘We’re still here’ part in my head... I just don’t want to forget about compassion for humanity and speaking more about supporting folks rather than demonizing or canceling or like violence against folks that come after us or whatever. Instead of talking about those people that are so negative, more trying to talk about the positive things and just celebrate that.”

Making albums into huge collaboration projects wasn’t always the HIRS Collective’s modus operandi. The group formed in 2011, and its first notable unique musical approach was to release 100-song albums (they’ve put out three such albums, though the majority of those tracks clock in at under a minute). But after Jenna was recovering from surgery while the band was working on a 2015 split with Peeple Watchin’, the duo decided to invite friends to make the process more comfortable. And from there on, HIRS Collective was open for collaborative business.

While Jenna and Scott still split core songwriting duties, once the base of the tunes are completed, the process begins of figuring out which friends or musical heroes (Jenna particularly freaked out about having Japanese noise rock act Melt-Banana on the new LP) might be willing to add layers of sonic color to the mix.

“It’s almost like there’s a framework — the body and the muscles — and then there’s like the clothing. And then to make the whole outfit work, so-and-so might put like a cute little hat on. And, like, that looks really great. And sounds

really great. And goes with everything else that we’re wearing,” Scott says.

While the HIRS Collective finds it to be a wonderfully creative, ego-free process, it’s also a ton of work. With so many moving parts, trying to figure out an album’s flow, mixing everything together, and trying to make it all not sound like a jumbled mess isn’t an easy process. And that’s not even getting into digitally coordinating with 35 other remote musicians.

“The threads in the emails are f---ing insane,” Jenna says with a laugh.

There’s also the hurdle of having thematic cohesion. When a track doesn’t scream a certain lyrical approach, Jenna often defers to the guest vocalists and bounces off whatever they’re offering up.

“[It] makes it easier as a collective that has done over 300 songs — you start to run out of shit that you want to say,” Jenna says with a chuckle. “It’s so sick to be able to get inspiration from someone else to add to like your own. And I have to stress less about figuring out what I want to talk about when I’ve already screamed about so many things. Time for me to shut up a little.”

With the American political climate being so openly hostile toward trans folks at present, Jenna and Scott have found even more meaning in being able to go on tour and meet fans who’ve gotten through hard times thanks to the HIRS Collective’s music. The HIRS Collective live setup is just Jenna singing and Scott shredding on guitar over backing tracks (having a Polyphonic Spree-esque, 37-person tour isn’t exactly feasible), but it’s still an invigorating live experience. And in true punk-rock spirit, the pair thrives on going to the places where trans folks are unwelcome and creating a scene for their fellow outsiders.

“Personally, as a trans woman, I don’t feel [representational] pressure at all. I actually feel supported. This band has literally saved my life a couple of times,” Jenna says. “The EP we put out, You Can’t Kill Us, I was in… whoof. Sorry, I just got emotional. I was in a really rough place when that happened. And if you go back, there’s literally a song where the lyrics are, ‘No one’s gonna kill me, not even myself. I’m gonna live forever.’ And that was me writing it almost as like... I can’t be another trans woman that takes her life. And I want to be very clear, I’m not shitting on anyone that dies by suicide. We live in, like, an intense, terrible place that makes it hard for everyone to live, regardless. Obviously, specifically speaking of oppressed folks.”

“When we were in Texas folks came up and were like, ‘Hey, thanks for, like, coming through here and playing these places that are specifically shitty to trans people.’ And like, I would rather play these places than spots that have way more support. Like, I want to play them all, but it’s cool to come to those places and be like, ‘F--- all of your anti-trans bills! We’re going to fill up this place with like all the trans folks, all the allies, all the people that need an outlet and a nice dance party. ’Cause we love to play dance music. It’s nice to offer a place that hopefully is safer than others, or, at least, more celebratory. Just like, come and have fun with your freaks.” n

The HIRS Collective, Simp, Backtracks, Spooky • Tue, April 25 at 7:30 pm • $13 • All ages • The Big Dipper • 171 S. Washington St. • bigdipperevents.com

ALT-ROCK CURSIVE

I’ve always recoiled a bit when Cursive gets labeled an emo band. While frontman Tim Kasher certainly spills his emotions all over the musical page in his songwriting, he does it with wry, grounded, biting bile and wrath, rather than the sort of whiny melodrama most folks associate with emo. The band’s 2001 “emo” classic Domestica illustrates this. The concept album about a married couple who learns to loathe one another — and perhaps most depressingly, stays together anyway — relies on huge, heavy alt-rock riffs and unnervingly on-edge rhythms to punctuate Kasher’s fury as he bellows out lines of crushing domestic discord. Cursive will be playing the album in full in the intimate confines of Lucky You for one of this year’s can’t-miss concerts.

— SETH SOMMERFELD

Cursive performing Domestica • Tue, April 25 at 8 pm • $25-$30 • 21+ • Lucky You Lounge • 1801 W. Sunset Blvd. • luckyyoulounge.com

Thursday, 4/20

J THE BIG DIPPER, River City Reggae Fest

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL, Inland Empire Blues Society Monthly Boogie

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Thursday Night Jam

CHECKERBOARD TAPROOM, Weathered Shepherds

HIGHBALL, Heather King Band

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Riley Grey

NORTHERN QUEST RESORT & CA-

SINO, Steel Panther

J QQ SUSHI & KITCHEN, Just Plain Darin

ZOLA, The Desperate Eights

Friday, 4/21

AK ASIAN RESTAURANT, Gil Rivas

BACKWOODS WHISKEY BAR, Jeff Fox

BARRISTER WINERY, Stagecoach West

J THE BIG DIPPER, Nattali Rize, Kumar, Minori

BIGFOOT PUB, Heather King Band

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL, Dangerous Type

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Whack A Mole, Belly Dancers

CHINOOK STEAK, PASTA & SPIRITS, Mike McCafferty

CURLEY’S, Haze

THE DISTRICT BAR, Moontricks

HIGHBALL, The Happiness

HIGHBALL, DJ Jade

IRON HORSE (CDA), JamShack

KNITTING FACTORY, Broadway Rave

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Tenci

MOOSE LOUNGE, Push

NEATO BURRITO, Mama Llama, Catnyp

NIGHTHAWK LOUNGE, Bruiser

OLD MILL BAR AND GRILL, Wild Wooly Duo

POP ROCK THE BEACHES

If you happened to show up early for the Taking Back Sunday and Jimmy Eat World show’s opening act a couple years ago at Spokane Pavilion, you know that The Beaches are a blast. The female Canadian quartet delivers a brand of catchy, melodic pop rock that pulsates with bright grooves (and the slightest hint of riot grrrl edge) that glimmer like a summer party on the water. The group’s latest LP, Sisters Not Twins (a fusion of the group’s prior two EPs), took home the 2022 Juno Award (think: Canadian Grammy) for Best Rock Album. If you want a bouncy rock night out, don’t miss out when The Beaches stop in Spokane on their first ever U.S. West Coast headlining tour.

— SETH SOMMERFELD

The Beaches, Haley Blais • Sat, April 22 at 8 pm • $15-$20• 21+ • Lucky You Lounge • 1801 W. Sunset Blvd. • luckyyoulounge.com

OSPREY RESTAURANT & BAR, Son of Brad

J PANIDA THEATER, Black Market Trust

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Monarch Mountain Band

RIVERSIDE PLACE, Barely Alive, Hi I’m Ghost

ZOLA, Royale

Saturday, 4/22

BACKWOODS WHISKEY BAR, The Black Jack Band

J J THE BIG DIPPER, The Nixon Rodeo, Free The Jester

BIGFOOT PUB, Heather King Band

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL, Dangerous Type

THE BULL HEAD, Working Spliffs

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Tuck Foster and the Tumbling Dice

CHINOOK STEAK, PASTA & SPIRITS, Mike McCafferty

J CREATE ARTS CENTER, Family Circle Band

CURLEY’S, Haze

THE DISTRICT BAR, The Eastwood Ravine, Buffalo Jones

FOXHOLE BAR & GRILL, Son of Brad

HIGHBALL, Harmonious Funk

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Sacha Boutros, Brent Edstrom Quartet

J HUCKLEBERRY’S NATURAL MARKET, Fleetwood Max IRON HORSE (CDA), JamShack

J KNITTING FACTORY, Troyboi, Mr. Carmack, Stooki Sound LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, So Below: Helmer Noel, Ryan K Bishop

J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, The Beaches, Haley Blais MATCHWOOD BREWING CO., Headwaters MOOSE LOUNGE, Push

NIGHTHAWK LOUNGE, Bruiser

OSPREY RESTAURANT & BAR, Wiebe Jammin

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, John Daffon

J PONDEROSA BAR AND GRILL, Wild Wooly Duo

J SIRINYA’S THAI RESTAURANT & LOUNGE, Robert Gould

ZOLA, Blake Braley

Sunday, 4/23

CURLEY’S, Push

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Michael Millham

J SOUTH HILL GRILL, Just Plain Darin

Monday, 4/24

J EICHARDT’S PUB, Monday Night Blues Jam with John Firshi

J KNITTING FACTORY, Hippie Sabotage

Tuesday, 4/25

J J THE BIG DIPPER, The HIRS Collective, Simp, Blacktracks, Spooky

LITZ’S PUB & EATERY, Shuffle Dawgs

J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Chris Webby, Ekoh, Justin Clancy

J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Cursive ZOLA, The Night Mayors

Wednesday, 4/26

J EICHARDT’S PUB, John Firshi

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Dr. Don Goodwin

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Athena Crossingham

RED ROOM LOUNGE, The Roomates

SOUTH PERRY LANTERN, Wyatt Wood ZOLA, Runaway Lemonade

J = THE INLANDER RECOMMENDS THIS SHOW

J = ALL AGES SHOW

MUSIC | VENUES

219 LOUNGE • 219 N. First Ave., Sandpoint • 208-263-5673

ARBOR CREST WINE CELLARS • 4705 N. Fruit Hill Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-927-9463

BABY BAR • 827 W. First Ave. • 509-847-1234

BARRISTER WINERY • 1213 W. Railroad Ave. • 509-465-3591

BEE’S KNEES WHISKY BAR • 1324 W. Lancaster Rd.., Hayden • 208-758-0558

BERSERK • 125 S. Stevens St. • 509-315-5101

THE BIG DIPPER • 171 S. Washington St. • 509-863-8098

BIGFOOT PUB • 9115 N. Division St. • 509-467-9638

BING CROSBY THEATER • 901 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-227-7638

BLACK DIAMOND • 9614 E. Sprague Ave. • 509891-8357

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL • 116 S. Best Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-891-8995

BOOMERS CLASSIC ROCK BAR • 18219 E. Appleway Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-368-9847

BUCER’S COFFEEHOUSE PUB • 201 S. Main St., Moscow • 208-596-0887

THE BULL HEAD • 10211 S. Electric St., Four Lakes • 509-838-9717

CHAN’S RED DRAGON • 1406 W. Third Ave. • 509-838-6688

COEUR D’ALENE CASINO • 37914 S. Nukwalqw St., Worley • 800-523-2464

COEUR D’ALENE CELLARS • 3890 N. Schreiber Way, Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-2336

CRUISERS BAR & GRILL • 6105 W Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-446-7154

CURLEY’S HAUSER JUNCTION • 26433 W. Hwy. 53, Post Falls • 208-773-5816

EICHARDT’S PUB • 212 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-263-4005

FIRST INTERSTATE CENTER FOR THE ARTS • 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. • 509-279-7000

FOX THEATER • 1001 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-624-1200

IRON HORSE • 407 E. Sherman, Coeur d’Alene • 208-667-7314

IRON HORSE BAR & GRILL • 11105 E. Sprague Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-926-8411

JOHN’S ALLEY • 114 E. Sixth St., Moscow • 208-883-7662

KNITTING FACTORY • 911 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-244-3279

LEFTBANK WINE BAR • 108 N. Washington St. • 509-315-8623

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE • 1801 W. Sunset Blvd. • 509-474-0511

MARYHILL WINERY • 1303 W. Summit Pkwy. • 509-443-3832

THE MASON JAR • 101 F St., Cheney • 509-359-8052

MAX AT MIRABEAU • 1100 N. Sullivan Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-922-6252

MILLIE’S • 28441 Hwy 57, Priest Lake • 208-443-0510

MOOSE LOUNGE • 401 E. Sherman Ave., Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-7901

MOOTSY’S • 406 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-838-1570

NASHVILLE NORTH • 6361 W. Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-457-9128

NORTHERN QUEST RESORT & CASINO • 100 N. Hayford Rd., Airway Heights • 877-871-6772

NYNE BAR & BISTRO • 232 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-474-1621

PEND D’OREILLE WINERY • 301 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-265-8545

THE PODIUM • 511 W. Dean Ave. • 509-279-7000

POST FALLS BREWING CO. • 112 N. Spokane St., Post Falls • 208-773-7301

RAZZLE’S BAR & GRILL • 10325 N. Government Way, Hayden • 208-635-5874

RED ROOM LOUNGE • 521 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-838-7613

THE RIDLER PIANO BAR • 718 W. Riverside Ave. • 509-822-7938

SEASONS OF COEUR D’ALENE • 1004 S. Perry St. • 208-664-8008

SPOKANE ARENA • 720 W. Mallon Ave. • 509-279-7000

SOUTH PERRY LANTERN • 12303 E. Trent Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-473-9098

STEAM PLANT • 159 S. Lincoln St. • 509-777-3900

STORMIN’ NORMAN’S SHIPFACED SALOON • 12303

E. Trent Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-862-4852

TRANCHE • 705 Berney Dr., Wall Walla • 509-526-3500

ZOLA • 22 W. Main Ave. • 509-624-2416

WORDS ASTRAL DISCOVERIES

Until we’re able to physically send humans into the infinite unknowns of the universe, we’ll have to rely on complex machines to first help chart the way. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, thousands of the nation’s brightest minds are developing and testing such devices, including aerospace engineer Tracy Drain. As part of National Geographic’s live speaker series, Drain is stopping in Spokane to share some behind-the-scenes insight on her work and the incredible discoveries those efforts have made possible. From among the many fascinating revelations the NASA engineer has experienced firsthand, Drain talks about the Juno mission to Jupiter, the Kepler mission to find planets beyond our solar system, and the Psyche mission to explore one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt.

— CHEY SCOTT

National Geographic Live: Cosmic Adventures with Tracy Drain

SPORTS & OUTDOORS RUN INTO SPRING

EARTH DAY GO GREEN

• Sat, April 22 at 7 pm

• $25-$31 • The Fox Theater • 1001 W. Sprague Ave.

509-624-1200

• foxtheaterspokane.org •

With warming weather and more pleasant conditions for outdoor recreation, one of the first runs of the year is about to kick off. The Spokane River Run is open to runners of all ages and abilities, and is held on one of the Northwest’s oldest trails. The race offers runners the choice of a 5K, 10K, 25K or 50K distance, along with a 50K team relay race, so participants can go at their own pace and challenge themselves as much as they’d like. All proceeds from this annual event go directly to the A.P.P.L.E. (Alternative Parent Participation Learning Experience) program at Garfield Elementary School, which fosters parental involvement in the classroom. The money raised is marked for providing the school with supplies and to fund field trips and other components critical to a complete education.

— SUMMER SANDSTROM

Every day is Earth Day at Art Salvage, an arts-and-crafts store located on the eastern edge of Spokane’s West Central neighborhood. Since 2019, the store has promoted creative reuse to Spokane’s youth, artists, teachers and makers. Now you, too, can be a part of making a difference by dropping in on the official Earth Day, April 22, to contribute to a community art project. Bring in any small blue, white or green mixed-media objects you can find around your house and then add them to a globe that will be displayed in-store after the event. During the day’s drop-in activity, Art Salvage staff and volunteers are available to teach visitors how to incorporate reuse into their daily lives. The planet we live on takes care of us everyday, let’s return the favor.

— MADISON PEARSON

Spokane River Run

• Sun, April 23 starting at 7:45 am

• $25-$220

• Riverside State Park • 7904 W. Missoula St., Nine Mile Falls • spokaneriverrun.com

Earth Day Drop-In Crafting • Sat, April 22 from 11 am-4 pm

• Free

• Art Salvage Spokane • 1925 N. Ash St. • artsalvagespokane.com

COMEDY OFF AIR & ON TOUR

After seven years hosting Comedy Central’s Emmy and Peabody Awardwinning The Daily Show, Trevor Noah is making a return to stand-up with his new show Off the Record, which is visiting 28 different cities, including Spokane, where he’ll entertain audiences with two back-to-back shows. In addition to hosting The Daily Show and recording numerous comedy specials, Noah is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Born a Crime While widely known for his political humor, Noah’s also known to steer clear of that topic on stage to instead focus on his travels, what it was like to grow up with a mixed-race heritage in South Africa, and his observations about race and ethnicity.

— SUMMER SANDSTROM

COMMUNITY ERADICATE HATE

Whether it’s cyberbullying on social media or systematic/institutional discrimination, hate touches almost every aspect of modern life. At this year’s seventh International Conference on Hate Studies hosted by Gonzaga University, panelists and speakers come from around the country to dismantle hate and empower action against it in our daily lives. Hear from speakers like Charlene Teters (pictured), a member of the Spokane Tribe who delivers this year’s keynote address, “We the Invisible People,” and David Neiwert, an investigative journalist based in Seattle who’s authored numerous books on radical extremism. For more information and a full conference schedule, visit the link below. Virtual attendance options are also available.

MADISON PEARSON

I SAW YOU

BRIGHT LIGHT You light up the room when you show up each morning. Shine your light on me. Signed, I am D

BLONDE BOMBER PUNK ROCKER I’ve been seeing you in the mornings at 6:30 am up by Indiana and Monroe. You drive a white BMW, and I’m enamored with your badass style! Hoping we can run into each other, so I can tell you in person!

RE: SPONGEBOB WATCH OUT Nah. I don’t feel threatened in any way by this man. He’s not stalking me. It really is an honest coincidence. The chance percentage of it happening was increased due to the practicality of me wanting a new apartment close to work. He lived there first. When we hung out he lived out of state, so, I didn’t know he lived there. I just didn’t consider that there was a chance of being his neighbor when I signed my lease is all. It is freaky on an intuition-based level, but not the type of freaky you’re thinking. I’m safe. There’s no hostility. He’s not a violent person. Just awkward. As one socially awkward person to another, I respect him being different without being a bully or jumping to negative conclusions. He has no ill intentions. Half of that post was me making jokes about the situation maybe to make him laugh so he knows I’m not mad at him. I think he has had enough rejection in his life that made him a little bitter, and I’m not gonna feed into that and be one of those people. He needs a good friend even if we aren’t on speaking terms. Thank you for the concern though.

HOPE YOU FEEL BETTER I saw you having breakfast with friends. I noticed you had a rather large spider bite on your neck. As a doctor I wanted to tell you to get it looked at but I was too shy. I was sad half your beautiful face was numb and drooping… hoping you are OK!! Breakfast sometime?

I SEE YOU EVERYDAY I see you everyday; I’m the luckiest gub in the world. We’re very much inseparable even in the midst of trash pandas and ravenger slugs. I look forward to seeing you more! Love your gub!

YOU SAW ME

CONNIE, THANK YOU FOR STOPPING

Connie, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for stopping outside Spangle on the way to Spokane. I had come across two dogs that were about to be hit and had already obvious injuries. More than over 100 vehicles passed and didn’t stop. You are one of very few people I will always be grateful for having met. Thank you, Connie, for helping me with those dogs. I’m thankful to know there is still some humanity left in this world. And a thank-you as well to the gentleman that stopped to assist getting the injured dog into her vehicle. Thank you! In a dark time you showed me the signs I ask for every day why I’m here. Questioning my purpose. I found my purpose thanks to you, Connie, for showing me there are people like you on this earth with a heart.

CHEERS

CHEERS TO NEW LOVE COFFEE I’ve been a regular for the last few months at New Love Coffee in Liberty Lake. I live downtown, but it’s worth the drive for the best coffee I’ve had in a long time. It’s not even just the coffee, the service is splendid; every barista I’ve encountered has just been fabulous! It’s a beautiful space to work or gather with friends and family. I can’t wait for the Kendall Yards location; my husband and I will be there for the grand opening! Support local and try New Love! It’ll be your “new love” ha ha!

PROBLEM SOLVED The solution to homelessness is obvious. Build more libraries.

MAVERIK GIFT OF GAS Young man at the Hayden Maverik Saturday late night. I don’t know what compelled you to gift me so

much in gas, but when you approached me with the promo code I was confused and did not respond the way you deserved. That was such a gentle and thoughtful thing you did, and I pray that my response doesn’t cause you pause to help someone again. I am old and slow, but so grateful not only for the gas but to see someone your age displaying such selflessness. It humbled me. So carry on, youngster! Life is what you make it, and seems to me that yours is kind and wonderful! From an old lady who was blessed by you.

making news, as the “Redoubt” destination for white Christian Nationalists. It used to be that Mississippi won the race to the bottom for bigotry and ignorance, but the Gem State can now claim this dishonor. Forget Famous Potatoes — it’s time for a new license plate slogan. “Idaho: Hater’s Paradise.”

CDA ON- AND OFF-RAMPS I eagerly await the day that the off- and on-ramps in CDA are updated from their 1960s origins. Driving by them every time, it is impressive

stress. Some of us have jobs and can’t drop what we are doing to run to your FCFS demand. Have some common human decency and stop being so selfish!

VOTERS Hey, Gen Z. Just wait until you get what you wish for... the Communist regime on your asses and your freedoms are squashed and you can’t use tiktok to express your “freedom” and narcissistic stupid videos to further the agenda of diversity. You are going to be Chinese slaves, just like the Uyghurs sewing your sports gear shoes and jerseys for your basketball team that you so much love. They are slaves doing this, and you condone that. Do you care? No you’re hypocrites, and y’all are proud of it. You are proud Marxists, and we the people will have no weapons or guns to resist because you are all fools.

INNER ERASMUS Cheers to the brave journalists and editors at the Inlander who, over the past few weeks, have broken through barriers by writing fulllength articles about both Entropy and Page 42 — a record shop and a book shop, respectively. Yes, while past Inlander journalists and editors have resigned themselves to limiting the cultural pages to blow-by-blow accounts of the life and times and new endeavors of local celebrity chefs, with a dash of the arts thrown in for good measure, you brought out your inner Erasmus and prized (even if for a mere brief moment) books over food, expanding your old independent rag’s definition of culture by being inclusive of small independent retail!

JEERS

THE HATE STATE Once again Idaho is

that we don’t have more accidents on I-90 there. Even though Spokane has it share of bad portions of interstate, CDA reminds everyone that it could be worse, and I have to imagine even back in the ‘60s you could have at least created a merging lane for the distance between Fourth Street and US 95 exits.

BAIT AND SWITCH The downtown stadium needs to be named “Joe Albi Stadium powered by the TAXPAYERS of District 81.” It is disgusting the past school board got new jobs and got to forget that the stadium is for the five schools that make up the tax base of the District 81. Not some fly-by-night soccer league that the nearest competitor for this D league soccer team is Papillion, Nebraska. By the way, not ONE car was made in 1943 in this country.

RE: THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Only the ones perpetrated by the government against defenseless citizens. Or perhaps they’ll use starvation. Maybe if your lucky you’ll just end up in a gulag.

FCFS Online buy/sell options are my favorite thing about social media these days. Saving money while helping neighbors get rid of unwanted items, not making greedy CEOs more money, and most importantly helping save the planet by reducing, reusing, and recycling. It keeps the money in our own state (usually) and means we are buying less crap from China. However... you firstcome, first-served sellers are the absolute worst! I hope someday you want something really bad, and someone sells it as you are on their way to pick it up. Life is hard enough, and you only add to that unwanted

LAWLESS LILAC CITY

The latest news about our cesspool of crime and violence, aka Spokane, makes its “Lilac City” label laughable. Every day brings another murder, another shootout. Now we’ve got well-organized “packs” of teenage thugs mugging victims downtown and in broad daylight. It’s so bad city officials are telling

folks not to be afraid to come here. When you have to be told not to be scared, it’s time to be terrified.

BASIC LAWYERING

101 You know, those ads on TV as well as radio that seem to be to good to be true are to good to be true. My wife needed a shoulder replacement after working as a care provider taking residents to appointments lifting wheelchairs and walkers out of the back of the vehicle. She worked there for over 15 years and contacted an attorney. Because of the pandemic, we had a conference call In the attorney’s office with the judge and the other attorney present. Now I am not an attorney, but it seems like not pissing off the judge would be basic lawyering 101. Well, no surprise, she lost the case. After a week passed, she received a bill for almost $2,000. So now we have to fight in court. Anyway, don’t make the same mistake we did.

HELPING HANDS Karma’s a bitch.

NOTE: I Saw You/Cheers & Jeers is for adults 18 or older. The Inlander reserves the right to edit or reject any posting at any time at its sole discretion and assumes no responsibility for the content.

CALENDAR BENEFIT

A TASTE OF HOPE This silent and live auction benefits the ISAAC foundation’s programming for children with autism spectrum disorders. April 21, 6-10 pm. $100. Shriners Event Center, 7217 W. Westbow Blvd. theisaacfoundation.org

SPOKANE MOM PROM A ladies night out with dancing, drinks and desserts that benefits the Women Helping Women Fund. April 22, 7-11 pm. $25-$50. FêteA Nectar Co, 120 N. Stevens St. spokanemomprom2023.eventbrite.com

STEPS FOR AUTISM The 8th annual awareness walk brings the community together in support and celebration of those with autism and their families. Hosted by the Northwest Autism Center and Autism Society of Washington Spokane Chapter. April 23, 11 am-3 pm. $5. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. stepsforautism.org (509-625-6600)

CDAIDE CARE AFFAIR This evening of fundraising features local chef-prepared appetizers, a Sysco chef-prepared dinner, a live auction and a silent auction. All proceeds benefit local hospitality workers in Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls and Hayden. April 27, 5-9 pm. $75. The Coeur d’Alene Resort, 115 S. Second. cdaide.org

MULTICARE HEART STRINGS This fifthannual concert benefits MultiCare Deaconess Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. VIP ticket includes dinner as well as the concert. April 29, 4:30 pm. $50-$150. Davenport Grand Hotel, 333 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. multicare.org (800-918-9344)

SPOKANE CIVIC THEATRE’S 75TH SEASON CELEBRATION An evening of live entertainment, dining, history, fundraising and community hosted by Molly Allen and Randy Schwaegler. April 29, 6 pm. $100. Northern Quest, 100 N. Hayford Rd. spokanecivictheatre.com

COMEDY

CHELSEA HANDLER: LITTLE BIG BITCH

Handler is a comedian, TV host and bestselling author. This tour gives insight as to what made her the person and comedian she is today. April 20 and 21, 7:30 pm. $50-$240. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. foxtheaterspokane.org

BOONE STREET HOOLIGANS Celebrating its 20th edition, this sketch comedy show performs twice a year with original scripts written by Gonzaga students. April 21 and 22, 7:30 pm. $5. Gonzaga Magnuson Theatre, 502 E. Boone Ave. gonzaga.edu/theatreanddance

SAFARI Blue Door’s version of “Whose Line,” a fast-paced improv show with a few twists and turns. Rated for mature audiences/ages 16+. Reservations recommended. April 21 and 28, 7:30-8:45 pm. $9. Blue Door Theatre, 815 W. Garland Ave. bluedoortheatre.com

YOU’VE BEEN CONN-ED Bring ideas for quirky conventions and characters, and the Blue Door Players create a show around them. Reservations recommended. April 21 and 28, 7:30-8:45 pm. $9. Blue Door Theatre, 815 W. Garland Ave. bluedoortheatre.com

GONZAGA THEATRE SPORTS The student comedy improv group showcases family-friendly humor. April 22, 9:30 pm and May 6, 9 pm. $1. Gonzaga University Magnuson Theatre, 502 E. Boone Ave. gonzaga.edu/theatreanddance

TREVOR NOAH Noah is the host of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, the author of his memoir Born a Crime and has mul-

tiple Netflix comedy specials. April 26 and 27, 7:30 pm. $47-$97. First Interstate Center for the Arts, 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. firstinterstatecenter.org

KELLEN ERSKINE Kellen is best known for him appearances on Conan, Comedy Central and America’s Got Talent. April 27, 7:30 pm, April 28, 7:30 & 10:15 pm and April 29, 7 & 9:45 pm. $20-$28. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com (509-318-9998)

DANIEL TOSH Tosh is an American comedian, writer and producer best known for his TV show, Tosh.0. April 28, 8 pm. $45-$85. First Interstate Center for the Arts, 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. firstinterstatecenter.org (509-279-7000)

COMMUNITY

CAMPBELL HOUSE DARK HISTORY: SOCIETY SECRETS An after-hours tour that sheds light on strange details and unconventional stories from turn-of-thecentury Spokane. April 20, 6 pm. $3.50$6. Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org

CARRINGTON COLLEGE SPOKANE

OPEN HOUSE This event includes live demos with students from Carrington’s Veterinary Assisting, Dental Assisting, Medical Assisting and Pharmacy Technology programs. Visitors can also view training equipment and talk to instructors while touring the campus. RSVP required. April 20, 10 am-noon. Carrington College Spokane, 10102 E. Knox Ave. carrington.edu (509-378-3628)

COFFEE WITH SPS Community members are invited to join district leaders for conversation over coffee. April 20, 8-10 am. Free. Ferris High School, 3020 E. 37th Ave. spokaneschools.org/coffee

LILAC CITY LIVE! Spokane’s premier late-night talk show featuring KSPS President and general manager Gary Stokes and Herbs of Smith Owner, Danielle Smith, with music by hip hop artist TOPP. April 20, 8-9 pm. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main. spokanelibrary.org

PRESEASON BARTER FAIRE A campout event featuring drum circles, public art, workshops, live music and more. Schedule TBA. April 20-23. $10-$60. Happy Meadows Venue, 5470 Hwy. 231. preseasonfaire.com

SPOKANE COMMUNITY OBSERVANCE

OF THE HOLOCAUST This event features a keynote address by Raymond Sun, a display of art, a candle processional and music performed by the Lewis & Clark High School Chamber Orchestra. April 20, 7 pm. Free. Temple Beth Shalom, 1322 E. 30th Ave. spokanetbs.org

WHAT’S HAPPENING AT TUBBS HILL

This program’s agenda features a 30-minute video tour of the hill, focusing on its natural and cultural history, narrated by noted naturalist and author Jack Nisbet, retired forester and foundation board member Mark Weadick and city forester Nick Goodwin. April 20, 7-8 pm. Free. Coeur d’Alene Public Library, 702 E. Front Ave. tubbshill.org (208-769-2315)

ROLE-PLAYING GAME DROP IN Improve your RPG skills by watching and participating in games. Fridays from 4-8 pm and Saturdays from 1-5 pm. Free. RPG Community Center, 101 N. Stone Street. rpgcenter.org (509-608-7630)

ACTIVE LIVING EXPO A event for people aged 55+ and their loved ones. Attendees have access to seminars, entertainment and local vendors focused on health, wellness, travel, leisure, retirement plan-

ning and more. April 22, 10 am-2:30 pm. $8. Mirabeau Park Hotel, 1100 N. Sullivan Rd. spokesman.com/activelivingexpo

ANNUAL PARK & NEIGHBORHOOD

CLEAN UP Meet at the Palisades Park parking lot. Donuts and hot drinks provided for volunteers. April 22, 8:30 amnoon. Palisades Park, Greenwood Blvd. & Rimrock Dr. FriendsOfPalisades.com

CUSTER’S SPRING ANTIQUE & COLLECTOR’S SALE Antique dealers from across the Northwest sell rare and retro antique items. April 22, 10 am-6 pm and April 23, 10 am-4 pm. $7-$9. Spokane County Fair & Expo Center, 404 N. Havana St. custershows.com (509-477-1766)

DORIS MORRISON LEARNING CENTER

GRAND OPENING This grand opening event unveils the newly constructed Doris Morrison Learning Center and features live raptor shows, guided bird walks, scavenger hunts, activity booths and more. April 22, 10 am-2 pm. Free. Doris Morrison Learning Center, 1330 S. Henry Rd. spokanecounty.org

ITCH TO STITCH Learn basic knitting, crochet and other stitch craft skills. Spark Central furnishes yarn, you must bring your own hooks and needles. Tuesdays from 5-7 pm and Saturdays from 12-2 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org (509-279-0299)

FREE COMMUNITY RETREAT A free trauma-informed yoga session by Kristine Zakarison and pottery painting by Wild at Art. Registration required. April 25, 1-4:15 pm. Free. Gladish Community Center, 115 NW State St., Pullman. tinyurl. com/yogapots (509-332-4357)

POST FALLS CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

COMMUNITY BUSINESS FAIR This business fair features over 70 businesses and service groups plus raffle prizes. April 25, 4-6:30 pm. Free. Real Life Ministries, 1866 N. Cecil Rd. postfallschamber.org

RETIREMENT BASICS In this workshop, participants begin to prepare for retirement readiness by creating a savings plan and learning about investments that may allow them to grow their wealth. April 25, 6-7 pm. Free. Hillyard Library, 4110 N. Cook St. spokanelibrary.org

WORKING FAMILIES TAX CREDIT Get help with your application for the Washington state Working Families Tax Credit and with submitting it online. April 25, 10 am-2 pm. Free. Liberty Park, 502 S. Pittsburg St. spokanelibrary.org

DEFEND YOUR HOME FROM FIRES Nick Jefferies from the City of Spokane Fire Department shows appropriate fire-wise measures for around the house, as well as the best maintenance practices for the Home Ignition Zone. April 26, 6:30-7:30 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. spokanelibrary.org

THE HIVE OPEN STUDIO Stop by to check out the Artist-In-Residence studios, tour The Hive and ask questions. April 26, 4-7 pm. Free. The Hive, 2904 E. Sprague Ave. spokanelibrary.org

SFCC JOB FAIR Meet with a variety of employers with summer and year-round employment opportunities available. Bringing a resume is recommended. Paid parking permit required. April 26, 11 am-2 pm. Free. Spokane Falls Community College, 3410 W. Whistalks Way. sfcc.spokane.edu (509-533-3500)

ARKIDTECTURE The AIA Spokane chapter of American Institute of Architects lead four different architecture activities for different age groups. This program is intended for kids ages 9-18, and 5-8 with an adult. April 27, 4-6 pm. The Hive, 2904

E. Sprague Ave. spokanelibrary.org

CITY NATURE CHALLENGE: IT’S A BIOBLITZ Citizens are encouraged to document as many different species in nature as they can, using the iNaturalist app. April 27-May 1. Free. Coeur d’Alene Public Library, 702 E. Front Ave. cdalibrary.org (208-769-2315)

DATA WALK: COMMUNITY IMPACTS

OF EXTREME HEAT Interpret and review data sets from the Gonzaga Center for Climate, Society and the Environment’s Beat the Heat community survey and answer questions based on your own experience and perceptions of extreme heat. Dinner provided. April 27, 4:30-7 pm. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. gonzaga.edu/center-for-climatesociety-environment (509-444-5336)

FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY BOOK SALE

Visit the library, browse of books and buy them at a discounted price. April 27-29; Thu from 4-6:30 pm (members only), Fri from 19 am-4:30 pm and Sat from 10 am-1 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. spokanelibrary.org

LGBTQ+ RETREAT A trauma-informed yoga session and a terrarium workshop for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Yoga provided by Kristine Zakarison and terrarium workshop provided by A Modern Plantsman. April 27, 10:30 am-1:15 pm. Free. Gladish Community Center, 115 NW State St. tinyurl.com/yogaplants

SMALL BUT MIGHTY: A CYBERSECURITY CONFERENCE A conference with panels discussing cybersecurity threats, women in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and more. Registration required. April 28, 8 am-1 pm. Free. Spokane Falls Community College, 3410 W. Whistalks Way. ccs.spokane.edu (509-533-3500)

MASTER GARDENER GARDEN FAIR & PLANT SALE

This fundraiser provides gardeners with a selection of quality plants while raising money to support community education about gardening in Spokane County. In-person shopping by appointment only. April 28, 1:30-5:30 pm and April 29, 8 am-3:30 pm. Free. WSU Spokane County Extension, 222 N. Havana St. mgfsc.org (509-477-2048)

YWCA SPOKANE: EQUITY FOR ALL

This annual event features an art performance, a panel discussion about mental health in the Spokane community and more. April 28, 5-7 pm. Free. Woman’s Club of Spokane, 1428 W. Ninth. ywcaspokane.org (509-378-5804)

ACCEPTANCE SPOKANE A peer-supported safe space for LGBTQIA+ youth (ages 16-19) to meet and discuss issues and topics, and promote mental health awareness and acceptance of oneself. The last Saturday of every month from 3-4 pm. Free. Atomic Threads Boutique, 1905 N. Monroe St. fb.me/e/3cxf4vKyL

BRICK BUY BRICK GRAND OPENING

The grand opening of a buy, sell and trade Lego store. This event features games, special Lego and a surprise for the first 100 people to attend. April 29, 11 am-7 pm. Free. Brick Buy Brick, 3915 N. Monroe St. brickbuybrickspokane.com

EL MERCADITO A Latino cultural market featuring fresh food, cleaning supplies, local vendors, a free health clinic, immigration resources and much more. Last Saturday of each month from 11 am-3 pm. Free. A.M. Cannon Park, 1920 W. Maxwell Ave. latinosenspokane.org/mercadito

PAGE 42 SPRING VENDOR SALE This parking lot vendor fair, in partnership with On the Level Tattoo, features 20+ vendors selling wares, art, food, gifts and

more. April 29, 10 am-7 pm. Free. Page 42 Bookstore, 2174 N. Hamilton St. page42bookstore.com (509-202-2551)

FILM

LEGO STOP-MOTION ANIMATION Learn to create and edit videos of Lego characters moving, jumping and talking to each other. All supplies provided. Ages 8–12. Registration is required. April 22, 3-5 pm. Free. Medical Lake Library, 3212 Herb St. scld.org/events (509-893-8330)

MOONLIGHT A look at three defining chapters in the life of Chiron, a young black man growing up in Miami. His epic journey to manhood is guided by the kindness, support and love of the community that helps raise him. April 23, 2:30 pm and April 29, 6:30 pm. $7-$10. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave. panida.org BEING 97 This documentary screening is followed by reflections on life and death by local philosophers Wayne Pomerleau, John Wagner, Rosemary Volbrecht and Anna Nowland. April 27, 6-7:30 pm. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. spokanelibrary.org (509-444-5358)

KINO SHORT FILM FESTIVAL This event showcases short films from filmmakers in the Northwest and students in the Broadcasting and Digital Media Production and Film and Television degree programs at the University of Idaho. April 28, 6:30 pm. Free. The Kenworthy, 508 S. Main St. kenworthy.org (208-882-4127)

FOOD & DRINK

WINE EXTRAVAGANZA CRUISE This wine cruise features Spokane’s Barrister Winery. Each ticket includes three winetasting tickets, live music on board and an hors d’oeuvres menu. April 20, 4:30-6 pm. $68. The Coeur d’Alene Resort, 115 S. Second. cdaresort.com (208-765-4000)

RAID THE CELLAR ITALIAN WINE DINNER Explore the flavors of the Mediterranean with a five-course, wine-paired meal showcasing wines from Piedmont, Tuscany, Sicily and more. April 21, 6-9 pm. $100. Beverly’s, 115 S. Second St. beverlyscda.com (208-292-5678)

NORTH IDAHO WINE SOCIETY APRIL

TASTING A night of wine featuring Kristina Mielke van Loben Sels, director of winemaking at Arbor Crest Wine Cellars. RSVP by April 17th. April 21, 7:30-9:30 pm. $25-$30. Lake City Center, 1916 N. Lakewood Dr. northidahowinesociety.org

BLOODY MARY BASH Come drink and watch the region’s best bartenders battle it out for the best mix and best garnish. April 22, 12-4 pm. $25. Wonder Building, 835 N. Post. wonderspokane.com

WEST END BEER FEST Six local breweries are featured during a walk-around beer fest. Tickets include specialty glass, a West End beanie and $4 pours of all the event beers. See website for more. April 22, 12-11 pm. $25. Brick West Brewing Co., 1318 W. First Ave. westendbeerfest.com

WINE EXTRAVAGANZA Enjoy sips from 20 wineries while perusing local shops and enjoying live music. April 22, 12-6 pm. $25-$45. Downtown Coeur d’Alene, Sherman Ave. cdadowntown.com

BRUNCH AROUND THE WORLD Learn how to create brunch using seasonal ingredients, influenced by foods and spices from around the world. April 23, 11 am1:15 pm. $85. The Kitchen Engine, 621 W. Mallon Ave. thekitchenengine.com

PARIS BY NIGHT: HAUTE COUTURE

TABLE D’HÔTE Experience an avantgarde fusion of fashion and food. The evening is hosted by Nova Kaine, featuring a champagne toast and a whimsical six-course menu accompanied by a live fashion show. Each dish and design pairing is inspired by fashion industry icons, from Christian Dior to Louis Vuitton. April 23, 6 pm. $100. Highball, 100 N. Hayford Rd. northernquest.com

RAMEN FEST The 35th fundraiser for the Spokane Buddhist Temple offers noodles with chicken or tofu ($15), mochi desserts ($7) and inari sushi ($7). Cash preferred. Also includes a temple open house. April 23, 11 am-3 pm. $7-$15. Spokane Buddhist Temple, 927 S. Perry St. spokanebuddhisttemple.org

EXPLORING INDIA Chef Noreen Hiskey of Inland Curry introduces Indian cuisine by going over commonly used spices and aromatics. Featured dishes include butter chicken, lentils, cumin rice and naan. April 24, 5:45-8:15 pm. $85. The Kitchen Engine, 621 W. Mallon Ave. thekitchenengine.com (509-328-3335)

WANDERLUST CHEESE DINNER This six-course dinner is centered around cheeses imported from around the world by Wanderlust. April 26, 5-9 pm. $150. Gander & Ryegrass, 404 W. Main Ave. ganderandryegrass.com (509-315-4613)

SCOTCH & SWINE WHISKY DINNER

This five-course dinner features scotches from Dalmore Single Malts. All dishes are created with pork and are paired with scotches by chef Josh Dunbar. April 27, 6-8 pm. $120. Purgatory Whiskey and Craft Beer, 524 W. Main Ave. thepurgatory.com (509-290-6518)

A TASTE OF ITALY WINE DINNER Specially selected Italian wines are paired with a five-course, Mediterranean-inspired menu crafted by executive chef Tim Heinig. April 27, 6-8:30 pm. $75.

Tito’s Italian Grill & Wine Shop, 210 E. Sherman Ave. bit.ly/3m8kFpR

WHISTLE PUNK

6TH ANNIVERSARY

PARTY This event features 14 Whistle Punk lagers and 14 guest taps. Each ticket comes with a commemorative mug April 28, 3-10 pm and April 29, 1-10 pm. $25. Whistle Punk Brewing, 122 S. Monroe St. whistlepunkbrewing.com

MUSIC

LIONEL HAMPTON JAZZ FESTIVAL A four-day celebration of jazz featuring performances from university ensembles and local and nationally acclaimed musicians. April 19-22; Thu-Sun, times vary. See website for full schedule. $20-$50. Idaho Central Credit Union Arena, Stadium Drive, University of Idaho Campus. uidaho.edu/class/jazzfest

NIC JAZZ CONCERT FEAT. CECE CURTIS Cece Curtis sings 1930s pop songs with her live combo accompaniment and pays tribute to fellow Schitsu’umsh (Coeur d’ Alene) tribal member and jazz great Mildred Bailey. April 20, 6-7:30 pm. Free. North Idaho College Student Union Building, 495 N. College Dr. nic.edu

SPOKANE SYMPHONY CHAMBER

SOIREÉ 3 Musician-curated chamber music accompanied by refreshments, wine, coffee and dessert from Beacon Hill Catering. April 20, 7:30 pm. $99. Barrister Winery, 1213 W. Railroad Ave. spokanesymphony.org (509-624-1200)

CRITICAL MASS: FUSING HEARTS, MINDS & VOICES A performance of “Mariachi Mass” by composer A. Avalos, a pseudonym for Theron Kirk. The piece is rarely performed in modern times and this instance is only the third time it has been performed in the U.S. in the last 25 years. April 21, 7 pm and April 22, 2 pm. $10-$25. Trinity Lutheran Church, 812 N. Fifth St. choralecda.com (208-664-5743)

NORTHWEST BACHFEST: MATT HERSKOWITZ AND LARA ST. JOHN The two musicians perform Beethoven, Franck and Kreisler on piano and violin. April 22, 7:30 pm. $15-$49. Barrister Winery, 1213 W. Railroad Ave. nwbachfest.com

NORTHWEST BACHFEST: ZUILL BAILEY AND MATT HERSKOWITZ The two musicians perform selections of classical, jazz and folk music on cello and piano. April 23, 3 pm. $15-$49. Barrister Winery, 1213 W. Railroad. nwbachfest.com

WHITWORTH WIND SYMPHONY: RISING SUN The acclaimed Whitworth Wind Symphony, under the direction of Richard Strauch, performs a program highlighting symphonic music from Japan for winds and brass. April 23, 3 pm. $7. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. foxtheaterspokane.org (509-624-1200)

MEET MOZART This concert showcases handbell, choir, the ensemble choir and orchestra groups. April 25, 6 pm. $5. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave. sandpointconservatory.org (208-263-9191)

NIC JAZZ CONCERT A showcase featuring the North Idaho College Jazz Ensemble and the Cardinal Voices ensemble. April 25, 7:30 pm. Free. Schuler Performing Arts Center, 880 W. Garden Ave. face-

book.com/NorthIdahoCollegeMusic

LINK UP: THE ORCHESTRA SWINGS! Students from 24 elementary and home schools join the Spokane Symphony in playing repertoire on the recorder. April 26, 10:30 am. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. foxtheaterspokane.org

SPORTS & OUTDOORS

EVERGREEN REGIONAL VOLLEYBALL

CHAMPIONSHIPS The culminating event of the indoor junior girls club season for clubs in the Evergreen Region of USA Volleyball. April 22, 7 am-3 pm and April 23, 7 am-8 pm. $10-$20. The Podium, 511 W. Dean Ave. thepodiumusa.com

HEROES SILKIES 5K This walk and resource fair connects veterans and their families with each other and resources in the community. April 22, 8 am-noon. $25. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. heroeshomestead.org (509-625-6600)

NATURE WALK WITH JACK NISBET

Walk an easy trail through nature with naturalist, teacher and writer Jack Nisbet. April 22, 11 am-12:30 pm. Free. Liberty Park Library, 402 S. Pittsburgh St. spokanelibrary.org

STATE LAND FREE DAYS The Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission invites visitors to enjoy a state park for free on select days each year. Next up: April 22 (Earth Day). parks.wa.gov

SPOKANE RIVER RUN Choose your own trail run through Riverside State Park. 5-50k options as well as relays available. April 23, 8 am. spokaneriverrun.com

PRUNING YOUR GARDEN: HOW, WHEN & WHY Master Gardener Steve Nokes discusses the importance of and reasons for pruning as well as the correct timing for pruning different plant types and proper pruning techniques. April 25, 6:30-7:30 pm. Free. Otis Orchards Library, 22324 E. Wellesley Ave. scld.org (893-8390)

SPOKANE INDIANS VS. EVERETT

AQUASOX Promos during the six-game series include Education Day (April 25), Ribby’s Birthday (April 26), First Responder Appreciation Night (April 27), Fireworks Night (April 28), Family Feast Night (April 29) and Pajama Party Day (April 30). April 25, 11:05 am, April 26-28, 6:35 pm, April 29, 5:09 pm and April 30, 1:05 pm. $8-$22. Avista Stadium, 602 N. Havana St. spokaneindians.com

COMPOST IN A BOX Make your own home compost kit with red wriggler worms. Space and materials limited. Registration open for ages 8-14. April 26, 4-5 pm. Free. Liberty Park Library, 402 S. Pittsburgh St. spokanelibrary.org

HISTORICAL FEET CLUB: WILDFLOWER

WALK A walking challenge/community tour led by local historians. April 26, 9:15 am-noon. Free. Coeur d’Alene Public Library, 702 E. Front Ave. cdalibrary.org

WILDFLOWER WEDNESDAYS Learn about area wildflowers, including what they’re called, where to find them and why they are important. April 12-May 24, Wed from 4-5 pm. Free. Coeur d’Alene Public Library, 702 E. Front Ave. cdalibrary.org (208-769-2315)

CREATIVE WALK & TALK

An opportunity for book lovers and creatives to stretch minds and legs on a low-key walk in

Riverfront Park with novelist and writing education specialist Sharma Shields. Strollers welcome; wheelchair-accessible routes can be used as needed. April 27, 10:30-11:30 am. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. spokanelibrary.org

THEATER

NATIONAL PASTIME This play recounts how Jackie Robinson, along with Branch Rickey, the white manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers overcame the racist culture of major league baseball. Wed-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm through April 23. $10-$25. Spokane Civic Theatre, 1020 N. Howard St. spokanecivictheatre.com

I HATE HAMLET This comedy-drama by Paul Rudnick centers around an up-andcoming TV actor whose life gets turned upside down after a visit from a ghost. April 20-22 at 7:30 pm. Free. Schuler Performing Arts Center, 880 W. Garden Ave. facebook.com/nictheatre

RED Taking place in 1958 New York City, Red follows the life of painter Mark Rothko. Thu-Sat at 7 pm, Sun at 2 pm through April 23. $20-$25. Stage Left Theater, 108 W. Third Ave. stagelefttheater.org

SOUTH PACIFIC Nurse Nellie Forbush falls in love with French painter Emile de Becque. When Nellie learns that the mother of Emile’s children was an island native, she struggles to overcome internal prejudices. Thu-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sat and Sun at 1:30 pm through April 23. $25$30. Regional Theatre of the Palouse, 122 N. Grand Ave. rtoptheatre.org

SALLY COTTER & THE PRISONER OF ALA KATRAZ Sally Cotter is back, once again dreaming that she is a student at the bewitching Frogbull Academy of Sorcery. April 21-22, 7:30 pm and April 23, 2

pm. $10-$15. The Kenworthy, 508 S. Main St. kenworthy.org (208-882-4127)

VISUAL ARTS

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Original work by female regional artists who work in the field of abstract expressionism. Wed-Sun from 11 am-6 pm through April 30. Free. The Art Spirit Gallery, 415 Sherman Ave. theartspiritgallery.com

JOE BRECKENRIDGE: COWBOY JOE

This exhibition showcases the work of traveling artist Joe Breckenridge whose paintings feature landscapes and rural life. Tue-Sat from 11 am-5 pm through May 29. $2-$6. Museum of North Idaho, 115 Northwest Blvd. museumni.org

SUBSTANCE This ceramics show features works by Maya Rumsey, KC Loveland, Sheila Grubb, Erik Rodgers and more. Tue-Sat from 10 am-6 pm through May 12. Free. Emerge, 119 N. Second St. emergecda.com (208-930 -1876)

PERSISTENCE OF VISION: ASIAN DIASPORA PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINUUM

Artists Margaret Albaugh and Frances Grace Mortel explore Asian and Asian American stories through diasporic portraits, memories and recipes. Mon-Fri from 8 am-5 pm through May 26. Free. Chase Gallery, 808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. spokanearts.org (509-321-9416)

SPOKANE PRINT FEST This annual celebration of print media features workshops, exhibitions, lectures and more. See website for full schedule Through April 29. spokaneprintfest.org

TRANSMUTATION: PRINTMAKING IN -

VITATIONAL A selection of printmaking work from national graphic and book artists including Kevin Haas, Koichi Yamamoto, Carlos Barberena, Chema Skandal,

Mary Farrell and others. Thu-Sat from 4-7 pm through April 29. Free. Terrain Gallery, 628 N. Monroe. terrainspokane.com

UBUHLE WOMEN: BEADWORK AND THE ART OF INDEPENDENCE This exhibition showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm through April 30. $10-$15. The MAC, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org (509-456-3931)

PINE NEEDLE BASKET MAKING During this four-hour class, instructor Barbara Snarr teaches how to create a small basket from Ponderosa pine needles. April 22, 11 am-3 pm. $75. Emerge, 119 N. Second St. emergecda.com (208-930-1876)

PRINT TOWN USA & SPPC BIRTHDAY

Celebrate the Spokane Print & Publishing Center’s birthday, watch live printmaking, enjoy beer from Golden Handle and more. This event is held as part of Spokane Print Fest. Free. Spokane Print & Publishing Center, 1921 N. Ash St. spokaneprintfest.org

WRITING & DRAWING WORKSHOP

Learn how to draw natural objects, landscapes and write about personal encounters with nature. April 22, 10 am-4 pm. $60. Create Arts Center, 900 Fourth St., Newport. createarts.org (509-447-9277)

ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS: DRAGON Artist Hannah Charlton teaches how to create an image based on medieval bestiaries. April 24, 5 pm. $80. Spokane Art School, 503 E. Second Ave. spokaneartschool.net (509-325-1500)

WORDS

MERCHANTS & MARKETS IN EGYPTIAN TRADE This presentation discusses the

role of centralized institutions in the economy of the Egyptian states and how tomb paintings reveal an alternative system that may have been used to import goods through non-centralized systems. April 20, 6:30-8 pm. Free. The MAC, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org

GET LIT! FESTIVAL This 25th annual literary festival includes four days of readings, writing workshops, craft classes, open mics, panel discussions and more. See website for a full schedule of events.

April 20-23. $0-$45. getlitfestival.org

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HATE STUDIES

The 7th annual conference is one of the leading interdisciplinary academic forums on hate, related social problems, and ways to create socially just and inclusive communities. See website for full schedule. April 20-22. $20-$300. Spokane Community College, 1810 N. Greene St. gonzaga.edu/icohs

OPEN MIC NITE All singers, songwriters, musicians, spoken word artists and poets are welcome. Hosted by Bailey Allan Baker. April 20, 7 pm. Free. Emerge, 119 N. Second St. emergecda.com

JULIE WESTON Weston reads from her fourth Nellie Burns and Moonshine mystery, Miners’ Moon, followed by a Q&A. April 20, 5-6 pm. Free. Coeur d’Alene Public Library, 702 E. Front Ave. cdalibrary.org (208-769-2315)

UNDERSTANDING & ADDRESSING THE IMPACT OF EXTREME HEAT Gonzaga’s Center for Climate, Society, and the Environment’s Climate Resilience Project and Gonzaga’s Environmental Studies Senior Capstone present their latest findings on extreme heat in Spokane. April 20, 1-2:30 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. bit.ly/gsi_heat (509-444-5390)

WINTER STORYTELLING & CRAFT

CULTURAL NIGHT Learn about Native American regalia while listening to traditional stories. Crafts include beading, looming, making moccasins and more. Thursdays from 4-6 pm through May 25. Free. American Indian Community Center, 1025 W. Indiana Ave. aiccinc.org

ARTIST PANEL: SOCIAL ISSUES

At this panel facilitated by the Human Rights Education Institute, local artists discuss if artists should feel obligated to respond to social issues. April 22, 2:30-4:30 pm. Free. Human Rights Education Institute, 414 W. Fort Grounds Dr. emergecda.com

AUNTIE’S BOOK CLUB: QUEER & WEIRD

A book club with a focus on queer literature. Meets on the fourth Saturday of the month at 6 pm. See site for current title. Free. Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main Ave. auntiesbooks.com (509-838-0206)

GET LIT!: AN EVENING WITH POET

LAUREATE ADA LIMÓN In celebration of 25 years of the Get Lit! Festival, the current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón discusses her work. April 22, 7 pm. $25. Bing Crosby Theater, 901 W. Sprague Ave. bingcrosbytheater.com (509-227-7638)

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC LIVE: COSMIC

ADVENTURES Aerospace engineer Tracy Drain works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop, test and operate the complex machines that uncover the countless mysteries within and beyond our solar system. April 22, 7 pm. $25-$31. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. foxtheaterspokane.org (509-624-1200)

AN AFTERNOON WITH AMMI MIDSTOKKE Spokesman-Review columnist and North Idaho native Ammi Midstokke, reads from her memoir and discusses the tales behind the stories. April 23, 2 pm. Free. Wishing Tree Books, 1410 E. 11th Ave. wishingtreebookstore.com n

REVENUE

Taxation Situation

Washington state makes big bucks taxing cannabis, so what does it do with all that money?

BY WILL MAUPIN

Tax Day may be behind us, but when it comes to cannabis, taxation never stops, which makes this a good time to get refreshed on how Washington taxes cannabis and what the state does with that revenue.

When voters approved Initiative 502 in 2012, they did more than just legalize cannabis. They also voted to approve a tax scheme for the state’s legal market. The ballot measure summary issued by the state read, in part, that the measure would “impose 25 percent excise taxes on wholesale and retail sales of marijuana, earmarking revenue for purposes that include substance-abuse prevention, research, education, and healthcare.”

With the implementation of the legal market in 2014, the excise tax rate was raised to 37 percent, the secondhighest rate in the nation. Consumers pay that every time

NOTE TO READERS

Be aware of the differences in the law between Idaho and Washington. It is illegal to possess, sell or transport cannabis in the State of Idaho. Possessing up to an ounce is a misdemeanor and can get you a year in jail and up to a $1,000 fine; more than three ounces is a felony that can carry a five-year sentence and fine of up to $10,000. Transporting marijuana across state lines, like from Washington into Idaho, is a felony under federal law.

they make a retail purchase.

In fiscal year 2022, the state generated $509.4 million in revenue from that tax. The National Association of State Budget Officers estimates that Washington spent $65.8 billion in total expenditures in fiscal 2022, which would mean the state’s cannabis income amounts to just under 0.8 percent of the total budget.

According to estimates from Crosscut, cannabis taxes paid for just under 2 percent of total expenditures in the state’s 2021-23 budget cycle, which ends in June.

But where is the cannabis income being spent?

Some goes back into the cannabis industry itself, paying for things like testing, enforcement and compliance. The bulk goes into health care. I-502 prescribed that once administration costs had been paid, 50 percent of revenue

from cannabis would go into health care. In the current two-year state budget cycle, more than 58 percent of cannabis tax revenue went to health care

The state’s general fund is the next largest recipient, taking in roughly a third of the cannabis income. The rest is distributed in much smaller amounts to other staterun programs including education or is spread around to local governments.

Spokane County generated $56.1 million in excise tax during fiscal 2022, or roughly 10 percent of the state’s total. The county won’t get anything near that amount of money back, however. Just $20 million of the total fiscal 2022 excise tax revenue is allocated for local governments to split among themselves, according to the Washington State Treasurer’s Office.

If all these big numbers and the high tax rate have you questioning your personal cannabis budget, don’t worry. Washington consistently ranks as one of the cheapest states in the country for retail cannabis. n

BE AWARE: Marijuana is legal for adults 21 and older under Washington State law (e.g., RCW 69.50, RCW 69.51A, HB0001 Initiative 502 and Senate Bill 5052). State law does not preempt federal law; possessing, using, distributing and selling marijuana remains illegal under federal law. In Washington state, consuming marijuana in public, driving while under the influence of marijuana and transporting marijuana across state lines are all illegal. Marijuana has intoxicating effects; there may be health risks associated with its consumption, and it may be habit-forming. It can also impair concentration, coordination and judgment. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. Keep out of reach of children. For more information, consult the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board at www.liq.wa.gov.

Spokane County brought in $56 million in cannabis taxes in 2022.

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e.g. (or what can be found at the ends of 17-, 26-, 51- and

60-Across)

43. Laugh hard

44. Honey brand since 1921

45. Jul. 4 cookouts

49. The “S” of RSVP

50. Social position

51. Perfectly suited partner

53. Lena featured on the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage postage stamp series

55. “Schitt’s Creek” matriarch

56. Sloth, for one

57. “Sound of da Police” rapper ____-One

59. Engine starter: Abbr.

60. Some members of a presidential candidate’s campaign staff

65. ____ for tat

66. City home to the 1,000-year-old Al-Azhar University

67. “Under the Redwoods” author Bret

68. “Isn’t ____ bit like you and me?” (Beatles lyric)

69. Beginning

70. Mend, as a torn seam

DOWN

1. Like many student films

2. “I swear ...”

3. Pop with no fizz

4. O’er and o’er

5. Go from 60 to 0, say

6. School on the Thames

7. ____ de plume

8. Expected

9. Play a role

10. “____ you!”

11. Neighboring

12. “Brewski! Now!”

13. Shook on it

18. “Help!”

23. Cheerios grain

25. Bickering

26. Patti in the Grammy Hall of Fame

27. Abbr. on old phones

28. Warms up the crowd

29. Singer Cooke

33. Foot rub reaction

34. Literature Nobelist Mario Vargas

36. Delta ____ Chi, house in “Animal House”

38. Nincompoop

39. Alternative to a prov.

40. Certain financial advisers, informally

41. More than look up to

42. “A mouse!!”

45. Lifestyle expert with a Bed Bath & Beyond line

46. Get down on the dance floor

47. “Abbott

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On April 29TH starting at 7 pm, 30 tickets will be electronically drawn. Winners will get to “punch” a square on the punch board game for a chance to win up to $4,000 cash!

Earn entries starting April 1ST at 12 am. Play your favorite video gaming machines with your Coeur Rewards card and get one entry for every 500 points earned.

Cage