19 minute read
ROOTED IN HISTORY
from Inlander 07/15/2021
by The Inlander
JAN, THE TOY LADY, HAS NOTICED THAT SUMMER HAS ARRIVED WITH ITS CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS AND, UNFORTUNATELY, WILDFIRES:
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Tangled Roots
BY INGA LAURENT
While teaching in Italy this summer, I got a little lost. In the humid, viridescent Tuscan hills, time altered its rhythm. My fingers brushed a cool piece of stone in Il Duomo di Siena and suddenly years stopped making sense. Objectively, I knew that the cathedral’s construction took place between its commission in 1196 until its completion in the 1300s, but my mind simply could not grasp the meaning of centuries. My hand had touched what millions of others had also once felt, and our lives merged together through time. I was all awe and wonder about those others — their heartaches, joys, sorrows and daily woes. History’s rope had intricately woven past lives into my present, which will eventually become my past in another’s future. Individual story is illusive, succumbing to the only thing that can remain intact over millennia — collective narrative.
From this perspective, any action but global synergistic allegiance seems ludicrous and laughable. Why is our sole purpose not to live in daily devotion to the pursuit of shared societal advancement?
Then on the flight home, I read about trees. Time altered again. In Overstory, Richard Powers preaches the gospel of our endangered greens by centering them in chapter and verse: “Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds.” Trees are the protagonists, who provide us with everything: medicine, oxygen, sustenance, shade, raw materials — in essence, life. I read that they communicate and coordinate: “Trees talk to one another, over the air and underground. How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil. … There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events.” They protect: “We found that trees take care of each other… trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. A forest knows things.” They adapt: “The planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for.” And they even sing: “The Redwoods do strange things. They hum.”
Trees are a part of us: “You and the tree in
your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.” Once again, I was all awe and wonder about those others — their challenges and triumphs, friends and foes. History’s 385-million-year journey of growth now faces near extinction, which will eventually lead to eradication, no hope of a future where someone will touch a stone and wonder about us.
From this perspective, any action but holistic alliance seem ludicrous and laughable. Why is our sole purpose not to live in daily devotion to the pursuit of symbiosis?
Insatiable in our human infancy (comparatively only a 2 million-year journey of growth), we are the antagonist, craving far more than can be exchanged sustainably. “It’s so simple. … So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Not all people. Indigenous guardians and environmentalists have perpetually warned, but we often fail to heed. In truth, my progressive advocacy has been mostly half-hearted — a fleeting awareness of our suicidal tendencies to kill what supports us alongside the hypocrisy of my spending habits. Consumption continually prioritized over conservation.
Maybe confrontation with the ancient will cement more humility within me this time. The dichotomous truth we fail to comprehend — that we are an infinitesimal but interconnected part of this grand old evolutionary arc — should be more pressing. Glimpsing swaths of time’s passing was disorienting though hopefully developmental. I am more aware of the ways I have failed to adequately care for all of creation, people and plants. My missed opportunities to learn from a natural world that has seen fit to continue nurturing us since conception. I just hope it’s not too late to learn.
I want to figure out how to grow old gracefully from the bristlecone pine — Methuselah is one aspirational example, over 5,000 years old. To see my transformation from black to gray and firmness to wrinkles and lines as beauty marks instead of things to be hidden; proud of my accumulation of time instead of things. I want to delay gratification with the patience of an oak, cradling a seed that can lay dormant for millennia. I want to let go as graciously as a linden. To release any unnecessary expenditures of energy from holding on. To let things drop like leaves slip gently to the earth when its time, without any malice, each imbued with a new sense of purpose and renewal, perpetuating only growth. And I want to be able to give it all away, like a Douglas fir on its deathbed, sending out “its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots… donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament.”
I guess I’ll just have to watch and learn. Now, sometimes I can be found, in the morning, staring off into the trees. I let Ma and Morricone’s “The Mission (Gabriel’s Oboe)” swell. It’s the perfect soundtrack for a hummingbird dance. My eyes can now focus on what I keep looking at but never seeing — trees dancing, branching, nourishing. Despite all the harm we have caused them, they still root for us. Trees continue to teach us the profundity of love, and amidst such an abundant and abiding connection, I don’t feel nearly as lost. n
LETTERS
Send comments to editor@inlander.com.
Inga N. Laurent is a local legal educator and a Fulbright scholar. She is deeply curious about the world and its constructs and delights in uncovering common points of connection that unite our shared but unique human experiences.
COMMENT | FROM READERS Readers sound off at news that an Airway Heights police officer under investigation over domestic violence allegations, first uncovered by the Inlander, has resigned. Readers react to our detailed report on why Avista issued rolling blackouts during the record-breaking June heatwave.
RACHELE NICHOLS: They shouldn’t accept resignations in this scenario. It’s a loophole that needs to be corrected.
CARLA CARNEGIE: Sitting on the Spokane prosecutors desk all this time? Since April? Just when does he plan to have a look — never?
BARBARA KELLY ANZIVINO: WTF being appointed to the domestic violence counsel?? Sheesh.
SMITH ROBBIE: Yeah, well, with the prosecutor in office now, won’t surprise me if they try to sweep this under.
KIKI CHRISTENSEN: ARREST HIM!
RAUL DUKE: Probably already has offers from SPD and SCSD.
TERRY PARKER: Another bad cop on his way to another bad police department somewhere.
FRANK CIKUTOVICH: I bet his coworkers never suspected…
PAT HALLAND: He should be prosecuted like anyone else ... and never be in the position of authority again. n PATRICK HAYES: The 1-in-100 event predictions seem to be based on more stable climate models. My friend in Houston has now had several 1-in-500 events in the past five years and several more 1-in-100. We shouldn’t expect anything different here. In addition to system loads, grid operators must consider physical damage to the grid … Wildfire, primarily. Much of our generating capacity is in the hands of the Feds with responsibilities far beyond the PNW. Bottom line? How much are ratepayers willing to pay for reliable power which may no longer be cheap? It’s not Avista’s sole responsibility.
Avista Utilities Substation Inspector Joe Vigliotta describes the elements of a substation near Avista’s Spokane headquarters. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
SUSAN SMITH LINDSEY: Our “electrical future?” How about our planet’s future? Our childrens’ future?
TERRY PARKER: We’ve learned that a private monopoly does not reinvest profits in its infrastructure while watching the Public Utility Districts who are required to reinvest profits into their grids handle the heat waves without rolling blackouts.
IAN NORDSTROM: It’s time to go solar. We can bolster our grid during heat waves rather than deplete it. We can grow our own energy where we use it rather than barter with dictators and destroy mountaintops. You can buy your power generation instead of renting it and lock your price in before the cost of utilities skyrocket. n
CITY HALL
Vacancies and turnover in high-level positions have made City Spokesman Brian Coddington, left, a particularly influential figure in Nadine Woodward’s administration.
DANIEL WALTERS PHOTO
As the housing crisis worsens, the city of Spokane struggles to staff the planning department needed to respond to it
BY DANIEL WALTERS
In the final year of Spokane Mayor David Condon’s administration, then-City Council President Ben Stuckart pushed a plan that he hoped would ease the housing shortage and boost neighborhood business centers: It involved rezoning sections of the North Monroe and Perry Street corridors to allow for denser housing.
He had the support of the city administrator, the City Council and the mayor. But after Nadine Woodward defeated Stuckart and became mayor, the project got shelved.
“Nobody gave me a reason why or who made a call,” Stuckart says. “I was just told, ‘Nope, when David left the building, it got stopped.’”
It wasn’t that Woodward’s new administration opposed the project. It was that, with a slew of important vacancies in the city’s planning department, the staff who would do the rezoning were needed on other projects like the downtown plan.
“They stalled during the transition process,” city spokesman Brian Coddington says. “Then as we got into COVID, it hadn’t been picked back up yet.”
Last month’s dramatic exit of Cupid Alexander, the city’s neighborhood services division director, exposed just how understaffed the city’s housing and human services department had become, handicapping the ability of the city to address homelessness.
But other departments, like planning services, have been overworked and understaffed as well.
“We’re down four positions in planning, at the time of the greatest housing crisis ever,” City Council President Breean Beggs says.
The city not only has two vacant assistant planner positions, there’s no official planning director to oversee the planning department, and there’s no official division director to oversee the planning director. If you include the two director positions, almost a quarter of the planning positions are currently empty.
The frustration is councilwide: Councilman Michael Cathcart details being told that “really important steps” he believes are necessary to ease the housing shortage are “too staff intensive and too time intensive.” Councilwoman Candace Mumm recounts developers’ complaints about the lack of staffing to respond to their concerns, while Councilwoman Lori Kinnear talks about the missed opportunities to transform North Division Street to take advantage of new bus lines.
“That department is on life support,” Kinnear says of the planning department.
Thanks largely to vacancies, only three-quarters of the planning department’s 2020 budget was spent last year. Over in Cupid Alexander’s division? Barely more than a third.
But all the vacancies have made even getting information about the vacancies more difficult.
Worried about a “potentially larger pattern of key departments being understaffed,” Beggs sent an email to the city administrator and human resources on June 23, asking for a spreadsheet detailing vacancies across all city departments, stressing that “community members have already paid their taxes for these budgeted positions.”
He never heard back. Instead, just a week later, the city’s HR director resigned, adding to the growing holes in City Hall.
“We are just completely understaffed,” Beggs says.
The Woodward administration argues that the amount of vacancies and departures isn’t particularly unusual, and that much of it may be related to exhaustion from the pandemic.
“We had a lot of our staff and division leaders doing around-the-clock work for months during the beginning of COVID,” Woodward says. “We’ve gotten to a point 15 to 16 months later, where people are strained, they’re stressed, they’re tired.”
Others have a more cynical explanation.
“This new administration has been there long enough, where they should see where the weaknesses are, where they should boost staff,” City Councilwoman Karen Stratton says. “I’m kind of at the point where I think they just don’t care.”
A DIRECTOR SEARCH IN SEARCH OF DIRECTION
recognized that hiring quality candidates would be tricky when they knew a new boss could just as easily fire them. At the end of 2019, over 40 major positions were vacant.
In fact, the planning director position had been vacant since March 2018, when the Condon administration ousted Lisa Key from that role. Cathcart hoped that would change when Woodward took office.
“The first thing I said to the mayor is, ‘We need to prioritize hiring a planning director,’” he says. “We need to go out and headhunt.”
But as the Woodward administration focused on hiring other roles, like a city administrator, a chief financial officer and a human resources director, the planning director recruitment didn’t begin until September.
In a speech to the City Council in October, Woodward named “recruiting a planning director to identify new ways for our city to grow and thrive well beyond this pandemic” as one of her top priorities.
But behind the scenes, Beggs suggests, the administration’s commitment to the department was less robust.
Beggs says the council “begged” the mayor to not ax one of the city’s empty planner positions. Eventually, the council agreed to eliminate one of the planner positions and create a new “community and economic development division director” position, a high-level position that would oversee planning, code enforcement and a number of other departments.
Toward the end of November, both Mumm and Cathcart sat on a panel to interview four planning director finalists. But the panel couldn’t agree. While Mumm selected what she felt was a front-runner, Cathcart didn’t believe any of the finalists had the experience to tackle the growth challenges of a city like Spokane.
“I recommended they go back out and do a new search,” he says.
But instead of following either councilmember’s recommendation, the whole hiring process came to a halt: Coddington says the administration put it on pause, while deciding whether it made more sense to first hire the community and economic development director.
For months, the planning director position hiring process hung in limbo. It didn’t help that, back in September, Woodward’s first city administrator had abruptly resigned.
“You had this five-month gap when everything was on hold,” Kinnear says.
And when the planning director search finally restarted in May, the administration sent two of the four director finalists to be interviewed by a second panel, one composed primarily of community members.
“The community panel was unanimous,” Coddington says. “The right fit was not there.”
As a result, he says the administration decided to find a firm to recruit new candidates.
Nearly 500 days after Woodward took office, the planning director search had effectively been sent back to square one. Mumm, however, says the panels shouldn’t be blamed.
“At the end of the day, it falls to the mayor to bring forth a candidate,” Mumm says.
THE HIRING CHILL
Coddington argues that it’s crucial to take the context into account when judging the mayor.
“She had, what, 75 days to get up to speed on the city op...continued on next page
NEWS | CITY HALL “‘ON LIVE SUPPORT’,” CONTINUED...
erations before a global pandemic?” Coddington says. Almost overnight, the city had to convert a 2,000-employee in-person organization into a mostly online workfrom-home operation. Department heads, including the director of human resources, had to take on new roles to respond to the pandemic.
“I’m sitting in a City Hall that has a fraction of employees here,” Coddington says. “We’re not back inperson here.”
Not only that, but because of the concern that the pandemic would devastate local tax revenue, the city was particularly conservative when it came to filling vacant positions.
“We’ve already put a freeze on hiring,” Woodward told the Inlander in April 2020. “We have already cut back on nonessential spending.”
Technically, hiring was allowed during the pandemic, Coddington says, but each position required explicit approval from the city administrator, a restriction that was only lifted last month. Either way, it turned out that the city’s budget wasn’t battered by the pandemic nearly as much as anticipated: So when the City Council learned in May that millions of dollars had been withheld that could have been spent on unfilled staff positions, frustration poured out.
“We’re sitting here without enough planners in planning. We have code enforcement that is way behind,” Stratton said at a May 13 study session. “Our employees shouldn’t suffer as they have been with too much work and too few people to do it.”
Beggs argues that the hiring limits came from an ideological place, that the mayor believed “each person you don’t hire, you’re helping the taxpayer somehow, you’re doing God’s work if you don’t hire a government employee.”
But Coddington says that, in fact, the city had explicitly allowed hiring to continue for the planning and housing and human services departments. In fact, there was a planner hired in February, but then another vacancy opened up in April.
That’s where an entirely different bureaucratic apparatus comes in: the civil service commission. The meritbased civil service hiring system was designed to protect
LETTERS employees from politics or favoritism, but it has become a Send comments to editor@inlander.com. major hiring bottleneck in recent months. To hire new planners, for example, the commission has to not only develop a new list of potential candidates, it has to update the civil service test for the position, a process that can take months. Kelsey Pearson, chief examiner for the civil service commission, says she recognizes that civil service needs to adapt and that their process hasn’t been working like it once did. But beyond the bureaucracy, the appeal of a government job in Spokane isn’t what it was during the depths of the recession, Pearson says. “We are just quite frankly, struggling to recruit planners,” she says. “Spokane used to be more of a draw,
City Council President Breean Beggs has become more outspoken in his criticism of the mayor’s decisions in recent months. DANIEL WALTERS PHOTO
more of an affordable place to live.”
And that’s the irony: Spokane needs more planners to help solve the housing crisis that is making Spokane less affordable. But, thanks in part to the housing crisis, it’s become harder to convince them to work here.
EXIT SIGNS
Coddington expects the community and economic development division director position to be filled by the end of this month. As for the planning director? Strategic Government Resources, the recruiting firm hired by the city to recruit a new slate of candidates, just started advertising the position last week. They’ll be taking applications through Aug. 5.
In the meantime, Mumm says, the City Council approved a stopgap measure on Monday: Use the money the city saved on not hiring people last year, and pay for contractors and consultants to help the planning department get caught up on delayed projects. A city spokeswoman says a consultant may help resurrect the North Monroe and Perry projects in coming months.
As for the housing and human services department, Coddington says the mayor and the HR department have been meeting personally with the department’s staff to listen to their concerns and identify possible solutions.
“We’re hoping to bring stability back to that department,” Woodward tells the Inlander. “I want to make the organization healthy again.”
So far that stability hasn’t come. Stratton confirms that another department employee, Homeless Program Specialist Matt Davis, submitted his resignation last week.
“We’ve lost a lot of really good people,” Stratton says, “And we’re going to lose more.”
It’s practically a demographic inevitability.
“More than half of city employees are eligible to retire right now,” Pearson says. “They could leave tomorrow.” n danielw@inlander.com
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