Spokane City Council delays hearing mayor’s proposed public drug use measure

The Spokane City Council will delay a vote on one of Mayor Nadine Woodward’s biggest policy goals of the year: combating public drug use.

The Safe Open Spaces Act, which makes public drug use a gross misdemeanor, was originally scheduled for first reading on April 17, with a vote likely the following week.

But the City Council voted Monday 5-2 to defer first reading until May 1, citing concerns that a local move could be pre-empted in coming weeks by the state Legislature, which is working on changing drug possession laws.

Councilmen Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart voted against the deferral, arguing the city should act immediately to criminalize public drug usage.

“There’s plenty of issues that the city of Spokane has led and the state has followed,” Bingle said.

Councilwoman Lori Kinnear called for more information from the police department as well as guarantees that the law would be enforced if it was passed. There are already recently passed prohibitions against using drugs in city parks that aren’t being enforced, and drug possession cases have been low on the priority list for an overworked department, she stated Monday.

Council President Breean Beggs noted that there were also already laws on the books criminalizing the public consumption of marijuana after possession was legalized, and questioned whether those laws were being enforced.

Cathcart argued the city’s law against drug use in parks didn’t have teeth, with the only added penalty being a possible yearlong ban from city parks. Bingle added that he would support hiring more officers to increase the department’s capacity to enforce.

“What I’m hearing is a plug for 70 more officers,” Bingle said.

Councilman Zack Zappone noted the ordinance hadn’t gone through subcommittees or undergone a public feedback process.

But Cathcart argued that public outreach wasn’t necessary for what he considered a universally desired prohibition.

“Do you think the public wants public drug use?” Cathcart asked shortly before the vote.

In a Tuesday interview, Woodward echoed calls for the City Council to act quickly.

“I think that this is something we need to do right away,” Woodward said Tuesday. “I don’t think we need to wait on what the state is doing.”

In the past, public drug usage cases were enforced through drug possession laws – a person seen using illegal drugs is implicitly in possession of those substances or paraphernalia.

But in February 2021, the state Supreme Court declared Washington’s felony drug possession statute unconstitutional. The case came out of Spokane after Shannon Blake said she was unaware that a pair of pants she was wearing during her arrest, which had been given to her, had a bag of methamphetamine in the coin pocket.

The court ruled that Washington’s law was unconstitutional because it made possession a felony even for people who did not know they had drugs on them.

The Legislature that year came up with a stopgap measure that expires in July, where drug possession was made a simple misdemeanor. However, for the first two offenses, those found in possession of drugs would be diverted to treatment instead of jail.

The Legislature is back at it again this year to work on a permanent reinstatement of drug possession laws, though the exact details of what will be passed remain unclear. On Tuesday, state House Democrats passed the “Blake fix,” Senate Bill 5536, but with amendments that would drop the Senate’s proposed gross misdemeanor consequence down to a simple misdemeanor.

Spokane and some other cities in the state have looked for creative ways to get around this prohibition against using arrest for drug possession as a first offense.

Introduced in March, Woodward’s Safe Open Spaces Act, sponsored by Bingle and Cathcart, would make it a gross misdemeanor to use illegal drugs in or visible from public spaces.

The Bellingham City Council passed a similar ordinance Monday that was also proposed by that city’s mayor in March.

Under Woodward’s proposal, if someone was cited for using drugs in public, the officer could refer the alleged perpetrator to treatment but would not be required to.

The Safe Open Spaces Act would also require officers to confiscate illegal substances and drug paraphernalia if they are found in someone’s possession, regardless of whether they were using the substance in public, which Cathcart said Monday often didn’t occur because it’s “inconvenient” for officers.

The ordinance would modify the city’s laws against loitering in a public place for the purposes of drug use, which currently requires officers to allow possible violators to provide a legal reason for their conduct. Woodward’s proposal would scrap that requirement and make violations a gross misdemeanor.