As City Council declines to take action, local business leader wants voters to criminalize public drug use

A downtown Spokane business leader will have to collect signatures in order to have a measure criminalizing public illegal drug use appear on the November ballot.

“Spokane is an amazing place to live, work, and play,” Chris Batten, the principal of RenCorp Realty and former board chair of the Downtown Spokane Partnership, wrote in an email. “I submitted this citizen initiative because I want to keep it that way.”

On Monday, the Spokane City Council declined to take action on the citizens initiative filed by Batten when no council member made a motion to place it on the ballot. The council had the option to vote to immediately put the initiative onto the November ballot, but by taking no action the initiative now goes to the independent hearing examiner for legal review.

After the review, Batten would need to collect a bit more than 11,100 signatures from Spokane residents, which is 5% of those who voted in the last general election, in order for the initiative to qualify for the November ballot, according to the city charter. He must submit those signatures no later than 150 days before the election.

Technically, Batten submitted two initiatives, both of which aim to criminalize the public use of illegal drugs. The only difference between the two is whether the penalty would be a simple or gross misdemeanor, reflective of ongoing debates in the state Legislature about whether penalties for drug possession will be increased to a gross misdemeanor.

Batten’s initiative is strikingly similar to the Safe Open Spaces Act, an ordinance proposed in March by Mayor Nadine Woodward and sponsored by Councilmen Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart. That ordinance would also have criminalized open public drug use.

The City Council was originally scheduled for a first reading of the ordinance on Monday, but delayed initial consideration until May 1, citing uncertainty about what the state Legislature might do as the legislative session heads into its final weeks.

Bingle and Cathcart had voted against the deferral, stating that the city should act immediately to criminalize public drug usage, which they argued had led to residents feeling more unsafe in public spaces.

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

Unlike Batten’s initiative, 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.

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

In a Tuesday interview, Woodward said that she believed Batten had offered the citizen’s initiative due to concerns that the City Council would not act quickly, if at all. Batten, who was visiting Disneyland, could not be reached for an interview, but provided a short written statement.

“While Olympia and the radical majority on our City Council debate the merits of allowing open drug use, I believe it’s important that the citizens have a say in making their city safe and clean for everyone,” Batten wrote.