Spokane City Council makes 11th-hour changes to redistricting measure on February ballot

Spokane voters will still decide early next year whether the City Council should have less power in drawing council districts in the future, but the measure that will appear on local ballots has been slightly changed after a Thursday vote.

Spokane city voters will be presented with a revised redistricting ballot measure in February than was approved this summer after a week of deliberation by the Spokane City Council.

Thursday’s vote modified a prior redistricting measure headed to the February ballot that was championed by Councilman Michael Cathcart. Council members unanimously supported placing the measure on the ballot on July 24, though Councilman Zack Zappone was absent from that meeting.

That initial measure had three key provisions. First, it expanded the redistricting commission from three members to seven, and the Community Assembly would verify whether applicants are qualified. The mayor would appoint three members, one from each existing district, and the City Council would appoint three. Those six members would vote to appoint a nonvoting seventh member who would act as chairperson; if no agreement can be reached, the Community Assembly, which neither the mayor nor council has authority over, would choose the seventh member.

The second key provision would bar the City Council from replacing the redistricting commission’s recommended map with one drafted by the council, as occurred last year. If a council majority votes against the recommendation, it would be sent back to the commission, which would have to draft a new map. If no map was approved, the pre-existing maps would be adopted automatically, so long as they don’t violate state law.

Finally, Cathcart’s charter amendment would create a process for local residents to request a redistricting process in the middle of the decennial. Redistricting typically occurs every 10 years after the U.S. Census is published. The City Council, however, can redistrict in the fifth year of this 10-year cycle but has not exercised that power in the two decades since the city charter was adopted.

The changes agreed to by Cathcart and Zappone and unanimously adopted Thursday made several small changes, including removing the Community Assembly from the process of soliciting candidates for the redistricting commission or potentially choosing that body’s seventh member. The mayor and council are also encouraged to consider demographic and geographic diversity with their appointments. The threshold for a citizen petition to call for a mid-decennial redistricting was lowered from 15% of recent voters to 10%.

Preventing the breakup of neighborhoods during future redistricting efforts would be codified as a priority for the commission under the modified ballot measure. A provision was also included that ensures that, if the City Council cannot agree on a map, the decision would be made by a municipal court judge.

“I think these changes are reasonable,” Cathcart said Thursday. “I think they’re representative of a common ground.”

Months later, Zappone argued at the Dec. 4 meeting that the redistricting measure should be pulled from the February ballot altogether and instead be considered as part of a sweeping review of the City Charter, any changes to which would eventually require voter approval. He argued that there hadn’t been sufficient community outreach about the proposal and stated that he worried the process would be seen as a partisan response to the City Council’s 2022 redistricting vote.

Perceptions of partisanship have certainly animated conversations about Spokane’s redistricting process. The initial ballot measure was written in direct response to the resulting backlash and the ambiguities in local law exposed during a legal challenge earlier this year.

Every decade, Spokane redraws the boundaries of its three City Council districts to ensure each has the same number of residents. The city earlier in 2022 tasked three volunteers, nominated by the mayor and approved by the City Council, with drawing a new map.

Those three redistricting board members – Rick Friedlander, Heather Beebe-Stevens and Jennifer Thomas – worked on maps through the summer and into the fall. Zappone and City Council President Breean Beggs served as nonvoting members.

After an extended public outreach process, the voting members of the board advanced a map drafted by Thomas, which had the fewest changes to its boundaries. The council, however, decided to throw out the board’s recommendation in favor of a map drafted by Zappone, with now-Council President Betsy Wilkerson putting forward the map drawn by her fellow council member.

The map selected by the City Council last year made Zappone’s District 3 – in northwest Spokane and previously considered a swing district – more likely to elect liberal council members. It also made District 1, which covers northeast Spokane and is represented by conservative city lawmakers Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle, less likely to elect conservative members.

A legal challenge filed not long after the City Council’s left-leaning majority adopted the new map claimed the districts were intentionally gerrymandered by Zappone in favor of left-leaning candidates.

Zappone has consistently stated in public that his only motivation in drafting the maps the way he did was to reunify neighborhoods, which the city argued were existing communities of shared interests. In the previous map, the Riverside, West Hills and East Central neighborhoods had been divided between two council districts.

In his court filings and arguments to a Spokane County Superior Court judge, the plaintiffs relied heavily on a litany of subpoenaed communications, primarily from Zappone. These communications show Zappone was aware of the political implications of the map he had drawn and worked with political allies and his taxpayer-funded legislative assistant to shape the public’s perception of the map before it was approved.

In April, Judge Tony Hazel ruled that the district map was legal, but argued that Zappone had violated the spirit, if not the letter, of local law.

“For precedent going forward, the City Council should not be submitting maps,” Hazel said. “I will make that ruling here, and if it is challenged, I would understand, but for now, going forward, that should not happen.”

Allegations of impropriety were not contained to the courtroom. Local insurance sales executive Neil Muller filed ethics complaints in May alleging that Zappone, Wilkerson and their legislative aids, Jeff Gunn and Mark Carlos, had improperly influenced the redistricting outcome. After numerous delays, the city Ethics Commission ruled Thursday evening that Gunn and Carlos has not committed an ethics violation and dismissed the case against Wilkerson.

The commission was split, however, with regards to Zappone. Two commissioners, Clayton McFarland and Kenneth Hall, believed the council member had improperly influenced the process to directly or indirectly benefit himself politically; two other commissioners, Gail Heck-Sweeney and Ivan Iverson, disagreed. The seven-person commission has three vacancies, meaning a unanimous decision was needed to affirmatively find there was or was not a violation; in lieu of that, no decision was made.

In a brief interview after the hearing, Zappone told the press that the ballot measure before voters in February would prevent future perceptions of impropriety, whether or not those concerns have merit.

“The legislation that we passed today would deal with a lot of these gray areas,” he said.