Spokane City Council will revisit parks trespassing law after Park Board declines to change hours

The Spokane City Council will have to vote again on a law making trespassing in city parks an arrestable offense after the Park Board refused to change its hours to limit the time police could detain someone suspected of committing a crime.

The controversial law that the City Council passed on a narrow 4-3 vote in June also set new hours at Spokane’s parks, closing all but Riverfront Park from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and Riverfront from midnight to 5 a.m.

The city charter bestows the authority to change park hours to the Park Board, not the council. The Park Board earlier this month declined to change its closure hours, which run from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. in all but Riverfront and midnight to 6 a.m. there.

In refusing to change the current hours, Park Board members said costs of changing signs would be prohibitive and they believed police would be able to use discretion when determining who to question about illegal activity after hours.

“I don’t know who would dispatch someone to say, ‘I saw a jogger, could you please come arrest him?’ ” Park Board President Bob Anderson said at the board’s meeting July 13. “I mean, I don’t see that happening … And I don’t see our police acting in that fashion.”

The division between city lawmakers means that a fix is unlikely to be made quickly, setting up several weeks where the city’s trespassing law for parks would appear to be in conflict with the city charter. The council plans to take up a bill reversing its action on hours, but won’t be able to vote until at least mid-August due to its summer schedule, several weeks after the current law signed by Mayor Nadine Woodward takes effect on July 30.

“If we had taken a little more time, maybe we could have worked through this better with the parks department,” City Councilwoman Betsy Wilkerson, one of the votes against the trespassing measure in June, said. She described the current situation as “a hot mess.”

At the same time, those who voted for the trespassing law said they needed to do something to address rising violence in city parks, including a rash of shootings over the past several years. That includes a fatal shooting in Franklin Park on Aug. 27 that killed a 22-year-old.

“The whole premise of this was that the northwest parks are a mess right now,” said City Councilwoman Karen Stratton, who sponsored the trespassing law. Stratton mulled an emergency ordinance that would reset the hours before the current law took effect, but that would require five votes for passage under the city’s legislative rules.

City Council President Lori Kinnear said even though enforcement will be complaint-driven, city police need the ability to potentially detain people in the parks who could be committing crimes. Because it was previously a civil infraction, the police department said, they were unable to get people to leave if they were trespassing after hours.

“Our parks are under siege by people who want to do bad things,” Kinnear said. “They’re not bad people, they’re doing bad things.”

The Spokane Police Department intends to start enforcing the law as written beginning July 30, said Julie Humphreys, Spokane police spokeswoman. That means officers will have the option of making arrests between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. in all parks but Riverfront, though officers will have discretion when deciding whether an arrest, or a warning, is necessary.

“We want to initially do a good bit of education as well,” Humphreys said. “That doesn’t mean we will always be doing a warning.”

City Councilman Jonathan Bingle, who is the council’s liaison to the Park Board and a supporter of the trespassing law, said he agreed that police would use appropriate discretion.

“I think they already do that with a number of city laws,” Bingle said. “I think this will be a very similar situation.”

But that concern, that enforcement will be complaint-based because police aren’t patrolling parks and therefore certain groups may be targeted for enforcement, was raised by members of the public and two council members at the vote in June. Councilman Zack Zappone suggested the change in hours as one of several amendments intended to allay concerns the law would be enforced harshly and against legitimate park users.

Zappone said Thursday his opposition to the law as written hadn’t changed, but he’d be willing to lend his support if a majority of the council agreed to add a sunset provision that ended the law after a year.

“I’d be happy to negotiate a compromise,” Zappone said. “They’ve shown no interest in doing that yet.”

The actions of the Park Board and City Council have left the city’s Parks and Recreation Division in a holding pattern while the differences are reconciled.

“We will let the legislative process take its course, and once we have final clarity around the ordinance and park hours, we will work with law enforcement on community outreach related to any changes,” Parks director Garrett Jones said via email Thursday.

Kinnear said a new version of the ordinance, switching the hours back to 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. for all parks but Riverfront and midnight to 6 a.m. for that park, will be scheduled for a final vote on Aug. 21, when the council returns from a summer break.