Jerrall Haynes is Spokane’s first Civil Rights Director

Jerrall Haynes is Spokane’s first civil rights director.

Appointed by Mayor Nadine Woodward on June 8 and approved by the Spokane City Council on Monday, Haynes is no stranger to the office, having worked for the past two years to build a framework for what the Office of Civil Rights, Equity and Inclusion should be.

Haynes has a long resume in local government. He served on the Spokane Public Schools board starting in 2015 and was elected its president in 2019. His tenure included weighty board decisions on a downtown stadium, new school boundaries and adoption of an equity policy.

In September 2021, Woodward hired Haynes as Spokane’s first civil rights coordinator.

Haynes’ hiring had capped a yearslong struggle by the Spokane City Council to hire a civil rights officer after updating and strengthening the city’s civil rights laws in 2017.

In that role, Haynes was expected to field complaints of civil rights violations and forward them to state and federal resources if appropriate. But a lot of Haynes’ job entailed figuring out what his job should entail, he said at the time.

“The last two years have been a whirlwind, filling the roles of three different people,” Haynes said in an interview. “I was the office, essentially.”

The process to promote Haynes as director of the office where he has worked since 2021 was a long and at times difficult one.

More than a year after the city launched its hiring process, another candidate, a woman officials have declined to name because her employer didn’t know she was seeking another job, was selected by Woodward in late January.

But within days, the candidate had rescinded her application. By Feb. 7, the job had been posted again.

To advocates who pushed for years for the office to be established and staffed, the news was bitterly disappointing. Many who expressed dissatisfaction with the process in February, some of whom expressed frustration that Haynes had been passed over, expressed strong support for the appointment Monday.

“I just want to publicly acknowledge and thank Mr. Haynes for sticking with this process with all of the political merry-go-round that took place,” said Anwar Peace, chair of the Spokane Human Rights Commission. “He’s somebody that I trust with advice on a regular basis.

“Mr. Haynes has made me a better community leader with that advice, and he’s just a good dude.”

Haynes said he was honored to have been chosen for the job.

“To the mayor’s credit, she took this process very seriously,” he said. “We’ve gone through multiple iterations of this, and I’m grateful to her to have gone through and made a selection she truly believed in.”

Now that he’s in the position, the first order of business for Haynes is staffing the rest of the office, streamlining the complaint process, building up policy and programming, among other initiatives, he said.

One in particular he expects to focus on in the immediate future is increasing languages on signs and in other areas of city business, a key initiative of Councilman Michael Cathcart, Haynes added.