City Council members continue calls for censure of Mayor Woodward after Christian nationalist event

Two members of the Spokane City Council are continuing to advance a proposal to censure Mayor Nadine Woodward for her Aug. 20 appearance at a Christian nationalist event alongside religious extremist Matt Shea.

The censure resolution, however, is not a sure thing. Councilmen Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart are opposed, and Council President Lori Kinnear has expressed doubt that censure is necessary or productive after earlier statements of condemnation from herself and three other members.

“The community already knows where we stand,” Kinnear said. “So this seems like piling on. It does seem political and it does seem like an election year stunt, quite frankly.”

The resolution, which was introduced Monday and sponsored by Councilman Zack Zappone and Councilwoman Betsy Wilkerson, stated that Woodward tarnished the reputation of the city of Spokane and called on her to provide an unconditional and public apology.

“I think it is critically important to draw a line in the sand and condemn this behavior,” Zappone said Monday.

Zappone noted that Shea, a former Republican state Representative from Spokane Valley who was ostracized by his own caucus after he attended an armed standoff with the U.S. government, had compared the fires that devastated Medical Lake and Elk to same-sex marriage and trans rights shortly before Woodward walked on stage.

Zappone linked this rhetoric to white supremacists who protested at Pride in Perry this summer, and a rainbow crosswalk in the South Perry Neighborhood that was vandalized over the weekend. He noted that Woodward in August responded to criticism over a looming, approximately $20 million hole in the city’s 2024 general fund by pointing to the growth of the City Council’s office, which she called a “shadow government,” as well as the funding of rainbow crosswalks.

The City Council’s office budget is $2.4 million, an 85% increase in the past 10 years.

Last October, the council approved spending as much as $300,000 to install six artwork crosswalks, at least some of which are rainbows to represent LGBTQ+ pride, though Zappone has said the projects have come well under budget at approximately $8,000 to $15,000 each.

Funds for those crosswalks also came from a dedicated traffic calming fund that cannot typically be used to backfill the general fund, though Woodward has recently proposed doing so to pay for police personnel.

Zappone stated that these expenses were either insignificant or irrelevant to the problems with the general fund and argued that Woodward pointed to the rainbow crosswalks and called the City Council a shadow government as a dog whistle to extremists.

“She’s engaging in extremist language online that just further emboldens this extremist community and encourages them to come to Spokane,” Zappone said.

City spokesman Brian Coddington, who acts as Woodward’s unofficial chief of staff, said that Zappone was taking the mayor’s statements out of context.

“Some of the language he used in his comments are pretty far-fetched,” Coddington said Tuesday. “Her point is those are unnecessarily costly to the taxpayer. There’s no basis in extremism whatsoever.”

Coddington said Woodward’s use of the phrase “shadow government” was a reference to the creation of positions in the City Council office that duplicate positions in the mayoral administration.

Woodward clarified her comments about the rainbow crosswalks shortly after she made the statement.

“The comment I made on Twitter about the crosswalks was really more about, what are our priorities?” she said in an August interview. “We can’t afford to continue to do extra stuff.”

Cathcart and Bingle made similar arguments last October when the expenditure was approved by their colleagues on the City Council. Woodward declined to comment at the time.

Woodward has repeatedly apologized for her attendance at the prayer event with Shea.

She has since denounced Shea and said she was not aware he would be at the event. On Friday, KHQ published Woodward’s first interview addressing the event, where she reiterated her previous statements, said she understood why her appearance angered some, and then posited that a “very loud minority group” was behind the political attacks.

She went on to call the effort to censure her a “political ploy to bring more attention to something that, you know, we need to move ahead of, that we need to move beyond that,” she told KHQ.

In the same interview, Woodward also dismissed accusations that she was not supportive of LGBTQ+ rights, saying she was “married to diversity” as the head of the city administration.

The resolution is likely to be up for first read at the Sept. 25 City Council meeting and for a vote in early October.

Cathcart, initially under the impression that the censure resolution would be fast-tracked for a vote Monday, suggested that he would call for a vote to release documents from city legal counsel. Though he said in a brief interview that he wasn’t able to provide specifics, Cathcart stated that counsel had advised against censuring the mayor for her attendance.