Spokane mayor pitches tax ask, pledges to move House of Charity during first State of the City address

Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown held her first State of the City address after taking office earlier this year with a speech on Tuesday that highlighted the work of city staff and attempted to persuade the crowd of hundreds, with many business and property owners, to support her proposal to raise property taxes to expand services and avoid deep cuts.

The event, hosted by business development group Greater Spokane Incorporated, provided an opportunity for Brown to provide an update on her administration to a room of some of the most influential figures in the city, as well as representatives from the state Legislature and other cities. She lauded the city’s amenities and culture and celebrated its people and natural features.

She also praised the efforts of city police, firefighters and staff from other departments including waste management before eventually transitioning to lobbying for a significant tax increase she is calling for to prevent layoffs and to expand the services that city staff can provide. On Monday, the Spokane City Council voted to place the property tax levy, which would raise about $38 million annually in perpetuity at a cost of around $377 for the average homeowner, on the August ballot.

She prefaced the speech’s big pitch by listing a few budget cuts she was making, including asking her cabinet to take two unpaid furlough days this year, and promised that more were coming in the coming weeks. But filling the approximately $25 million hole in the city’s budget could not be responsibly done with cuts alone, she argued.

“I don’t believe we can do this response all on the cut side, especially as calls for service are up and we are a growing city,” Brown said. She pointed to results from internal surveys of staff at the city’s fire and police departments.

“They asked, ‘Stop asking us to do more with less, and ignore the politics and do what is right,’ ” Brown said. “I believe what is right for our community is investing in community safety and fiscal responsibility.”

Not quite five months into her first term, there were few substantial accomplishments that the freshman mayor could tout during her first State of the City address. Brown primarily highlighted the planning her administration has done in its early days that may yield fruit later this year, though she also pointed to efforts to streamline city permitting and to attract a more robust aeronautics sector in the Spokane area.

She also held up the historic work done to change zoning within the city and allow for greater residential density – these reforms happened under the administration of her predecessor, former-Mayor Nadine Woodward, though it was to Brown that Gov. Jay Inslee presented an award for the work earlier this year.

Brown also floated projects she hoped to complete before the end of the year, including one Woodward pledged to accomplish during the 2022 State of the City address but couldn’t finish: moving the Catholic Charities-run homeless shelter the House of Charity out of the troubled area near Second Avenue and Division Street.

Almost two years ago, Woodward, who argued that a concentration of homelessness and addiction treatment services in a small area downtown had led to urban blight there, named the “House of Charity 2.0” project among her top priorities. She pledged to move Catholic Charities into a larger space out of downtown, doubling the shelter capacity in the process, and to help find state funding and operational support to do that.

Nothing came of that project, however. No potential sites for the new House of Charity building were disclosed by the city or Catholic Charities, and by the summer of 2023 the nonprofit was criticizing Woodward’s partnership.

On Tuesday, Brown continued Woodward’s initiative to disperse services out of the downtown core, calling to close the current congregant shelter and open a facility modeled after another Catholic Charities project, the Catalyst building in the West Hills Neighborhood. That converted Quality Inn, which opened December 2022 with significant financial support from the state Department of Commerce, which Brown led at the time, now provides formerly homeless people individual rooms with dedicated mental health and peer support services as they transition into permanent housing.

Unlike her predecessor, Brown is recommending backing the move with over $2.6 million of tax dollars.

The Spokane City Council is in the process of clawing back over $7.5 million of COVID-19 relief funds that had been allocated to various purposes but remains unspent. Those funds must either be contracted by the end of the year or returned to the federal government.

On Monday, during a council exercise to gauge each member’s priorities, the mayor’s proposal to spend $2.65 million of those funds to move the House of Charity was among the top ranking items. Rated even higher by most members was another $1.8 million to also move the neighboring Compassionate Addiction Treatment facility, which Brown also teased during the State of the City address.

A vote on how the city will use the last of its pandemic relief funds will be held on May 13, according to City Council President Betsy Wilkerson.

“We have heard and been challenged with Second and Division for years,” Wilkerson said. “There are other items that I would have also liked to have funded, but we have prioritized this.”

As with two years ago, the new sites for those moved facilities remain to be identified, wrote city spokeswoman Erin Hut in a Tuesday text.

“At this time no specific plans for that transition have been agreed to or funded,” wrote Catholic Charities Eastern Washington CEO Rob McCann.

McCann believes that this time will be different, he added in a brief interview.

“The biggest single difference this time around, this current administration has proposed a process and a plan to determine a new House of Charity facility that fits into the broader system,” McCann said. “We were interested two years ago, but in hindsight now we see was a political stunt with no real effort behind it.”

“I have every reason to believe that a House of Charity transition can and will happen under this administration,” he said.