Getting There: Disagreements flare again over how to pay for promised Spokane traffic unit that still hasn’t ramped up

Transportation safety activists are accusing Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown of hypocrisy after her budget proposal continues to recommend paying for traffic officers with a fund typically understood to pay for infrastructure, such as speed bumps.

“This sleight of hand budget maneuvering is unacceptable,” said Erik Lowe, creator of transit-advocacy organization Spokane Reimagined, at the Nov. 25 council meeting. “If the money from the new community safety tax is not enough to pay for the traffic unit, then the tax should have been higher, or the traffic unit should have been cut from the proposal.”

Lowe and other activists have pointed to statements Brown made on the campaign trail last year criticizing her opponent, then-Mayor Nadine Woodward, for a similar move. They also pointed to messaging from the city around the recent sales tax proposal, which voters approved in November, that stated some of the funds would go to standing up a traffic unit.

“While the mayor’s community safety (tax) proposal was light on specifics, it was clear that one of the key funding investments would be reconstituting a robust traffic enforcement unit,” Lowe said. “Now the mayor wants to continue raiding the extremely limited funds of the Safe Streets For All Fund, which is supposed to go to infrastructure.”

Brown still plans to use some of the sales tax to fund traffic enforcement, but she argued that her budget proposal made due with limited resources after a year of spending cuts to pull the city out of a deficit. However, she will work with the City Council to find an alternative before a final budget is approved later this year, she said in a Wednesday interview.

“I understand the objections and agree with them,” Brown said. “It’s just a question of where to come up with the funding without cutting the police budget.”

A full year after city officials came to a contentious agreement to fund a dedicated traffic enforcement unit, it still hasn’t happened, police Sgt. Theresa Fuller acknowledged Wednesday.

How did we get here?

Facing complaints about rising crime and slow response times from police, the Spokane Police Department eliminated its dedicated traffic unit in 2021 due to staffing shortages and a need to shift officers to patrol duties. The traffic unit was briefly revived in a limited capacity in 2022, then eliminated at the beginning of 2023 as traffic officers were once again shifted back to patrol.

In late 2023, former Mayor Nadine Woodward proposed bringing back the traffic unit, this time paid with the city’s Traffic Calming Fund, which is traditionally used to pay for physical infrastructure that makes roads safer.

Woodward opposed the existence of the fund because it is entirely controlled by the council, which she believed had slowly subsumed some of the administrative powers of the mayor’s office. Running out of stop-gap measures to balance the city’s tenuous 2024 budget, Woodward argued she should be able to raid the traffic fund to the tune of a few million.

Opponents called the proposal a betrayal of the promises made by the city.

The fund is filled by fines from red-light and speeding camera tickets, and to counter concerns that the cameras were installed to make money, not make people safer, the city committed to only use the fines to improve road safety. For years, neighborhood councils have been able to recommend how those dollars should be spent, asking for stop signs and speed bumps and other long-term measures to slow drivers down.

To remain mostly in compliance with those commitments, Woodward proposed that the funding be used to pay for traffic enforcement and drunken driving patrols – investments relevant to road safety, even if it wasn’t infrastructure.

Despite initial controversy, the Spokane City Council agreed to pull $1.8 million from the Traffic Calming Fund for policing services, of which $1.4 million would go to stand up a four-person traffic enforcement unit.

When asked on the campaign trail last year whether Woodward’s proposal to fund traffic cops with the fund was appropriate, Brown was unequivocal: “No.”

“One of the things I hear at the doors is that people are already frustrated that their neighborhood council approved traffic calming projects that haven’t been completed yet,” Brown said during a debate. “And so I don’t think we should raid the traffic calming fund for this budget that we’re in.”

So it came as a surprise for infrastructure-minded activists when Brown’s budget proposal continued to raid the Safe Streets Fund to fund police positions, albeit ramping down from the 2024 budget. Her biennial budget would transfer $1.2 million in 2025 and $600,000 in 2026.

The budget also called for paying for the traffic unit with some of the $6.5 million the city expects to take in annually from the recently approved tax increase , though it didn’t specify how much and there are several other expensive commitments for the fund, including seven neighborhood resource officers.

The rest of the city’s budget didn’t offer a lot of flexibility to pay for the traffic unit without continuing to pull from the Safe Streets Fund, Brown argued. Her administration largely has managed to close the $25 million deficit the city was barreling towards when she came into office, but she said those negotiations didn’t factor in having to find another $1.8 million to backfill the traffic unit’s expenses if the Safe Streets Fund was off limits.

Brown said she anticipated ramping down the dependence on the Safe Streets Fund in the next couple years and slowly replacing that with funds from the sales tax, but understood why there was resistance to that proposal.

“We’re climbing out of that hole, and you have to look at a variety of ways to do that,” Brown said. “When you’re trying to balance a budget, you do things that you don’t want to. But you have to go there.”

Still, she said she heard the concerns being raised and would work to find an alternative with the council, which has final authority to approve the city’s budget.

Where’s the unit?

When Brown pledged in July to make the city safer for pedestrians and bicyclists following a spate of fatal accidents, she primarily focused on infrastructure and procedural changes that could speed up changes on city streets.

She also acknowledged that there still wasn’t a dedicated traffic unit in the police department.

She blamed former Mayor Nadine Woodward and Woodward’s cabinet members for the delays, saying she hadn’t been aware that the controversial funding proposal, which she opposed on the campaign trail, had ultimately been approved.

“I didn’t know they had made some kind of agreement to stand up a traffic enforcement unit anyway,” she said at the time.

Then-interim police Chief Justin Lundgren also noted that staffing shortages had made it difficult to dedicate officers to traffic enforcement.

“The launch of this rededicated Traffic Unit was dependent upon staffing and in particular a group of new officers completing their training,” Lundgren said in July. But staffing attrition meant the department “did not reach our appropriate staffing level.”

He believed, however, that after high-profile summer events like the Expo ’74 anniversary celebrations were concluded, enough officers would be available to finally create the four-person standalone unit that had been promised.

Four months later, there still isn’t a dedicated traffic unit.

Fuller said in a Wednesday interview that there are three officers who are frequently, but not solely, tasked with traffic enforcement. She pointed to the early retirement incentives offered to senior officers, part of Brown’s strategy to balance the budget, and delays in replacing those positions.

“Unfortunately, because of the buyout, we’ve lost 20 people we now need to replace, and those assets come from patrol at the end of the day,” Fuller said.

Once again, officers have been pulled away from traffic enforcement to fill in gaps in patrol to respond to 911 calls.

Brown said Wednesday that she and current police Chief Kevin Hall remain dedicated to getting the traffic enforcement unit fully stood up. She argued that her administration has been making many sizable changes in the police department, including expanding the Homeless Outreach Team and a co-responder unit in partnership with the Sheriff’s Office, and that the entire ship can’t be turned all at once.

“We’re going to get there,” she said.