A Democrat paid for a billboard attacking Mayor Lisa Brown’s homeless plans. Brown says it’s personal.

Near the troubled downtown Spokane intersection of Second and Division, a billboard recently sprung up that, in so many words, accuses Mayor Lisa Brown of not being transparent or meaningfully improving on the homelessness plan of her predecessor.

In return, Brown has dismissed the display as the personal grievance of a man whose money would be better spent donated to a homeless service provider than spent on a billboard.

While Brown has frequently been criticized by downtown business owners and real estate interests for a perceived lack of criminal enforcement of crimes associated with homelessness, these groups weren’t behind this billboard: it was, instead, Harold Thomas “HT” Higgins, a donor to Brown’s mayoral campaign whose family has been involved in Democratic politics for decades.

Higgins is the son of “Hank” Higgins, a well-known attorney and businessman who helped his cousin, Tom Foley, run for Congress in 1964. Higgins said in an interview that he has known Brown for decades, having unsuccessfully lobbied her to support expanding nontribal gambling – he eventually added a mini casino to his Spokane Valley bowling alley and restaurant Players and Spectators, one of six in the city at the time.

Higgins, who donated the maximum $1,200 to Brown’s campaign last year, believes the city hasn’t been transparent about its plans for providing inclement weather shelter this winter and now says he can’t get a meeting with the mayor.

“I contributed to her campaign and she won’t even give me the time of day,” Higgins said in a Friday interview.

When asked, Higgins said that he wasn’t angry that he personally wasn’t being consulted by the mayor, but feels like homeless service providers are being iced out of conversations, though he could only name Julie Garcia, the founder of Jewels Helping Hands, as having raised concerns to him. Higgins served on the board of Jewels Helping Hands until four months ago, and said he stepped away so that he could become more politically active.

Brown argued that her administration has a weekly call with service providers, and she was not aware of widespread concerns that she was not consulting with them.

“I think he took great offense that he personally wasn’t in the room,” Brown said.

“He’s clearly quite agitated, and billboards are one way to express that … sometimes I would maybe ask folks if they would like to put the funds into their favorite provider’s budgets instead of ads and billboards.”

Higgins was invited, at least once, by the administration to provide feedback as the region develops a homelessness plan; Higgins declined, arguing that the city hadn’t yet formed a firm plan for providing emergency warming centers during the winter and criticizing the administration as unwilling to accept feedback.

“There is no reason to meet,” Higgins responded in an email to Dawn Kinder, the city’s Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services Director. “I wanted to have a conversation about the process with Lisa, but she clearly will not meet with us (maybe just me).”

It is true that the city has not yet released specifics for where it will provide beds during freezing temperatures, though that process is expected to be finished in early November.

Higgins has attacked Brown for her recent plan to concentrate resources over the next month on Spokane’s downtown to tamp down crime in the city’s core, arguing that it was a quid pro quo in exchange for support from the business community for the upcoming sales tax measure. He pointed to a Wednesday ad in The Spokesman-Review by various business groups endorsing that tax measure and explicitly tying that support to Brown’s deployment of officers downtown.

Brown acknowledged that she had met with the Spokane Business Association, which had endorsed the tax measure in September but had since threatened to revoke that support, before announcing a plan to increase police presence downtown, but said that this plan was already being put together in response to concerns downtown and was not being deployed to secure the group’s political support.

She added that, until the ad was published Wednesday, she was not sure whether the business association and other groups would choose to endorse.

Higgins also accused the administration of sending officers to harass the homeless without a plan to connect them with services, saying one of the officers in the newspaper ad was equipped with an AR-15 – he corrected himself when it was pointed out that there was no gun visible in the photo.

Brown said this was broadly false, adding that outreach teams and code enforcement were deployed alongside officers, who were themselves logging data about encounters with the homeless and complaints from the community and trying to connect the homeless with available treatment services.

In a Wednesday email to Brown and liberal city council members, Higgins threatened to pay for a second billboard, this time encouraging voters to vote against the tax proposal. The next day, he said that he had decided against doing so and that he in fact supported the tax proposal because it “is the best for the most vulnerable citizens in our community.”

While Higgins emphasized that his concerns with the administration are about process, wanting Brown to tell local leaders and providers that “we’re going to go into a room and we’re going to sit down” and hash out stronger plans, he is also sharply critical of the lack of beds that will be available for the homeless to protect them from freezing temperatures. Under former Mayor Nadine Woodward, the Trent Avenue shelter, which is expected to be largely decommissioned at the end of this month, added hundreds of additional beds during the winter – Brown’s office has said there is only money for 100 beds for 38 days in the current budget.

He added that he doesn’t recognize the Democratic Party active in Spokane today, believing that the liberal majority on the City Council would have publicly attacked Woodward if only 100 beds were made available.

In an interview, Brown said her administration is doing what it can with the limited money it has available to provide additional beds during the winter and hopes to be able to add funding in the 2025-26 budget – the first budget that she will have proposed as mayor – in order to bolster the cold weather shelter for which they currently have funding.

“I think there’s a big misunderstanding in the public, ‘Why don’t you do what you did last year?’ ” Brown said. “(Woodward’s administration) used one-time money, they didn’t have the same kind of cost controls built into the contract – I think $1 million went to (the Trent Avenue shelter) in one month.”

“We still have the Trent shelter, but what we don’t have is funding.”

City spokeswoman Erin Hut also argued that there should be more pressure on surrounding jurisdictions, particularly Spokane County, to provide funding for more beds.

“The county has funds as well that could be put towards this,” Hut said.