(The Center Square) – Attempting to restore the will of voters, the Spokane City Council is considering cutting a controversial notice period from a camping ban set for a vote on June 30.
Last week, the council rejected the ordinance after business owners and residents flocked to the meeting to voice their opposition. Much of the sticking point centered on requiring up to a week’s notice before breaking up encampments, but the council backtracked at the last minute.
The meeting lasted from 6 p.m. on June 16 until well after midnight. Many testified against the camping ban, calling it a watered-down version of Proposition 1 – another ban nearly 75% of voters approved before the state stepped in – but left before the council reconsidered its vote.
Rather than removing the notice period entirely, the council’s progressive majority reduced the seven-day notice period to three. The decision faced immense backlash, which Councilmember Paul Dillon tried to alleviate on Monday by proposing to remove the notice period altogether.
“I think the three-day to the seven-day, in a lot of ways, was bogging us down,” Dillon told the council during a committee meeting on Monday. “[My version] does take directly the language from Prop 1, those definitions for 1000 feet within a park, school, daycare, childcare facility.”
The Washington State Supreme Court struck down Prop 1 in April due to the law falling outside the scope of the citizen-initiative process. The ruling provided the council with an opportunity to restore word-for-word by a vote, but the majority rejected the conservative minority’s proposal.
Mayor Lisa Brown responded with a proposal branched across several ordinances to overhaul Spokane’s response to homelessness. Two of those passed on June 16, leaving the camping ban and aggressive solicitation ordinances up for a highly anticipated vote next Monday.
Councilmember Michael Cathcart, who represents the conservative minority and downtown with Councilmember Jonathan Bingle, said he appreciates Monday’s change but still has concerns.
The council will vote on whether it will consider Dillon’s amended version of the camping ban on June 30 before it makes a final decision on the ordinance as a whole. Dillon noted that while his version includes the Prop 1 language, per voters’ requests, the camping ban would apply citywide.
Dillon told The Center Square on Tuesday that his amendment is still going through a legal review and has not been formally filed yet.
“My concern kind of is just the interpretation and the enforcement,” Cathcart said. “It’s not too different from kind of what’s in our existing code that I don’t believe has been used very much, and it talks about a reasonable belief; and so what has given them that reasonable belief?”
Like the original, another part of the camping ban directs police to break up encampments that pose a danger to public safety. However, much of that rides on having a reasonable belief that an encampment is a threat, so Cathcart wants to provide more direction on when to enforce.
He suggested asking Police Chief Kevin Hall for input to avoid relying on administrative policies that could change depending on who’s in office. Cathcart wants it written clearly in the Spokane Municipal Code, just in case Brown or other officials ask the police to pull back on enforcement.
“This is giving the administration a lot of leeway because it’s not in the code,” Bingle said. “A lot of leeway to say, ‘Hey, we are enforcing, but it’s not spelled out as seven days, but now it’s an administrative policy that we’re at seven days.’ … I just think there’s a lot of ambiguity here.”
After Monday’s Finance & Administration Committee meeting, the council held an agenda review session before its legislative business later that night. During the agenda review, Bingle again proposed reinstituting Prop 1 word-for-word as many business owners and residents requested.
Councilmember Kitty Klitzke disagreed with the notion that people want to reimplement Prop 1 despite nearly 75% of voters passing the law in 2023. She said the city faced issues enforcing the law due to a lack of resources and manpower and suggested a “more holistic approach.”
The progressive majority ultimately rejected Bingle’s proposal to place his version, reinstituting Prop 1, on next week’s agenda. The city council will vote on Dillon’s amendment on June 30.
“We were enforcing prop one to the extent of our resources, and it was a whack-a-mole game,” Klitzke said during the agenda review meeting. “We’ve gone through a lot of public feedback, and of course, every public piece of public feedback cannot be incorporated because the public feedback doesn’t agree with each other. So this is our best effort to thread that needle.”
