(The Center Square) – Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown is rounding the final corner of her first year in office; from balancing a budget deficit to mitigating an opioid and homelessness crisis, her hands are full.
Brown recently sat down with The Center Square to discuss her first year in office and the administration’s biggest hurdles. Much of what she does is informed by the city’s general fund deficit, which she attributes to the prior administration’s lack of long-term planning.
Since 2019, the deficit has inflated to approximately $25 million, with reserves depleted by nearly $21 million.
“I’m truly operating on the budget of the previous administration,” Brown told The Center Square. “We haven’t modified it very much. We’ve been able to secure some funds and do some things, but we are truly operating under that staffing model, that budget, and with nine bargaining units, you also don’t just say we’re going to shift everything from A to B.”
Brown proposed several cost-saving measures since taking office while asking each department to consider additional cuts. In doing so, she’s reduced the anticipated deficit heading into next year from roughly $25 million to $10.9 million.
The mayor is expected to release her proposed budget for the upcoming biennium in November, which state law requires to balance that deficit. The question is, at what cost? Earlier this year, Brown looked at options amounting to nearly $16 million in cuts from the city’s public safety departments.
While she clarified last month that the city would not proceed with those cuts, Brown still needs to find about $10.9 million to close the structural gap before releasing her proposal.
“My biggest opportunity to make change is really in the next couple of months when I present my two-year budget,” Brown told The Center Square, “and that will be a framework, in a sort of a roadmap, for actually making some of the key changes that we’ve been hoping to make.”
Another priority for Brown is alleviating the regional housing crisis and addressing the ongoing opioid crisis, both intrinsically intertwined with homelessness. She declared an emergency over the opioid crisis in June, a few days before the county’s 2024 Point-in-Time Count was released.
The PIT Count recorded 2,021 homeless individuals countywide, a 15% decrease compared to 2023 but a 15% increase compared to 2022. When considering the last recorded dip of 5% in 2016, the 2024 metric represents a 106% increase.
The Spokane City Council’s republican minority spent the last few months calling for more enforcement around illegal camping and open-air drug use. While recent data shows overdose deaths decreased 10% nationwide, Spokane is heading in the opposite direction with an 18% rise.
Others, such as Sheldon Jackson, chief executive officer and founder of Selkirk Development, use their influence to criticize the mayor and other officials. Jackson runs an informal email thread with upwards of 300 community members, often calling for more police enforcement.
Brown pushed back against claims that her administration is pressuring officers not to enforce the law, particularly around illegal camping. She said police typically handed off those cases to community court, which, like the local jail, deals with capacity and staffing issues.
“Kind of the rallying cry of some in the business community is about enforcement,” she said. “[Interim Police Chief] Lundgren and I had frank conversations that no matter what was said on the campaign trail, I wanted police to enforce the laws, so there was never any direction to not enforce; if anything, it was the opposite.”
Still, several businesses resorted to hiring private security and dealing with other associated costs of vagrancy, while others closed altogether. That stress isn’t the case for every business, but Jackson and others in the thread have said if elected officials want support, enforcement has to come first.
Brown wasn’t sure what to attribute Spokane’s rise in overdose deaths to, though she noted that other cities might have hit their peak earlier. To combat any further increase, she said the city is creating a new Assistant U.S. Attorney position to help tackle narcotics flowing through the city.
The new position is one of Brown’s many steps in tackling these issues. She also mentioned the city’s high utilizer program, which identifies the top 30 people frequenting the justice system and hospitals, as part of a plan to disrupt the destructive cycle of homelessness and addiction.
These actions, paired with Brown’s new scattered site shelter model, the housing navigation center and others, are how she plans to uplift Spokanites and their lilac city.
“I think these things are collectively going to make a visible difference that will show itself in Spokane over the next period of time,” Brown told The Center Square, “but acknowledge that inflection point is not visible to people yet.”
