F
or all the speculation and rumors that Lisa Brown, outgoing director of the Washington state Department of Commerce, was going to run for mayor, it turns out, she's actually running for mayor.
"I love Spokane," Brown, the former state Senate majority leader and former WSU-Spokane chancellor, said in a speech today announcing her campaign. "I'm Lisa Brown. And I do believe in a better way. And today I'm announcing my campaign to be the mayor of the city I love: Spokane. Together, we can get a city that is stuck in neutral moving again."
There's a typical formula for challenging the mayor: You condemn the hellish state of things, decry the leadership that produced the status quo, and you offer yourself as a clear-eyed sensible alternative.
Indeed, at moments during her opening speech, Brown offered her critique.
"Forward progress has stalled. This administration has turnover — too many unfilled positions for months at a time," Brown said. "There's too much conflict: conflict with the Council. Conflict with the state. Conflict with communities of color. There isn't a vision for where we're going or clear roadmaps for how we're going to get there."
And she argued that current Mayor Nadine Woodward hasn't truly accomplished her campaign goals.
"The mayor ran on two issues, homelessness and crime downtown," Brown said. "But most people would tell you that we have made little genuine progress on these issues. And many would say that things feel worse."
And yet, Brown didn't come remotely close to suggesting that, say, Spokane is dying, like Woodward sometimes did during her campaign four years ago. Asked in a short Q&A session after her announcement about whether downtown is more dangerous than it was four years ago, she hedged instead of taking the opportunity to condemn the current conditions.
"I don't have data to know whether that's true or not," Brown said. "I think it feels that way to some people."
Pressed about her sense of things personally, she said, "it feels about the same, honestly. That's why I use the phrase, 'stuck in neutral.'"
It's shaping up to be an early irony: At times, Woodward's rhetoric about the state of Spokane — as she's decried the Camp Hope homeless encampment, crime, and fentanyl addiction — has been more pessimistic than Brown's. Meanwhile, some of the most furious people at the state of Spokane, the most outraged at the status quo, are the same business leaders who want to re-elect Woodward.
"The last thing Spokane needs is someone who wants to undo that work with a radical playbook straight out of Seattle that has only weakened our state laws and policies governing public safety, limited our ability to move people off the streets, and spent without having to produce actual results," Woodward said in an emailed statement from her campaign after Brown announced her challenge.
Indeed, there's a good reason why the conservative playbook is to condemn the Seattle playbook. From San Francisco to Chicago, we've seen a big voter backlash against left-wing policies, particularly surrounding crime, disorder and homelessness. If the progressive strategy is working in those cities, a lot of voters aren't seeing it.
But the trouble is, Spokane has been facing some of those same problems with a conservative mayor who wants to be reelected.
"There's been a dialogue for years about Spokane being compared to Portland or Seattle. I really don't think that's the right place to start," Brown said.
Instead, she suggested we need to focus on Spokane solutions.
"I think we need to look at what we have here," Brown said. "The solutions that are working, but maybe aren't scaled up appropriately. I don't necessarily think of the solutions as progressive. I think of them as built by the community."
So while Brown touted common ground ("We love the river, the mountain, the streams, the wildlife — turkeys or marmots.") at times her speech was unabashedly progressive.
There was a land acknowledgment. ("I'd like to acknowledge that we are on the ancestral land of the Spokane Tribe of Indians.") She gave shout-outs to abortion rights. ("Most of us want reproductive freedom... to be steadfastly protected in Spokane.") She declared that "the conversation between communities of color and police that has broken down with this administration must be revived."
She spoke about participating in the first Spokane gay pride parade in 1992. And she cited Sandy Williams, the outspoken Black Lens publisher and activist who died in a plane crash last year, as her inspiration for running for mayor.
"When I was making this very hard decision, I asked myself, 'What would Sandy do?'" Brown said.
"We won't always find that common ground that we seek," Brown said. "I want to know when that happens, if it's a case of a fundamental value of principle I hold, I will stand the ground."
Spokane is about as blue as Spokane County is red — typically, Democrats get roughly 55 percent of the vote in the city limits. While Brown was trounced in her race against U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, she won by double digits in the city of Spokane.
Amid the frustration over crime, Brown doesn't argue we need to get tougher on crime — though she questions whether the laws on the books are being enforced. Instead, she suggests a more technocratic approach, suggesting that the community might need to scale up its mental health team for responding to crises.
"When someone is having a mental health crisis on the street, you hear and feel their pain," Brown said. "It is scary. And we need to do something about it."
She said she witnessed it directly just yesterday. Meanwhile, she urged caution against efforts to build a new jail, decrying the proposed County Commission measure as "a blank check."
"We deserve a big community conversation to help us inform the plan and move forward," Brown said. "There has not been adequate input. We need to get there, to mobilize the resources to make things happen."
Neither Woodward nor Brown can really declare they're outsiders. Woodward spent the last four years as mayor. And Brown has spent 30 years in government and education.
Brown brags about her history of securing funding for teen shelter Crosswalk, her efforts to help save the Fox theater or provide tax incentives for the local movie industry. Woodward brags about expanding the number of homeless shelter beds and her "law and order" approach to homelessness.
And while Brown notes that "high rates of visible homelessness are triggered in communities when rental vacancy rates decrease dramatically, and rents and housing prices rise rapidly," Woodward can point to the emergency zoning reforms that places like, well, Seattle have looked to with jealousy.
Yet both candidates are also tied up with some of the biggest controversies, in particular the Camp Hope homeless encampment that's entering its second year.
The Spokane Good Government Alliance, an anti-Lisa Brown political action committee, has already tried to label Lisa Brown as the "honorary mayor of Camp Hope."
The trouble is, Woodward is the actual mayor of Camp Hope — the residents are living in her city, though she's not sure if she considers them her constituents. While Woodward can blame the state — it's on state property — it's still homelessness in her city.
Brown, meanwhile, argues that she wasn't involved in Camp Hope at all until it had grown to 500 people. Then, she was involved as the Department of Commerce tried to find new homes for the people still living in the camp. Roughly 80 remain today.
"There are probably twice as many people homeless in this community and living unsheltered right now than the people that you see at Camp Hope," Brown said. "This is a situation in which, in some ways, the people at Camp Hope have provided us with an opportunity because it is [all in] one place."
Meanwhile, Brown lambasted the alternative that Woodward did land upon when trying to provide a solution to Camp Hope.
"This administration's emphasis primarily on one warehouse on Trent, being transformed into a large congregate shelter is not a best practice for successfully transitioning people off the street," Brown said. "It appears to have an enormous price tag, with no plan for funding. There is a better way."
Ironically, that's very close to the way Woodward once talked when she was running for mayor against City Council President Ben Stuckart.
"Mr. Stuckart believes an impulsive push for a city-owned shelter will solve our problem," Woodward wrote then. "But it will simply establish another unnecessary and expensive bureaucracy that will become a long-term burden."
But when it came time for Woodward to come up with alternative Spokane solutions instead, she landed on a big shelter. It's easy to complain about the city being stuck in neutral when you're not in the driver's seat. It's a bit harder when you actually try to shift gears. ♦
