Growing up, Spokane City Council member Lili Navarrete hated her family's Spanish/English dictionary. It was ugly and big, and "it made me work," she says.
Navarrete started learning English when she was 11 years old, after her family moved to Spokane from Mexico City in 1988. If her parents got a water bill or garbage notice in English, they'd often ask Navarrete to go to the dictionary to help translate. She dreaded it.
Navarrete doesn't want preteens to have to help translate city communications for family members. She wants city employees to do that instead.
On Feb. 10, the City Council unanimously passed an ordinance instructing Spokane's civil services to find ways to recruit and reward bilingual or multilingual employees at City Hall. It aims to properly value the extra skill set that multilingual employees have and to increase government access and transparency for all Spokane citizens, 8% of whom report speaking a language other than English at home.
Navarrete sponsored the ordinance along with Council members Paul Dillon and Michael Cathcart. Cathcart's wife is fluent in Vietnamese, and he has watched Spokane's Vietnamese community turn to her again and again for language help, especially concerning city issues. He and Navarrete also championed a project to translate city documents into multiple languages last year.
"Transparency is the most important thing government can do," Cathcart says. "Whether you are English speaking, whether you are an English as a Second Language [learner] or whether you have no or very little ability to speak English, you have the right to understand what your government is doing — potentially doing to you — and you have the absolute inherent right to hold your leaders accountable."
The ordinance is in line with state Senate Bill 6157, which the Washington Legislature passed last year. The new state law allows civil service employers to give extra credit on standard hiring examinations to people who speak more than one language. Previously, only veterans were eligible to receive extra credit.
Navarrete is also advocating for multilingual employees to be paid extra for their special skill set.
"I've worked in nonprofits a long time," Navarrete says. "I always got paid extra for being bilingual."
Navarrete, her legal assistant, Andres Grageda, and the city's manager of equity and inclusion, Alex Gibilisco, are all fluent Spanish speakers. They've each been tapped to help with translation work around City Hall, whether it be translating Miranda rights into Spanish or helping a Spanish speaker who called 311 to ask about utilities.
The 311 call center is one area where Navarrete would like to see an influx of multilingual employees. Eventually, she hopes the city will create a registry of employees who speak multiple languages across all departments.
Currently, no one at the city knows how many of its roughly 2,000 civil servants can speak another language, says Kelsey Pearson, the chief examiner for Spokane's Civil Service Commission.
Multilingual recruitment wouldn't have to be targeted at certain departments, Navarrete says. For example, if an English-only employee in the permit department needed assistance helping a citizen who speaks Ukrainian, Farsi, Marshallese, Vietnamese or Spanish, an internal registry could allow them to call someone in the building who is comfortable in that language, even if that makeshift translator is technically an IT specialist, code enforcer or administrative staff member.
The Spokane Police Department is slightly ahead of other city departments in this area, Pearson says. The police guild's contract requires a pay incentive for police officers who speak more than one language. The incentive pay boosts an officer's hourly pay rate by about 2%, she says.
Cathcart says it's cost effective to have multilingual police officers who don't have to rely on a phone call to a translation service contracted by the city. Plus, there's an invaluable amount of added trust between that police officer and minority populations.
"If you can find people who meet all of our high standards to be a police officer, both physical, mental, and character-wise, and they can speak another language, then to me, oh my gosh, you have struck gold," he says. "It just makes those interactions all that much more trusting and, frankly, more efficient and effective."
When the Civil Service Commission starts rolling out new incentives, Pearson says it will also strengthen recruiting efforts at Spokane Colleges, Gonzaga University and Eastern Washington University. The hope is that a better chance of getting hired, plus an extra salary reward, will attract a younger, more diverse applicant pool.
Navarrete has championed other recent language access improvements at the city. At the Feb. 10 meeting, live in-ear translations from Spanish to English or English to Spanish were also piloted for the second time in City Hall, with ear pieces available to Council members as well as the public.
It was the best attended City Council meeting in recent memory. Hundreds of people showed up to support a proposed resolution supporting the state's Keep Washington Working Act, which prohibits state and city employees from cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. There was testimony in both English and Spanish.
For Navarrete, who has made language access a priority since her appointment to the City Council at the beginning of 2024, the night was an exciting moment in an ongoing process.
"This is a great step forward for Spokane," Navarrete said, referring to the newly passed ordinance in a video recap of the meeting. "Language should never be a barrier to accessing city services, and this is a significant step toward breaking those barriers down." ♦
