The two main candidates running for Spokane City Council president are relative newcomers to electoral politics — but they aren't new to Spokane.
They both grew up in the city and have decades of experience as local business owners. They tout connections with community groups across the city and say they're committed to Spokane.
They also agree that Spokane has an increasing number of vulnerable people who are suffering on the streets. It's one of the most pressing issues facing Spokane, they say, and the city should help them.
But how?
Kim Plese, a former business owner, thinks that the city is spending too much money on homelessness, and that people need more "accountability" and a "hand up not a handout."
Betsy Wilkerson, who currently represents the city's southern District 2 on the council, sees it differently.
"When you invest in people, it's not inexpensive, and it's a long game," Wilkerson says. "As with others, they deserve a second chance, and a third chance, however many it takes."
Plese first got involved with politics last year, after three decades owning and running Plese Printing and Marketing. She sold the business in 2022 and ran for an open seat on the Spokane County Board of Commissioners. She ran as a Republican and lost by 10 percent to Chris Jordan, a Democrat.
It was a tough loss, but Plese says she wasn't ready to give up.
"I just said, 'I'm not gonna lose it emotionally,'" Plese says. "So I dusted myself off."
When Plese announced her candidacy for council president in February, she thought she would be running against Breean Beggs, the incumbent president. But in early March, Beggs said he wouldn't be seeking reelection, and he enthusiastically endorsed Wilkerson to take his place. (Beggs has since been appointed as a Superior Court judge by Gov. Jay Inslee.)
Wilkerson was appointed to her council seat in 2020 to fill a vacancy left after Beggs was elected president. She won reelection in 2021 after her opponent, Tyler LeMasters, was disqualified for not meeting residency requirements.
Wilkerson says Beggs' suggestion that she take his place as president came as a surprise. She had to think it over.
"It wasn't on my bucket list," Wilkerson says. "In leadership over the years, I've learned sometimes you just have to step up and do the work if there's nobody else to do it."
Hours before the May filing deadline, a surprise third candidate entered the race, mostly on a whim.
Andy Rathbun is a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who ran an unsuccessful campaign for Spokane City Council in 2019. He is a critic of progressive council members like Wilkerson and Beggs.
Rathbun says he doesn't expect to make it past the August 1 primary election and plans to support Plese. He decided to run a few hours before the filing deadline and hasn't raised any money.
He says he's running because he wants to hold Wilkerson accountable and "get the word out" about how current council members have been running the city. He thinks they're driving businesses away by letting homelessness and crime run unchecked. He compares them to the pilots on the Titanic steering Spokane toward an iceberg.
"We're gonna die," Rathbun says. "Our city will die with no strong businesses."
Plese isn't quite as apocalyptic as Rathbun, but she shares many of his frustrations about the state of public safety and homelessness. She also pins the blame on the council's five-person progressive majority, which she at one point refers to as the "Fraudulent Five." (Rathburn prefers the phrase "Great Gang of Five.")
If elected, Plese would represent a significant conservative shift in city governance.
Doorbelling last week in the Five Mile Prairie neighborhood on the northern edge of city limits, Plese met several voters who asked which side of the aisle she's on. She told them she's a nonpartisan business person, but also stressed her commitment to things like small government and lower taxes.
"There's too much oversight and government telling you what to do," she told one voter, who nodded approvingly. "It doesn't say 'We the government,' it says 'We the people.'"
Plese accuses the council of listening to "radical groups" instead of taxpayers. Sowing division. Twisting the narrative to make business owners, landlords and police officers look like the bad guys. Catering to homeless people and giving them free rein in downtown Spokane.
Worst of all, she thinks they aren't listening to people.
"They're gonna vote on putting fluoride in our water, in our aquifer," Plese tells a voter. "Do you know how scary that is?"
Most of her criticism is directed at Beggs, not Wilkerson. She describes him as a "radical," and points to a recent Inlander article that quoted Beggs describing himself as a "change agent" and saying we need "people protesting and marching in the streets" and "lawyers filing lawsuits."
Plese sees that type of language as polarizing and promises that she'll be a unifying force if elected.
"I just want to bring our community together so that we don't turn into Seattle," Plese says.
Wilkerson knows people are frustrated with the city's response to Spokane's problems with homelessness and public safety, but she pushes back on the bleak characterizations of downtown. The problem was always here, she says, it was just more hidden.
People started moving to Spokane because the economy was doing well, but there wasn't enough housing, Wilkerson says. Then the pandemic hit and took the lid off a problem that had been bubbling up for years.
"So if you want to be mad, be mad at [previous] councils and other [mayoral] administrations who hadn't addressed the problem when it was smaller, and maybe could have been dealt with better when it was a little elephant," Wilkerson says. "Now we got a big elephant, and we just have to do the best we can."
"There's too much oversight and government telling you what to do. It doesn't say 'We the government,' it says 'We the people.'"
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If either Wilkerson or Plese are elected, Spokane will have its first female council president.
But if Wilkerson is elected, she'll be Spokane's first Black council president. She says it's an honor, and that representation matters, but she's also wary of being put in a box.
"[People] want to label me as a radical Black woman," Wilkerson says. "I'm so far from radical I have to start laughing."
Wilkerson thinks her experience sets her apart from her opponents. The job of council president comes with a lot of moving pieces, and Wilkerson says her time representing District 2, her experience as a business owner, and her work with community groups have helped her learn the ropes.
Beggs agrees. When he announced that he was stepping down, he told supporters that Wilkerson has "lived her whole life getting ready for this role to lead this city."
Wilkerson has a lot of admiration for Beggs. But she stresses that they aren't the same person and that she'll bring her own leadership style if elected.
"He'll admit he's not the best communicator, because that's just his lawyer style," Wilkerson says. "Breean likes to lead with the law, and I like to lead with input from the people. That will be the difference."
Wilkerson talks a lot about diversity and supporting communities. Her proudest achievements on the council include helping secure grant funding for communities of color during the pandemic and working with local Indigenous tribes to rename a street that had been named after George Wright, a murderous white general. She says one of her goals as president is to encourage more small business development and attract more young people and diverse groups to the city.
Council presidents are responsible for leading the council meetings. They get to hold the gavel and bang it when things go off track.
Wilkerson also thinks the council could do a better job maintaining decorum. In recent months, meetings have been interrupted by incidents involving people lobbing insults, shouting at council members and even a (very minor) scuffle between two politically polarized public commenters.
People have said they don't feel safe, Wilkerson says, and that's unacceptable to her. As president, she says she'll be firmer about making sure meetings stay on track and stick to actual city business.
Plese is also unsatisfied with the way meetings are run — but for very different reasons.
"I tell people: 'Just go online and listen to the meetings. It's disgusting,'" Plese says. "It's like, they're on this pulpit where they think they're better than us, and they're smarter than us."
She thinks council members are too disconnected from the people they represent. As president, she would want to have several meetings per year held in different parts of the city to make them more accessible to the public.
Plese says she would also require that council members spend one day a month in their districts walking around and talking to people so they can "see what's really going on."
Wilkerson and Plese are both unhappy with the state of the city's homeless shelter on East Trent Avenue, a massive warehouse on the city's outskirts with capacity for about 350 people.
Wilkerson thinks it was a mistake for the city to open such a large shelter in a part of town that's far from services.
For future city shelters, Wilkerson wants to take a "scattershot" approach — which means smaller units with space for 20 to 30 people spread out in different parts of the city to minimize neighborhood impact.
But since the city is locked into a lease with the Trent shelter and stuck with it, Wilkerson says the city needs to focus on making the industrial warehouse more hospitable and inviting.
Plese, however, thinks the Trent shelter is too accommodating. She owns property in the neighborhood and describes seeing garbage and feces strewn nearby. She thinks the people staying there need more accountability.
"There are working families that don't get three meals a day," Plese says. "But yet you can go to the Trent shelter, do drugs and get three meals a day."
She wants to see some sort of rule that requires people staying at the Trent shelter to agree to do garbage pickup in the neighborhood.
What about the people who don't agree to those rules and prefer to continue sleeping outside?
"Well, then, go to another community," Plese says, adding that she supports stricter enforcement of the city's laws against public drug use and sitting or camping on public sidewalks.
Wilkerson has mixed feelings about those laws. People with houses do drugs in private, she says. Unhoused people don't have that option.
But at the same time, Wilkerson says she doesn't like what's happening on the streets, either. She wants to see police fully enforce the laws, but with an approach that resembles a "steel hand with a velvet glove on."
Plese takes a tougher approach.
"You talk to the West Hills neighborhood, the garbage and the drugs and the filth that they're seeing is horrendous," Plese says. "They want to take their neighborhood back. So we need to make it more difficult to be homeless in our city."
In a later text message, Plese stresses that she has a lot of compassion for unhoused people. She clarifies that "make it more difficult to be homeless" means being tougher on those who "refuse help and continue to use drugs and camp along the river causing fires and tearing up the environment" — not the working families that can't find affordable housing.
"There are more homeless people coming to Spokane because we are a compassionate community, and the weight of it is crushing downtown and all around the city," Plese says. ♦
