Today, on a brief trip to Spokane to visit Thrive International and the Podium sports complex, Gov. Jay Inslee visited the RANGE office for a half-hour interview. The interview, like much of our coverage, focused on key areas of concern for Spokane: homelessness, affordable housing and behavioral health.

Gov. Inslee repeatedly called for increased investment in home building from the state legislature and even direct housing development by the state.

He also touted his connections to Eastern Washington, called for additional investments and initiatives to bolster the state’s behavioral health workforce, and called attention to conflict with neighboring Idaho over the state’s support of the women’s right to abortion.

We’re back at you with a whole new podcast episode and it’s only been … five months? We’re still figuring out how to carve a sustainable podcast with all of our reporting work and limited staff, but we’ve missed you — and we know you missed Luke’s buttery podcast voice — so we have a special episode!

In November, we hosted our first-ever live podcast recording at the Central Library, where we got a panel together to talk about Ranked Choice Voting, and the attendees got to ask questions. 

Marilyn Darilek from League of Women Voters Spokane and Trenton Miller from FairVote WA joined Luke on stage to explain the ins and outs of Ranked Choice Voting and share about the process to get it adopted in municipalities all over the state. We even held a mock Ranked Choice Vote election on quality seasonal pies. 

Given how strongly people feel about pumpkin, apple and pecan, it was remarkably civil!

Real quick: what is Ranked Choice Voting?

In our current voting system, you get to place one vote for one person in any given election. Your only alternative to voting for one person is to vote for no one. Plenty of political scientists believe this system all but guarantees a two-party dominant system — and that is certainly how it has played out in America. 

In ranked choice voting, though, as we’ll hear explained in detail, you get to pick several candidates in order from the person you like the most to the person you like the least. And if you loathe someone so much, you can just not rank them at all.

If your top choice has a chance of winning, that vote stays. If your top choice gets eliminated, your second choice gets your vote and so on, until one candidate has 50% plus 1 vote. 

It’s up to each of us to decide if RCV is something we want to fight for, but at the very least we should recognize the shortcomings of our current system. 

If you hear yourself saying “I like this person, but they can’t win, so I won’t vote for them” — then our system of voting is not working for you. 

Of course that doesn’t mean your candidate will always win. But shouldn’t we have a system where the best thing you can possibly do as a citizen is say, “I believe this is the best person to lead us, and that’s who I’m going to vote for?”

People who study ranked choice voting elsewhere believe that it leads to more pluralistic elections: there’s room for more parties and more political viewpoints when you can rank your favorites rather than voting for just one.

And even if the two parties stick around for a while, the immediate benefit of ranked choice voting is that you still get to have a vote be a truer and more nuanced representation of your opinion about a race — and therefore a more nuanced representation of how you think this city, this county, this state, this nation, ought to be run — without feeling like you’re throwing away your vote on a candidate who is too good to be elected. 

The event went off without a hitch, and we look forward to doing many more.

MASSIVE THANKS to our guests Marilyn Darilek from League of Women Voters and Trenton Miller from FairVote WA, and our friends at the Spokane Public Library who made this event possible: Shane Gronholz, Vanessa Strange, Andy Rumsey and Jason Johnson.

We’re back with the third installment in our RANGE of Care miniseries on productive disagreements at an interpersonal level and a societal level through the lens of family therapy and restorative justice.

This began as a conversation about how to have productive disagreements and quickly became a discussion about how do we change our criminal legal system, and maybe on our way to that needing to change our entire society and how we relate to each other—a small order, right?

Meg and Luke are joined again by Inga Laurent, Professor of Law at Gonzaga who studies, theorizes and helps implement restorative justice practices in court systems and schools.

Inga and Meg talk about tools we can use in order to reconcile with one another and keep ourselves mentally safe.

Today on the pod, we have the second part of our conversation with Daniel Walters. 

Last week we spent a lot of time breaking down the chronology of how the June 11 anti-Pride event was conceived and initially promoted locally, but how “local” in the case of North Idaho now includes an increasing number of far-right celebrities.

This week we discuss how, just as the pot seemed likely to boil over, all sides took a step back — tweaking their plans to de-escalate — and how that might have been the difference between what actually happened and something deadlier. 

We also discuss the way these things get covered by the media: does the far-right get over-covered? Or do larger outlets only pay attention to the Inland Northwest when people like Matt Shea are involved? 

Read Daniel’s story here.

Today on the pod, The Inlander’s Daniel Walters joins us to talk about the many groups, YouTube celebrities, and far-right hype people who brought the June 11 counter-demonstration against Coeur d’Alene’s Pride in the Park near to a boiling point. This event led to 31 Patriot Front members getting arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to riot, including at least two men with ties to far-right pastor Matt Shea.

There’s A LOT to unpack here, so we’re cutting the discussion up into two parts. 

We wanted to go through it methodically as an opportunity to document not just the people actively shaping politics in Kootenai County and the broader Inland Northwest, but the people who are promoting the region to hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. 

So buckle up for part one of a discussion of all the connections, alliances and squabbles of a region that has real importance for many different ideologies and groups across the spectrum: from conservative to libertarian to far-right. 

Read Daniel’s story here.

At a lot of media companies, the crime beat is new reporter purgatory. This is probably your first job out of college: listen to scanner traffic and when something newsworthy happens, you run out and report it.  

In one sense, it’s journalism on easy mode — the stories literally come to you — and in that sense, it’s understandable to put a young reporter on it. But that inexperience creates a real imbalance between the journalist and power, asking the least experienced writers to hold their own against career law enforcement bureaucrats and professional communicators. And because there’s so much to cover, new reporters often only have time to get the police account of things, and rarely get a chance to actually follow up to see if the person arrested actually ends up facing trial.

You’re going to hear from two different young reporters, Rebecca White from KPBX and Valerie Osier, on the effects of this, and why, for the health of our communities and the mental health of young reporters, the crime beat has to go.

The Inland Northwest offers a unique glimpse into the future of the rest of the US in light of the expected overturn of Roe v. Wade & Planned Parenthood v. Casey, two landmark Supreme Court decisions that codified the federal right to an abortion. 

This is because there already aren’t any abortion clinics in North Idaho, so many abortion-seekers as far away as western Montana need to go over the border to Eastern Washington clinics. For years, over 40% of patients seeking abortions at border clinics run by Planned Parenthood have been from out of state. Recently, that number has jumped to over 50%. 

We talked to friend of the pod & Inlander reporter Samantha Wohlfeil about her recent cover story, "My Body, State's Choice?" what additional work Washington abortion clinics are preparing for the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

Follow Samantha on Twitter.

Video games obviously don’t just come into being. Like any piece of art, they have creators. And we happen to know one right here in Spokane. 

A couple weeks ago we talked to Justin Baldwin, Creative Lead & Cofounder at Moonlight Kids. He’s one of the creators of a pretty popular indie game called The Wild at Heart. It’s described as cute and cozy, but it introduces important themes to kids and other users, like working through childhood trauma.

Trailer

Follow Justin on Twitter: @butttoots 

Or Instagram: @themoonlightkid 

Follow Moonlight Kids: @moonlightkids_

In today’s RANGE of Care, we’re continuing our talk on productive disagreements. Joining us is Inga Laurent, Professor of Law at Gonzaga who studies, theorizes and helps implement restorative justice practices in court systems and outside of judicial settings like schools.

So how does the conversation from our last episode on productive disagreements in interpersonal relationships tie into a legal framework like restorative justice?

It’s in the name: restorative. The point isn’t to cast a person out of society or community. The point is to encourage a conversation in which the person or people who were harmed can gain closure and those who did harm can make amends.

If you want more of Inga’s insight, she’s an occasional columnist at The Inlander.

Don’t forget to share this with a friend and if you’re able, become a member of RANGE for $10 per month.

We’re at the end of Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month and hopefully you’ve had a chance to go to one of the many events hosted around town celebrating the rich and almost unfathomably diverse peoples and cultures represented. 

The majority of those events were put on by a coalition led by two organizations: APIC Spokane, whose mission is advocating for racial, social, and economic justice for Asians & Asian Americans in solidarity with Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and other systematically oppressed communities, and the Pacific Islander Community Association of WA an organization dedicated to establishing a cultural home, centering community power, and furthering the wellness of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities physically, culturally, socially and spiritually.

These two partner organizations rallied around using this month to draw attention to their criticisms of the imposed category “Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.”

The category groups wildly different cultures that span literally 40% of the globe, lumping together the American diaspora of over 60% of the world’s population – everything from Bangladeshi-Americans to Tahitians — in one category. 

So it’s like, are we really spotlighting this incredible individual and cultural diversity by smashing them all into one month? And beyond that, you’ll hear our guests, Ryann Louie and Sarah Dixit of APIC talk about how statistical aggregation papers over legacies of colonial violence and completely obscures real disparities in health outcomes and death for many Pacific Islander communities. 

There is a lot of excess death – unnecessary death, preventable death – happening that is not truly understood because of how we lump people together statistically. 

In this podcast, you’ll hear about their efforts to push for race data disaggregation and why it’s important. You’ll also hear what you can do to help, like not using aggregated terms, asking aggregated organizations if they do have NH/PI representation and simply following APIC and PICA on social media. 

ALSO, don’t miss the companion art show called “Hidden in Plain Sight” that is only open for three more days, through May 28 at the new Terrain Gallery at 628 N. Monroe.