SPOKANE, Wash. – Mayor Lisa Brown is confident the clean changes made to Spokane for the spring and summer event season will be sustained year-round for visitors and those who call the Lilac City home.
“I think that we are going to see an improvement and I think we can sustain it,” Mayor Lisa Brown said.
There’s no doubt about it, during spring and summer downtown Spokane is cleaner than other key points on the calendar. You saw it for the NCAA tournament, you saw it for Bloomsday, Hoopfest, and the Lilac Festival in years past. It has to do with tourism, a busy season for welcoming visitors to the Lilac City.But until now, by all accounts it has been hit and miss; locals are aware of the issues, they can be prevalent. Graffiti, debris left from the homeless population to plain old litter.
These issues are often temporarily fixed for the event season, but the question is, can these cleanup efforts be sustained throughout the year for locals?
NonStop Local’s Ava Wainhouse asked Mayor Brown this very question, her response:
“It’s definitely a focus of the city to not only do clean and safe activities, but to activate as much as possible, and then those things work together,” Brown said.
The mayor and her team just got back to the Inland Northwest from a trip to Boise; Brown said Spokane is pulling ideas from Boise leadership on how to tackle key things, like reducing crime and reducing the number of people living on the streets.
Brown said Boise conducts nightly cleanups, which is something she said Spokane will start to do. But the mayor admits, there is a ton of work ahead to realize Boise’s reality here in eastern Washington.
“The kinds of challenges we’re facing with the unhoused population, with the fentanyl crisis, are not going to disappear overnight,” Brown said.
The city signed an agreement with the Washington State Department of Transportation and the Washington State Department of Commerce to increase funding for gateway cleanups and for the unhoused.But, with the big events on the calendar, locals are wondering will these changes last after the 50th anniversary of Expo ’74, after Bloomsday, and after Hoopfest?
“I think we’re taking advantage of this current burst of activity to identify these partnerships and better coordinate what is already there, and I think that coordination will be sustained throughout the year,” Brown said. “I think people see a difference and now our challenge is let’s keep it going.”
