The Choice
Spokane will spend the money either way. The only question is what it buys.
This is the whole argument on one page. The status quo is not free — it is the most expensive option on the table, paid in emergency-room invoices, jail beds, and a downtown nobody wants to walk through. The alternative is cheaper, measured, and proven in cities that tried it. The itemized receipt is on The Bill; the plan that spends the money differently is the Roadmap.
And there is a deadline: the councilmanic funding window under RCW 82.14.345 closes June 30, 2028. After that, the choice gets harder and the politics get worse. The 2023 jail-centered ballot measure won barely a third of the vote — voters won’t fund more of the same. A regional, accountable, outcome-dated plan is what can pass.
The window is also crowded
The public-safety sales-tax stack is finite — a best reading of roughly 0.50% maximum inside the cities — and every tenth claimed separately shrinks what remains for one unified regional measure. Meanwhile the Spokane Transit Authority is asking voters this August to approve what it labels a “renewal” of its 0.2% sales tax — in substance a new twenty-year, roughly billion-dollar tax running to 2048, atop STA’s permanent 0.6%. An SBA analysis of STA’s own filings with the State Auditor found the expiring “temporary” tax was not needed to deliver its promised projects: between 2017 and 2024 the tax collected $169 million while STA’s reserves grew by $234 million — and over nine years STA’s actual results beat its own forecasts by roughly $320 million. Core transit service is not at risk either way. A community will not absorb a billion-dollar transit tax in August and then layer additional tenths for Safe & Healthy behind it. The full argument — one region, one measure, one system, or another decade of well-funded fragments — is on the Governance page.
One measure, not fragments
When the funding question reaches voters, it should be one unified regional measure that purchases the council, the ledger, the data spine, the handoffs, and the housing — with published outcomes as a condition. Separate money hardens separate systems; the funding structure IS the governance structure. The full case, with the instrument and the arithmetic, is ★ Priority recommendations, step 7.
Your part in the choice
A map this size can leave a reader feeling like a spectator. You aren’t one. Every lane on this board has a door a private citizen can walk through — here is where every citizen starts; Take action has the doors for donors, volunteers, employers, landlords, faith communities, and officials.
Every citizen
- Spend the fifteen minutes. Take the ▶ guided tour, read The Bill, skim the Hard Questions. An informed citizen is this system’s scarcest resource — most policy failures on this map survived because almost nobody could see the whole board.
- Show up for the regional solution. The single highest-leverage act available to an ordinary voter in 2026 is supporting one unified, accountable regional structure — and declining to reward fragments. When a measure reaches the ballot, read it against this map’s crossroads section, then vote.
- Speak in specifics. One sourced number at a council meeting or dinner table ($56 vs $12 per resident; 16,000 bookings; 344 deaths) moves more than an hour of vibes. Borrow freely — that’s what this map is for.
- Correct us. See something wrong? Send it in. Every correction makes the shared picture sharper.
The thread through all of it: this crisis is not waiting on a hero. It’s waiting on a few thousand ordinary people — each holding one door open in their own lane, at the same time, in the same direction. Pick your door.