City Manager Ken Decker was placed on paid administrative leave Tuesday, according to city officials.
“It’s a personnel issue,” said Mayor Matt Pacifico, who, along with other council members, declined to explain further.
“(It’s) not due to any type of alleged criminal activity,” said solicitor Tom Finn.
Personnel Director Omar Strohm has been named acting city manager, according to Councilman Dave Butterbaugh.
Finn, the mayor and council members declined to say whether council voted on the action taken against Decker although city managers serve at the behest of City Council, and council can discuss personnel matters in executive session, Finn said, speaking generally.
Get Lit! Director Kate Peterson is taking the festival online in 2021.
Spokane s Get Lit! Festival has been gathering a diverse array of writers in the Inland Northwest every year since 1998, but 2020 introduced plot twists that no author could have seen coming. The pandemic forced Get Lit! back onto the shelf for a while, but the festival is back starting Monday, albeit in a virtual capacity. Eastern Washington University s annual literary celebration not only lauds local talent but brings in big names from all over the country. Past Get Lit! appearances have included literary legends like Kurt Vonnegut and Joyce Carol Oates, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, and bestselling commentator Roxanne Gay.
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Teresa Vanairsdale completed her MFA in poetry at Eastern Washington University last June. Although she lives in Spokane, she spends a fair amount of time living and playing at Priest Lake also. Her poems have appeared in
Camas, The MacGuffin, StringTown, Yeah Write Review, Clockhouse, the anthology
Spokane Writes, and others.
Credit union approaches 40K members in market Growing up on a Valley farm, Steve Hauschild tackled arduous jobs like clearing rocks from crop fields. Years later, he would clear the way for one of the nation’s largest credit unions to sprout in a new market. Five years ago this month, Hauschild was hired by Boeing Employees Credit Union as market leader and director of business lending in Eastern Washington, which was new territory for the financial cooperative with deep roots in the Puget Sound area. Since then, Hauschild has helped BECU establish three new branches and a home loan center in the greater Spokane area. The credit union also has a growing foothold in North Idaho.
Credit Courtesy of University of Washington
The Washington Senate has voted to help property owners remove racially-discriminatory language from some of their homes’ documents.
The bill was approved unanimously and sponsored by Issaquah Democrat Mark Mullet. This bill does two important things, he said. The first is it allows those deeds with the racial restrictions to be removed from the underlying document. Two, we provide money for Eastern Washington University and the University of Washington so they can actually go through various deeds and covenants throughout our state so they can alert homeowners, to people who do have these racial covenants in their property deeds and have them removed, Mullet said.