RANGE

Starting the year off with a banger: Senate Majority Leader Andy Billig joins us to talk about the legislative year that was, and what to expect from Washington state in 2022 as the legislature tries to pack all its work into a whirlwind 60 day session. Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

This week we speak with Inlander reporter Samantha Wohlfeil, who has been filing the best stories anywhere on the continuing — and honestly, worsening — crisis at the Spokane Regional Health District. She wrote the authoritative piece to date on the steady exodus of staff from the district. It’s vital reading . Since we recorded, more heads have rolled. Here, Sam covers the firin...

Listen now | RANGE OF CARE | Building resiliency in the face of burnout, uncertainty and flux Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

This week on the pod, Gene Brake, Spokane-based Realtor, civil rights activist, and neighborhood leader joins us to talk about: How the local Realtor association is spending heavily in local political races and the un-democratic process they use to decide who gets their support How administrative dysfunction on the one hand and restrictive zoning on the other are affecting our ability to build the...

We won’t call it an “emergency” pod because the news is kinda good. We’d call it Breaking news … but it’s not really that either. WHAT IT IS: a conversation with Rebecca Cook, proud Spokanite and Vice President of IATSE Local 488, which serves film and TV crews in Washington, Oregon, Montana and North Idaho. We discuss: The breadth of entertainment workers in ou...

This week we discuss the tremendous challenge of climate change and the impacts of that challenge on mental health — especially the mental health of young people, who will bear a disproportionate trauma and hardship from our collective inaction. Younger generations are suffering deeply from what feels like an overwhelming challenge, and need support. They are also incredibly resilient and ar...

On this week’s episode, we speak with Jeff Ketchel , Executive Director of the Washington State Public Health Association , about the state of public health 18-plus months into a centenary pandemic. It’s slow, painstaking work done by diligent people in the messy environment of human frailty, government funding, society, culture and politics. Not complicated at all! Then you throw covi...

Many of our local law enforcement officials have expressed concerns about a set of new laws ( HB 1310 , HB 1054 ) that, among other things, require stricter standards for probable cause when detaining someone, require de-escalation during encounters, ban chokeholds and significantly restrict the use of tear gas. Despite the handwringing, it seems pretty reasonable to us, so we spoke with Enoka Her...

Psychotherapist Meg Curtin Rey-Bear guest hosts a roundtable with fellow therapists Maggie Rowe, a clinical social worker and certified child life specialist, and Ingrid Price, a licensed mental health counselor and a child mental health specialist. It’s a tough, wide-ranging, but ultimately hopeful conversation about what kids and parents are going through. Content warning: includes frank d...

Normal people can’t afford to live in North Idaho anymore. As of 2019 — the most recent data we have — the median household income in Bonner County was $50,256, almost 25% below the national average of $65,712. That year, median housing sale prices fluctuated between $307,000 and $340,000. Not cheap, but payments would be well under the 30% of income that finance nerds say is ide...

The conclusion of our two-part chat with Sandpoint Reader Editor and Co-founder Zach Hagadone. If you haven’t already, listen to the first episode before proceeding . It’s pure gold. This hour we drill deep into Idaho’s 1st Legislative District — a microcosm of many of the larger political dynamics playing out statewide — to understand in miniature many of the dynamic...

In early April, we brought you the strange story of the blood feud between North Idaho College’s administration and its board of trustees. NIC is a public junior college and its board had always been elected by the people of Kootenai County, but to hear locals talk about it, those races were never partisan. That changed last year and the resulting saga was by turns silly, absurd, chilling an...

Back for his second turn in the hot seat, filmmaker Benji Wade and I discuss the new documentary WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn (streaming on Hulu ). Unlike our last film episode , we actually recommend watching this one — and we use the occasion of a better than average film about one of recent history’s most spectacular failures to ask some pretty importa...

This week on the show we welcome Rosie Zhou, a lead organizer with Sunrise Spokane — a student and young-adult-led organization focused on ensuring we get to 100% carbon independence within the less-than-seven-year window set out in the 2018 special report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What makes young organizers like Rosie and her friends really special and wor...

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If you or a loved one are experiencing domestic or sexual violence and would like help, the StrongHearts Helpline offers assistance from within an indigenous cultural context. This week we speak with Yakama tribal member Jenny Slagle about some brutal, vital topics: The disproportionality with which our indigenous neighbors go missing, experience sexual violence, and end up murdered The structural...

Hey y’all. A couple weeks ago the DC-based Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story from right in our backyard about a coordinated effort by Kootenai County Republicans to run for the ostensibly non-partisan North Idaho College Board of Trustees on explicitly conservative talking points. They leveraged the full power of the local Republican Central Committee, ended up winning a super majori...

This week we talk with State Rep. Marcus Riccelli about all the work our state legislature has been doing this session. Including: Public Health Reform Universal Health Care Capital Gains Tax This one isn’t through the house yet and has an opportunity to get better, see below. Just Cause Evictions And last but not least … wait for it … his controversial take on the downtown stadi...

This week on the pod we talk with reporter Daisy Zavala, who wrote our heartbreaking farmworker profile “ Essential, but Unprotected ” (there’s also a Spanish-language version ). This is still a hell of an interview regardless of whether you’ve read the story or not — much of the interview is discussing the pitfalls of being a young professional journalist of color &#...

Continuing our housing series with a dash of sprawl containment, farmland preservation, racial equity and environmental impact (not to mention crawdad fishing in Elk!), this week we talk with Kitty Klitzke, Spokane Program Director for Futurewise, an organization that works throughout Washington state to encourage healthy, equitable and opportunity-rich communities, and to protect our most valuabl...

Hey y’all, it’s been a few weeks of pretty relentlessly depressing topics here at RANGE HQ so we thought we’d do something a little lighter. Not like, light light, but still light-er. Doing another film ep, this time talking about the Spokane Jewish Cultural Film Festival — which begins TONIGHT AT 7 PM! — with festival director and head of Spokane Area Jewish Family S...

This week on the pod we talk to Virla Spencer and Camerina Zorrozua of The Way to Justice, a newish non-profit that helps people get their lives back after run ins with the criminal legal system. Cam works primarily in post-conviction relief — helping people who have been locked up — while Virla runs the re-licensing program, helping poor folks who have lost their drivers license due t...

The conclusion of our interview with the inimitable Terri Anderson, Spokane Director and Policy Lead for the Tenants Union of Washington this week on the podcast. If you haven’t listened to PART 1 , I really recommend you do so before diving in here. You’ll thank me later. Things have not miraculously become perfect in the week since we posted the first episode, so it is still vitally...

Even after we manage to contain the public health crisis brought on by Covid-19, the danger isn’t over in Spokane. The economic crisis has left thousands of people without steady employment and, as a result, thousands of our neighbors are behind on their utility bills and behind on rent. This almost exclusively affects the poor, and because of our nation’s legacy of white supremacy and...

In this week’s episode we take a brisk 30-minute jaunt through some new polling data that confirms, yep, the rest of Spokane County wants a jail about as badly as we do — which is to say: NOT. AT. ALL. It’s encouraging news for everyone from reformists to prison abolitionists to get this sort of poll result in a Republican-leaning county like Spokane. But the real kicker is when...