The Spokane City Council voted on Monday to indefinitely table a controversial land deal between the city and Union Gospel Mission.
UGM provides one of the city's largest homeless shelters but has received criticism for discriminatory hiring practices. The religious organization does not hire LGBT people.
Spokane wants to build a stormwater treatment facility to stop industrial pollution from entering the Spokane River. City staff identified a piece of land along the riverbank near the UGM facility on Trent Avenue as the most feasible location.
The city owns part of that land already but would need access to adjacent UGM-owned parcels to install it. UGM currently uses the whole property as a park.
The facility would be a swale, which is a dip in the earth under which filters would be installed. This means the land could still be used as a park post-installation.
In order to obtain access to that land, the city worked out a deal.
Two city-owned parcels would be given to UGM and two sections of dead-end street would be vacated and given to UGM.
In exchange, the city would be given total access to the waterfront property to install and maintain the swale. In addition, they could construct a Ben Burr trail extension through the land.
UGM would take over maintenance of the road sections, which would become part of their campus and the waterfront land. According to Executive Director Phil Altmeyer, the parcels would likely be used for additional parking or for extensions on the main UGM facility.
Altmeyer called the deal a win-win.
"It works out, pencils out to be an even swap over time," he said. "So the question is: why wouldn't you do it?"
But Spokane City Councilman Breean Beggs says the city would be giving away too much.
"The swap was going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in city land that we were going to then give to the Union Gospel Mission in exchange for the use of some of their land. So it wasn't even a full-on swap," he said.
Beggs would rather the city simply buy the property they need, which he says is valued at $130,000.
But Altmeyer isn't interested in selling.
"We want to maintain ownership," he said. "And that again is so that we can be a good neighbor, and we can control what happens on our property."
His interest might not matter though. Beggs says eminent domain is on the table but he hopes it won't come to that.
"This land is right on the river. It's not really usable for building, but it's critical to city infrastructure," he said. "And so if we can't figure out a fair market agreement with him, we would go to eminent domain and then pay him the fair market value."
"I think it would be kind of unfortunate," said Altmeyer, regarding eminent domain. "Sixty-eight years, we've never asked for anything."
The land deal first saw a public vote on April 8, when the council decided to defer its decision. At that hearing, several members of the public testified against the deal. Many were opposed to having the city do any sort of business with UGM due to their discrimination.
"UGM should not be receiving any kind of monetary gain from the state, or the city, or the local government," said one commenter. "Because they are a discriminatory place and they have admitted it themselves."
Beggs says those concerns, while heard, were not a factor in his own decision-making, because legally the city cannot make land deal decisions based on religious beliefs.
City staff will now pursue the purchase option, according to Beggs, though there is no timeline beyond that for next steps.