For nearly 30 years, Lori Patrick loved working for the city of Spokane. Having risen from a clerk to the office manager overseeing the city's permitting team, she was proud of her reputation as the "Mama Bear" of the office. She outlasted eight mayors. She weathered the rise and fall of multiple planning directors and division heads. She was overseeing the team that cut permitting times in half under the administration of former Mayor David Condon.
But the pandemic left her reeling. She needed a break. Her doctor told her as much.
"You're gonna continue to get worse unless you do something," she recalls her doctor saying early last year.
Just a week or two of vacation wasn't enough. So in March 2022, she sent her employees a long email apologizing for leaving them at such a crucial moment — and went on federally guaranteed medical leave.
It was when she came back in June that she learned her job wasn't waiting for her. She met with the city's recently hired community and economy development director, Steve MacDonald, who told her she'd no longer be supervising the permit team.
The woman who'd replaced her, Patrick says, told her she wouldn't be supervising anyone at all anymore. From everything she knew about the federal law around medical leave, it seemed illegal.
Patrick wrote a lengthy email explaining that she was "horrendously saddened." In the email, Patrick also raised "the very real issue of gender inequality" and said she'd suffered "retaliation" for taking protected leave. She quit a month later.
But that summer, she got a call from attorney Kathleen Haggard, the independent investigator who had previously cleared a city official of charges of racism. And she had some questions for an investigation she was conducting into MacDonald.
Months later, when Patrick asked to see the results of Haggard's investigation into MacDonald — as she'd seen provided to complainants in a previous investigation she'd been involved in — the city flat-out refused.
"Because the investigation was performed for both personnel and legal reasons, I am unable to provide you with a copy of the report or further disclose any personnel actions," Assistant City Attorney Mike Piccolo wrote in his reply to her.
Piccolo later told her the report was "inconclusive" and said the city had taken "appropriate action in alignment with" its practices.
But both state law and the investigator's own contract was clear: While names of complainants and witnesses could be redacted, the investigation itself was a public document.
So the Inlander made a formal records request, and got the investigation documents.
The investigation shows that Patrick wasn't the only one with concerns: Multiple employees had raised concerns about MacDonald's leadership, including Kris Becker, the development services director who had performed MacDonald's role for 18 months before he'd arrived. Above all, the report exposes a bitter rift that ran down the middle of City Hall, driving out longtime employees, and contributing to the internal chaos that has come to define Mayor Nadine Woodward's first term.
BEND IT PAST BECKER
From the outside, MacDonald's hiring in fall 2021 has seemed like a smashing success. City Council members, often critics of the Woodward administration, have been singing his praises. Council member Karen Stratton calls him one of the mayor's best hires, applauding him for promoting women in his division.
"I have seen the faces of the employees in his department, it feels like it's a far more positive environment to work in," says Stratton. "I don't have employees coming to me talking about how their feelings got hurt or yelled at."
But behind the scenes, records and interviews show, the relationship between MacDonald and key members of the development services center went rapidly from dysfunctional to downright toxic.
"I feel like there was a big change when Steve came on," Patrick says. "Him starting at the city impacted people that I worked for."
Conflicts reverberated throughout the leadership chain.
MacDonald quickly began clashing with Becker. Both were strong-willed leaders with their own fans and detractors.
Becker reported that her one-on-one meetings with MacDonald would be repeatedly moved or canceled. One was merely eight minutes. She said that MacDonald would invite male colleagues to lunch, but not her.
MacDonald would accuse her of withholding information from him, Becker said, after she'd twice emailed him a report containing the supposedly withheld information.
Becker says she felt she couldn't effectively communicate with him, that it seemed like in his eyes, she "couldn't do anything right."
"Anytime I reached out, it seemed like whatever I did made things worse," Becker says.
Becker — who had overseen parking, code enforcement and the development services center at the same time — didn't file a formal complaint, complain to the press or want an investigation. But she did seek guidance from the city's Human Resources Department.
"The working relationship between you seems to have broken down," City Administrator Johnnie Perkins told MacDonald, according to notes from a February 2022 HR meeting.
MacDonald declined interview requests to tell his side of the story, though he did provide a short statement. But in his comments to HR, he came across as equally frustrated, accusing Becker of dishing out excuses and delays.
Distrust between the two grew. MacDonald declared that Becker was trying to "sabotage" planning director candidate Spencer Gardner, and so he cut her out of the planning hiring process. Gardner was appointed to the role in January 2022.
"I wanted people who were fair-minded," MacDonald told HR, according to the report.
But Becker says she had nothing against Gardner. It was about the consistency of the hiring process: Other candidates with more relevant experience hadn't received interviews, she says. She was also uneasy about MacDonald taking Gardner out to dinner — an opportunity that other candidates didn't get.
Becker helped lead the COVID team that set up about seven homeless shelters and isolation centers. She'd been part of the mayor's "strike team" tasked with keeping the community housing and human services department afloat after the entire homelessness team had quit.
And yet, in December 2021, after she raised concerns about putting a proposed homeless shelter on Trent Avenue — a heavy industrial zone — MacDonald cut her out of major discussions.
"I was actively trying to make sure that problem was addressed before the city signed a lease," Becker says.
Ultimately, the City Council had to change the zoning for the building. It opened in September 2022.
Becker was alarmed with the way MacDonald would go around the chain of command to push through his agenda. And she wasn't the only one.
The Haggard investigation shows a development services clerk wrote a letter last year raising the alarm that even though key inspections on an apartment complex apparently hadn't been completed, MacDonald declared that a temporary certificate of occupancy needed to be issued anyway. The clerk described MacDonald's approach as "hostile" and said multiple staff members were fretting that the "highly irregular" process could expose the city to serious liability if things went wrong.
Any government regulator faces this kind of ethical tension: The same responsiveness to complaints that can make a division director a hero to a City Council member or a business owner can also mean that those who complain — or have political connections — receive special privileges.
"It's not fair to the little guys," says Patrick.
Across the three decades she served at the city, Patrick says, she always despised seeing the way that "somebody could go upstairs and skirt around requirements or jump to the head of the line" if they had connections.
"Employees hated seeing, you know, a school get a [temporary certificate of occupancy] when it's not safe to be occupied yet," Patrick says.
But this time, this sort of thing was happening when their department was already overwhelmed. The staff was simultaneously dealing with the lingering psychological trauma of the pandemic, the backlog of permits that had built up during the lockdown and the inevitable problems integrating remote work.
"People didn't have the capacity anymore to be able to deal with small things that would happen," Patrick says.
Becker, Patrick and the department's operations manager, Jacque West, all went on medical leave in March 2022. All ended up leaving the city.
"Quite a coincidence," MacDonald snarked in an email, uncovered by one of Patrick's own records requests.
GOODSPEED AND GOOD LUCK
Patrick knows she could have sued.
She knows what happened to Nancy Goodspeed — how Goodspeed went on medical leave in 2015 only to see her job filled by a police spokeswoman who'd quietly accused the police chief of sexual harassment, got a transfer and a $10,000 raise. When Goodspeed returned and wasn't given her job back, she sued — the city settled for $165,000.
Goodspeed's attorney, Kevin Roberts, tells the Inlander that the Family Medical Leave Act would have usually guaranteed that an employee gets their job back — or an equivalent job with the same authority and duties. If Patrick was overseeing employees when she left, in other words, she'd need to oversee employees when she got back. (Interviewed for the investigation, MacDonald claimed both that he hadn't intended to make permanent changes to Patrick's job, and that, in the long term, he did intend to remove the permitting team from Patrick's supervision.)
But Patrick didn't sue. Even if she successfully protected her job, Patrick thought, she'd just have her position eliminated during budgeting. She'd watched it happen. But Patrick wasn't expecting much from the investigation either.
"Many times over the years, people would remind you: HR is not there to protect you," Patrick says. "HR is there to protect the city."
Once the Inlander showed Patrick the investigation, it did little to contradict her cynicism. Though Patrick says she was willing to speak to the investigator again more thoroughly, Haggard claimed that, because she'd been unable to interview Patrick "in full," she could not draw a conclusion.
Still, Haggard hoped the report was useful to the city's legal interests.
"I hope this report was useful to the City should any tort claims or lawsuits be filed," she wrote in the report, "or should the City feel the need to make personnel decisions."
But the report also alluded to a broader crisis rippling through City Hall. In fact, Haggard noted, all three human resources employees who'd discussed the issue with MacDonald had themselves left the city before the report had been finished.
That included the human resources director — Woodward's third HR director to quit in as many years.
"Meaningful change in an organization can be difficult," MacDonald wrote in his statement to the Inlander. "Our staff is thriving under a very capable leadership team that is committed to common sense process improvements that benefit both customers and employees alike."
In his interview with Haggard, MacDonald suggested many employees were happier with Becker, West and Patrick gone.
Still, within a six-month span last year, six different Development Services Center employees had resigned or quit.
The city of Spokane had more resignations in 2022 than in 2019 and 2020 combined — and that doesn't even include Becker or Patrick, who both technically retired. By July 2022 the city had 282 vacancies — about 14 percent of its workforce. The gaping hole wasn't just in the Development Services Center or HR. It was in planning. Community housing and human services. Accounting.
Mayoral candidate Lisa Brown has made the chaos at City Hall one of her key attacks on Woodward's leadership, arguing that the vacancies in the planning and housing departments have crippled the city's ability to respond to the homelessness crisis.
"The lack of staffing and turnover has been problematic in getting a lot of good ideas off the ground," says Brown.
COVID was part of the explanation. But to veteran employees like Patrick and Becker who had wanted to stay, leadership shared in the blame.
"I always had this vision of how I was going to leave," Patrick says. "It was going to be this retirement party. It was going to be this great thing."
That party never happened. But today, she reports, she has a new job she loves, working for a state agency. It's a little like how dating someone new can show you can reveal just how bad your ex actually treated you.
"Only in hindsight, do I realize how long I was treading water in toxic sludge," she says. ♦
