Once again, another Spokane County election cycle begins. From May 5-9, folks from across the county filed to run for city councils, school boards, and other elected positions like those in fire and cemetery districts.
Voters will decide the top-two candidates in competitive races in the Aug. 5 primary election, and then will make their final choices in the Nov. 4 general election. Below are a few of the races to pay attention to. For a more comprehensive summary, find a longer version of this story at Inlander.com.
DEJÀ VU
Those who pay attention to school board elections may notice that the race for Central Valley School Board Position 5 looks much as it did four years ago when now-board member Pam Orebaugh ran against Rob Linebarger and Jared VonTobel.
Orebaugh and Linebarger edged out VonTobel, making it to the general election where Linebarger was on the ballot but endorsed his opponent. Now, the pair are again running for the spot against a third candidate, Mark Bitz.
Orebaugh says she's running for reelection to continue the work she's been doing on the board to enhance "accountability and transparency."
"As a board, especially in the last year and a half, we're making a lot of headway with increased academics for our students, especially after COVID, and we're finally seeing a big bounce in that student learning," Orebaugh says. "If you look at our board docs, we put a lot of information on there when years ago there was hardly anything there. We really push hard to get this information out to the public."
Bitz taught trades for a decade at Spokane Valley Tech, a public technical high school for interested juniors and seniors in Central Valley, East Valley, Freeman and West Valley school districts. After retiring in 2023, he decided that another way to help people become "capable, successful, competent citizens" was to run for election to the school board.
Considering his background, Bitz hopes to advocate for career and technical education programs in the district if elected. He also says he'd like to see the school board use its resources and time more wisely.
"I attended the last school board meeting, and it's disappointing when our local leaders spend their time and our money getting into issues that are out of scope for their roles," Bitz says, referring to a recent meeting where the board sent Title IX complaint letters to the federal government over Washington's gender-inclusive schools law. "School boards have to follow state law, and whenever we're acting outside of state law, then we're really not focusing our time and resources on things that we can actually make decisions on."
Linebarger, the current Spokane County Republican Party chair, says social issues that put state or federal funding for districts at risk, like the one Bitz referenced, are always important for a school board to address.
Linebarger says he's running for the board seat again because he doesn't think the current board is as effective as they need to be. He believes that the current board does exactly what Superintendent John Parker wants, rather than enforcing the will of the voters who elected them.
"The school board is there to be somewhat of an adversarial relationship to the district on behalf of the voters and the taxpayers — not adversarial like mean or hostile, but like they're there to ask questions, to push back on how money is spent," Linebarger says. "It seems like the district, you know, they have the upper hand on the school board. I think we need to kind of turn that around to where they know that the superintendent of the school district reports to the school board, not the other way around."
For example, Linebarger says he opposed the district's 2024 six-year capital levy that will fund improvements to the district's buildings, not because he doesn't think schools should be fully funded, but because he thought the levy should have been a bond instead.
"You don't fund capital investments with a credit card, that's basically what a levy is. It's a short-term funding source ... whereas a bond, you know, the taxpayers pay for that over a 10-year period," Linebarger explains. "I get why they don't do it that way now, because there's a 60% voter threshold [to pass a bond] and quite frankly, people are tired of giving more and more tax dollars to schools."
Orebaugh, who also voted against the $47.5 million capital levy, disagrees with Linebarger about running a bond instead.
"I don't know what difference it makes, you know, it's a six-year capital levy versus the bonds which tend to run a lot longer," she says. "The capital levy helps us get the job done faster, so that we can have less construction costs, less interest, and pay that off faster."
Orebaugh similarly criticized the school board for bending to the will of the school district before she joined it in 2021, but she believes that's changed with her on the board.
"I know [the school board] did basically whatever the district wanted," she says. "They just said yes to everything, and there wasn't a lot of liaisoning with the community, but in all honesty, the community wasn't demanding it either."
While Linebarger agreed that Orebaugh would be a better school board member than him in 2021, he thinks she could have done better in her first term. He was the first candidate to file for the seat this year.
"I think I can do a better job, and I'm in a position now where I can do it. My background is in business and executive leadership, and I think that's what the district needs," Linebarger says. "I think it's a win-win for the voters having a little bit of competition in this race."
Orebaugh thinks her experience on the board, where she's been the board president and vice president, makes her more qualified than her competitors.
SEEKING LOWER OFFICE
Spokane Valley City Council member Rod Higgins has served longer on the council than anyone, but now he plans to finish his elected work after his current term.
Four candidates filed to replace Higgins in Position 1. Two of the candidates ran unsuccessfully for the state Legislature last year including Kristopher Pockell, who lost his race against Rep. Suzanne Schmidt, and Mike Kelly, who ran unsuccessfully for outgoing Sen. Mike Padden's seat. The other two Position 1 candidates are Lisa Miller, who sits on the Spokane County Board of Equalization, and Adam Smith, the owner of Smash Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu who ran unsuccessfully for City Council in 2019, 2021 and 2023.
In 2024, Padden surprisingly endorsed Kelly in the primary election for his Senate seat, over other conservative candidates that he worked closely with, such as then-state Rep. Leonard Christian (who won the Senate race) or Spokane Valley Mayor Pam Haley. While Kelly didn't make it past the primary last year, he says his relationship with Padden and his wife, Laura Padden, who is on the City Council, is what inspired him to run for this election.
"When I found that Rod Higgins was going to be stepping down and not running again, I thought that would be a good place to start trying to shape policy here in the Valley and conserve our values and conserve our resources," Kelly says. "Also, I sit on the [city's] planning commission, so I understand the control that Olympia is trying to exercise over us. I'm a big proponent of being able to make decisions and keeping local control."
If he's elected, Kelly says he would step down from the planning commission.
Pockell received less than a third of the vote in his 2024 race against Schmidt. However, he says that was a challenging election because he agreed with the incumbent on nearly every issue. Now, he's hoping his lifelong love for Spokane Valley will help him succeed in this City Council race.
"The thing that sets me apart is I'm at every single City Council meeting," Pockell says. "I have a very deeply vested interest in the future of the city. I've seen a lot of growth in my 30-odd years of living here, and I think the city has done a good job of managing that growth. I want to see that process continue when I'm elected."
Miller also says her love for Spokane Valley is why she's running for election, and that her experience as a two-term council member from the Valley Village neighborhood of Los Angeles is what makes her qualified for the position.
All three of these candidates said public safety and ensuring that the city is employing enough police officers will be their top priority if elected. Miller also says the Valley's public safety efforts need to include an adequate response to cybercrimes as they become more common.
"We need to equip our public safety officers, our law enforcement officers, our departments, adequately to combat the on-the-streets effects of cybercrime. It's not just identity theft and fraud anymore. Cybercrime is now coming for operational systems such as energy and water," Miller explains.
Smith has made regular appearances on the Spokane Valley City Council ballots for the past six years. Though Smith says he didn't spend any money campaigning for election in 2023, he received more than 3,000 votes in the primary, which is what encouraged him to run again. He didn't advance past the primary in the 2023 race that Council member Jessica Yaeger won.
"I've got a good background, a diverse background. I'm a business owner. I'm certified to work with the police department. I was a fireman. I teach martial arts to kids and families. So I really hope to use my experience for some of the issues that face the City Council," Smith says. "My background brings something that's different, not only to what we have [on City Council] now, but what we've had in the past."
OTHER RACES
In Spokane County there are about 160 candidates vying for 112 positions, meaning many of the races on November 2025 ballots will be uncontested. However, there are a handful of competitive races that will see a pool of candidates whittled down to two after the August primary election. Races with only two candidates will still appear on the primary ballot, but both candidates will make it through to the November election regardless.
In Cheney, three candidates are hoping to fill the City Council’s No. 4 seat currently held by Teresa Overhauser, who did not file for re-election. Voters will decide between Shawn Ricketson, a system administrator for the Air Force who sits on the city’s Planning Commission; Rebecca Long, a software engineer who ran for the same position in 2023; and Timothy Steiner, a Cheney firefighter.
To the north, three candidates are running for a two-year term on the Deer Park City Council to fill the seat of Ross Hall, who was appointed last year when the Council expanded from five to seven members. In the primary, Tony Bailey, David Aufdencamp and Robert Whaley will face off to figure out who’ll be on the Nov. 4 ballot.
In addition to the race to fill Spokane City Council member Lili Navarrete’s District 2 seat, two other seats — Jonathan Bingle’s District 1 and Zack Zappone’s District 3 seats — will be on the ballot.
Bingle will run against Sarah Dixit, an organizing director at Pro-Choice Washington. Zappone faces Cody Arguelles, an Air Force veteran and the owner of a private cigar lounge called The Late Arrival Club, and Christopher Savage, a courier for DeVries Business Services.
All four races for the Spokane Valley City Council are contested, but only a few of them have more than two candidates. In addition to the seat Higgins is vacating, Council member Laura Padden will attempt to retain her seat against two challengers: Gonzaga University student Joseph Ghodsee, who serves on the city’s Homeless Housing Task Force, and High Mountain Horsepower salvage yard manager Brad Hohn.
Spokane Valley Mayor Pam Haley will run for re-election against realtor Catherine Nelson. And Council member Ben Wick who has served on the Council for about a decade, will face Fairmount Memorial Park employee Daryl Williams.
The Central Valley School Board will also look a bit different next year as board member Teresa Landa did not file for re-election. The two candidates running for her seat include Brandon Arthur, a clinical informatics specialist at MultiCare Health System and Allen Skidmore, a family medicine specialist with Providence.
Finally, a few fire commissioner positions each have three candidates hoping to win voters’ favor. Newcomers Mike Meyer, Tim Flock and Kent Reitmeier are running for a position with Fire District No. 3, which is headquartered in Cheney. Meanwhile, Roger Krieger (the incumbent), Dan Garner and Sean Siegel are vying for a spot with Fire District No. 4, which is headquartered in Deer Park.
To view a full list of positions and candidates that will appear on the Aug. 5 ballot, visit this site.
♦ Editor's Note: This story was corrected on May 15 to reflect Central Valley School Board Member Pam Orebaugh's vote against the district's $47.5M capital levy last year. The previous version incorrectly stated she supported it.
