Spokane voters will have the chance to decide who holds the reins of the CITY ATTORNEY — and how much job security that person will have. Right now the city attorney is hired by the mayor and can only be fired by the mayor. That's drawn complaints from City Council members who believe that setup effectively tells the city attorney that they serve the mayor — not the city as a whole. That's a big problem in the not-uncommon situation where the mayor and the council disagree on something.
So Proposition 1, if passed, would take the power of appointing the city attorney away from the mayor and place it in the hands of the City Council. (Though the mayor would still have to agree to their pick.) Under the measure, which was put forward by Council President Breean Beggs, the city attorney would serve up to two seven-year terms, for a total of 14 years, and could only be fired if the council and the mayor agreed. The job security, the thinking goes, could make it easier to find better candidates.
But skeptics — including Mayor Nadine Woodward — believe that it makes more sense for the mayor to still be the one who makes the pick.
"The departments I advise on the day-to-day operations are all appointed by the mayor," Lynden Smithson, the city's interim city attorney, told the Inlander in June. "They're all hired and fired by the mayor." ♦
