At 4:58 am on Friday, 15 people are gathered in front of Spokane City Hall in the dark. Before the sun comes up, two bright spots glow in the group — Gavin Cooley, in his yellow puffer jacket, and Barry Barfield, in a reflective orange and yellow safety vest.
Cooley is the executive director of the Spokane Business Association, a conservative organization founded by developer Larry Stone. Barfield is a longtime community activist and administrator of the Spokane Homeless Coalition.
The two men are leading a daily 5 am "crisis walk" through downtown Spokane. Their goal, they say, is to highlight how urgent the homelessness crisis is and to pressure the mayor into taking quick, measurable steps to decrease the number of people sleeping on the street each night.
"Imagine," Cooley wrote in an email newsletter on Feb. 6, "if the mayor announced to her cabinet of top city executives that, starting tomorrow, they would meet every morning at 4 am for a one-mile walk through downtown Spokane. After that first walk, she would make it clear: these walks would continue every single day, weekends included, until they could complete that mile without seeing a single person sleeping on the streets or struggling with addiction."
Cooley and Barfield started walking on Feb. 17 — at 5 am instead of 4 am, with the hopes that TV news crews would be more willing to show up an hour closer to dawn.
They've been walking alongside about a dozen community members every day since. That makes this the 12th one in a row. Mayor Lisa Brown has yet to ask her staff to join, or to join herself. There is healthy regional collaboration happening, she says, and she and everyone on her staff already feels the urgency of the situation.
"They didn't come and talk to us about [the walks] before they started publicizing them," Brown says. "There is definitely [regional] communication and I believe, at the staff level, some of the best collaboration occurring that maybe has not been the case in the past."
'JUMP START'
The partnership between Cooley and Barfield is itself unique and unexpected.
"I lean left," Barfield says, "and SBA leans heavy right, which is exactly what I think needs to happen. ... I want to bring them together, because that's the only way a sustainable something is going to happen."
But as the sun peaks over the horizon, Cooley describes himself as a Democrat.
"As a financial person, the CFO of the city for 18 years — people assume if you're financial, you're conservative," he says. "I think I am left. I've always been left, and significantly left. The business association, I think, knew that also when they hired me."
The thing that Democrats often can't balance together, he says, is compassion and law enforcement. Cooley says that four of his eight children are in recovery from different types of substance abuse, and their journeys, although different from each other, all color his perspective on addiction treatment and accountability.
"The one group that I found is universally in favor of dealing with this situation as a crisis, and including measures such as involuntary detention, are the parents of children who have struggled with addiction and mental illness," Cooley says by email after the walk.
At first, the walkers pass through Riverfront Park, where no one is camping. Cooley points out the success of park rangers keeping the park safe and clean. Then, the group turns onto Browne Street and walks under the viaduct, where a handful of people are camping. A few blocks later, there are about a dozen people sleeping or standing outside the Ridpath apartment building on Sprague Avenue, as well.
"In a lot of ways, you don't want to conflate homelessness with substance abuse and mental health at all," Cooley says. "But the population we're seeing here is chronically homeless — 12 months or more on the streets, [with] co-occurring drug addiction, substance abuse and mental health. So, with that population, by its very definition, you can conflate those."
This is a tiny part of the homeless population, Cooley says, but one that he believes could be quickly alleviated through law enforcement and mandated, involuntary treatment. He suggests having officers go around offering either time in jail or treatment.
That's what he says is the point of these walks — the population on the street in the early hours of the morning could be off the street if the mayor simply gave the word.
"I think chronic homelessness could end overnight," he says. "If suddenly you set zero tolerance, it would jump start all those activities — if the mayor would just say, 'We're not going to do this.'"
CUTTING BOARD
Tension between Cooley and Brown arose much earlier than 5 am on Feb. 17.
Cooley was part of Brown's 100-day transition team when she took office in early 2024. He claims most of the credit for designing her budget. Their first strain, he says, was when she decided not to join his proposed regional board to address homelessness.
In 2023, Cooley and experienced former city staffers Rick Romero and Theresa Sanders tried to start a regional board including the city, county, and nongovernmental experts to address homelessness. It was inspired by a similar para-governmental organization in Houston that was wildly successful, Cooley says.
It was his top priority, and one he expected the mayor to be all in on. Brown, however, was not.
"The original regional homeless proposal was to create another public development authority, like SREC," Brown says. "The idea was that the city's homelessness funds would flow to this entity. But there wasn't a commitment of the county's behavioral health dollars."
Brown was concerned that a board of maybe a dozen people would get to decide how to spend Continuum of Care dollars — about $6 million from the federal Housing and Urban Development Department that is given to the city to use on behalf of the region — while the county wasn't willing to put its mental health funding through the same process.
When Brown took office in 2024, she refused to join the regional homeless authority, and the idea was effectively dead. But that has not killed regional collaboration generally, she says.
"It was premature to set up a separate board to spend taxpayer funds when we had not done what we are doing now, which is this mapping and understanding if there are easy agreements we can reach to collaborate on how we spend some of our funds," she says.
Right now, Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates is spearheading a project to map the interactions between behavioral health incidents and the criminal justice system.
"We've met with the county, and the county has agreed to essentially take our map and then add their map onto it, so we will have a regionwide intercept map that we can utilize to judge where we have gaps in the system," Brown says.
STELLAR STAFF
Elected officials and staff from most nearby municipalities still meet quarterly for the Spokane Regional Collaborative to Address Homelessness, the remnants of Cooley's proposed board.
Cooley thinks the remaining collaboration is toothless compared to what he envisioned. But from the city of Spokane staff's perspective, collaboration with the county and surrounding towns has never been better.
George Dahl, Dawn Kinder and Gloria Mantz, staff members working on homelessness initiatives for Spokane County, the city of Spokane, and the city of Spokane Valley respectively, have never been more in sync, they each say. The three meet regularly, share data and track funds together.
"I've been with the county now since January 2023, and gosh, in that time, I've never seen this level of collaboration between the jurisdictions," Dahl says. "It's really, really encouraging, and also I think, just a really positive direction, recognizing we still have an emergent issue with addressing homelessness, but the collaboration and the partnerships that the community is asking for are being worked on."
They're working on an interlocal agreement that will ensure this type of collaboration continues even when they're no longer in these positions.
"This idea that the region doesn't collaborate is misinformation," Kinder says. "But we're certainly excited to have an updated version of [an interlocal agreement] coming now so that we can really give our electeds a tool to hold the region and staff accountable for that ongoing partnership."
In his weekly Spokane Business Association newsletter, Cooley has critiqued Brown for not meeting with county Commissioner Al French, one of the longest-serving county politicians.
But Brown says her duty is to county Commissioner Mary Kuney, the chair of the Board of County Commissioners, not French.
Brown meets with Kuney at least every month — 15 times, actually, since Brown took office at the beginning of 2024.
"Between the city and the county, it's always been that the chair of the Board of County Commissioners meets with the mayor on a monthly basis," Kuney says. "We have been doing those so that we can be talking about the issues that are relevant to both of our entities."
Plus, Kuney and Spokane City Council President Betsy Wilkerson have been friends for about three decades, far predating election to their respective offices. Though their politics differ, they regularly meet over a glass of wine.
In February, Wilkerson asked if she could present the idea of a joint meeting between the City Council and the county commissioners to address opioid use. Kuney readily agreed. That meeting should be on the books in a matter of weeks, they say.
"I sometimes think of us as the Hatfields and the McCoys — like, does anyone remember what we're fighting over?" Wilkerson says. "I have an idea. You have an idea. We both want to get to the same goal. We may have a different idea of what path we want to take. So let's look at it, and really at the end of the day, let's compromise for the best."
WEEKS VERSUS YEARS
Still, Cooley and Barfield don't think the current level of collaboration is powerful or urgent enough. Meetings need to be happening daily, not monthly or quarterly, they say, and stricter measures of success need to be met.
"[Homelessness] is an incredibly, incredibly complex, deep issue," Barfield says. "It will never be solved in a few weeks."
Will these walks continue for years, then?
"I would end them if enough leadership — it doesn't have to just be the mayor or county commissioners, it could be the presidents of all the banks — if they could all get together and say, 'We're gonna do it.' I want to see regional collaboration," Barfield says.
Isn't that what the Spokane Regional Collaborative to Address Homelessness is?
"To be blunt, no. It's in name only. I mean, the people who show up to that are doing good work. I appreciate them. Great, keep doing what you're doing. But it is this big," Barfield says, holding his thumb and index finger an inch apart, "and we need this big," he says, stretching out his arms. ♦
