Council candidates present themselves

MEDICAL LAKE – Four candidates vying for a vacant seat on the dais introduced themselves and described what they expected to bring to council to current members at the Feb. 2 meeting.

Health Wilbur, Howard Griffith, Chrystal Ortega and Chad Pritchard are hoping to be selected during to fill the seat left vacant by the resignation last November of Jessica Roberts. Roberts had just been re-elected to the position, and gave her resignation at the meeting on election night because she was moving outside of the city limits.

Health Wilbur said he finished a military career in 2015, settling in Medical Lake with his family soon after. He has two boys who attend high school.

“I really wanted to serve the public again,” Wilbur said. “I really feel a calling to be of service in some way.”

Griffith moved to Medical Lake with his family from Spokane Valley about a year and a half ago to be closer to his job at Eastern Washington University. He said early fears his family wouldn’t adjust to the change were quickly put to rest by the receptiveness of the community.

“I wanted to also pay back service to the community,” Griffith said. “I wanted to see how I could help the community progress.”

Ortega said she retired from a 22-year military career in 2016. Her family has lived in the area since 2011, but moved to Medical Lake in 2018. A program manager with Leadership Spokane, Ortega said the city has the same “small town feel” as the community she grew up in in Ohio.

“I’m looking for a way to provide insight and experience and gain insight and experience from other team members,” she told the council.

Pritchard and his family moved to Medical Lake from Spokane 6-7 years ago, and has three sons, two in first-grade and one fourth-grade. Like the other applicants, he also feels a responsibility to the community.

“I just want to give back to the community as much as I can,” Pritchard said. “I have a very great appreciation for the natural environment and like what ML has done so far and I just want to make sure it continues to be focused towards the family and be a nice green place with beautiful hearts.”

Selection will take place at the next council meeting, Feb. 16. The successful candidate will fill the position for the rest of the year, at which point they must decide if they will run for election in the November general election.

If so, and they win, they would fill out the remainder of Roberts term.

During reports, Spokane County Fire District 3 Chief Cody Rohrbach provided call volume data for 2020. Rohrbach said it was difficult to put the numbers into perspective since for most of the year, calls were handled by Station 33 on Melville Road in Four Lakes, with Medical Lake’s Station 311 taking over calls in December.

For the Four Lakes station, plus Station 311 — which also covers some of Four Lakes and the Medical Lake/Interstate 90 interchange — the total calls for 2020 was 1,505. To compare, Rohrbach looked at what those stations ran in calls separately in 2019, which was 550 for Four Lakes and 650 for Medical Lake or 1,200 total — making 2020 figures a 25 % increase over 2019.

“Now that could be related to COVID, I certainly think that’s possible,” Rohrbach said. “We saw trends around folks not wanting to call 911 initially last spring, and then almost a backlog as things that may have been more maintenance style issues started to pile up for folks and then an increase in call volume.”

Rohrbach said calls with the district were expanding as well, totaling 2,726 in 2020, or about 7.5 emergencies per day. Four years ago, the district was at 1,600 calls per year.

“The take home on this is call volume is going up and it’s not going up in a linear fashion it’s going up logarithmically,” he said. “You continue to add even 8 % onto 2,700 calls per year and you get to a big number pretty fast.”

Rohrbach added both Medical Lake and Four Lake stations combined are accounting for over 55 % of the total call volume district wide.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].