John Taves leaves positive footprint in Cheney

CHENEY – John Taves, 74, spent nine years on the Cheney City Council before retiring during his last meeting in December. The soft-spoken man with glasses and a flannel button up clearly left a large impact on his colleague who only had glowing things to say about him as a colleague and his service for the community of Cheney during his last meeting.

Before being on the council, Taves said he was a constituent account executive for the Bonneville power company “which is a large way of saying I was a liaison between BPA and the public interest groups in the northwest.” Between being a resident of Cheney and managing accounts for a power company, having an understanding of how public interest groups and city utilities made Taves a no brainer candidate for the city council. Which is why former mayor Tom Trulove nominated Taves to become an interim city council member after someone on the council unexpectedly and suddenly died.

After spending about a year as an interim councilmember, Taves decided to run in the next election. “I knocked on a lot of doors, talked to a lot of people,” Taves said. It might seem strange in today’s hyper digitally connected world, but that’s one of the beautiful things about small communities like Cheney - simple things like eye contact, handshakes, and friendly conversation can go along way into gaining the trust of your constituents and securing their vote.

Taves pondered over many city council resolutions over the years and that was certainly the best part of his job. Taves enjoyed influencing the city’s direction and helping mold it into an awesome place to live. He recalls trying to get the railroad district to install different types of horns on the trains to try and keep the noise down when the trains come through the city in wee hours of morning and night. While he didn’t succeed in getting this issue resolved, it felt good to try to do something that would have a dramatic impact on the community.

Taves said one of the more important topics he weighed in on was the legalization of cannabis within the city. It was certainly a hot button issue, but Taves voted for it to be legalized because it would take a large strain off local law enforcement by allowing them to deal with real crime and not sweat over victimless crimes involving ingesting a medicinal plant. Also, when you take the black-market aspect out of cannabis sales, it becomes much easier to track its production and consumption within your community.

More recently, the biggest issue the city council dealt with was the COVID-19 related mandates. Whether its for testing, vaccination, or mask, COVID-19 mandates are incredibly controversial in Cheney. This caused a lot of protests and angry letters to be sent towards the city council, of which Taves received some of them because he voted for a vaccine mandate.

The entire situation taught him that you can’t make everyone happy and even when you believe you have the community’s best interests in mind with your decision making, some people will be upset with you regardless. For Taves, this had to be the most difficult part of the job, knowing that a decision you make out of the community’s best interest will still make people mad at you.

For any future city council members in Cheney and beyond, Taves said to make sure that they do their homework on the issues. The job is hard enough when you already know what you’re talking about and voting on, let alone if you’re completely underread on a subject.

Now that Taves is retired from the city council, he said he’s going to spend his days reading newspapers like the Spokesman Review and as many books as he can get his hands on. After Taves decided not to run for re-election, Mark Posthuma ran for office and won his election for Cheney City Council’s third position.