Condon wants Spokane to be ‘City of Choice’ for Northwest
Spokane Mayor David Condon delivered the annual state of the city address Friday morning, where he said that job growth and improving public safety are at the top of the agenda.
What makes Spokane great? In Condon’s opinion, “it’s our parks, it’s our retail, it’s our arts; in short we will be the city of choice for the northwest.”
To reach that goal Condon wants the community’s feedback.
“We asked the public what is the number one reason that would bring people here, it is economic growth, it is jobs,” Condon said
The mayor’s state of the city address featured live social media updates from the public; he wants open dialogue from citizens.
“They use their smart phones, they use Twitter, they use Facebook, and that’s how they want to communicate,” Condon said, adding that it’s an approach that’s working.
“This year we responded to snow issues over Facebook where people said ‘My street hasn’t been plowed’ and it really is incumbent on us to do that to make sure we’re reaching out,” he said. “We take those seriously, I monitor those in my office and like I said we actually deploy services, based off of some of those responses.”
During the state of the city address Friday morning, Spokane Teachers Credit Union CEO Tom Johnson announced his business is expanding; they plan to move into the Hutton Building downtown later this year.
“As the mayor said this morning ‘What are you doing for our town, what are you doing to make this the city of choice?’ This is part of our commitment to the city of Spokane,” Johnson said.
“This is an investment in our community; it’s a partnership with all who are investing downtown, the great buildings that have been restored, this is another one,” Johnson said. “This building has been neglected a little bit in the past decade, so we plan to make investments there to make this a flagship location for us and downtown Spokane.”
“We have that quality of life in spades, we now need to be looking at how to create that economic growth so people can afford to have that quality of life,” Condon said.
