Follow-up coverage could have helped
Editor made `routine' decision in 1997 not to further analyze project after council vote

Jim Camden
Staff writer

When the Spokane City Council voted one night in January 1997 to link its parking meter fund to the River Park Square garage, the debate between the project's supporters and its critics appeared in the next day's paper.

That story also featured some of the warnings included in a 28-page analysis the council got before voting.

What The Spokesman-Review did not do, however, was follow up on that analysis with a deeper look at the problems the accountants from Coopers & Lybrand were flagging for the council.

Reporters proposed that type of story on Jan. 28, 1997, the day after the council meeting. After talking with their immediate supervisors, they eventually made the case to Chris Peck, the newspaper's editor.

He said no, contending that the council had voted, passing an emergency ordinance that wasn't subject to a ballot initiative. The issue was settled, he said.

"In retrospect, we probably shouldn't have moved on," Peck said in a recent interview.

But Peck, who is now the editor of the Memphis (Tenn.) Commercial Appeal, defends the decision he made in 1997 as routine.

"There was not a secret motive," he said. "Government reports are issued all the time. The news media, including this newspaper, tend to focus on the vote. There seemed to be closure."

In reality, there wasn't closure, and reporters didn't move on. They just didn't do the type of in-depth analysis on River Park Square that the newspaper became known for on other subjects.

With little support from their editors, the reporters -- primarily Kristina Johnson, the newspaper's City Hall reporter, and Alison Boggs, its retail business reporter -- stepped up the daily coverage of River Park Square. In those stories, which got longer and more frequent as the project became a political flashpoint, they addressed some possible problems from the report along with emerging issues.

Whether an in-depth newspaper review of the mall project would have prevented any of the subsequent controversies is unknown. Johnson and some of the newspaper's reporters who covered the project in the ensuing seven years think it would have.

"I definitely think it would have forced the council to take a step back and have more public scrutiny," said Johnson, now the paper's editor of Our Generation.

Peck is not convinced such treatment would have made a difference.

"But it's easy to look back now and say, `Wouldn't it have been great?' " he said.

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