Measures to clean up the primary gateway into Spokane are positive first steps to making our city more welcoming to those who enter it and to getting our more vulnerable population the help it needs. 

The key to success for new partnerships between the city of Spokane and state agencies will involve getting results in resolving some of the biggest problems that plague our core, rather than throwing buckets of money—totaling more than $14 million, when tallying all initiatives announced in recent weeks—at the problem in vain. 

Earlier this week, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown announced the city of Spokane has reached an agreement with the Washington state Department of Transportation and the state Department of Commerce to designate the Division-Browne streets downtown corridor as a priority encampment zone, which frees up some funds through the state's Right-Of-Way Encampment Resolution Program to address the vexing problems. 

The agreement is intended to enable the city to use about $6.5 million in state funds in total to help homeless people who camp in that area find housing and other services. It also will go toward cleaning up litter and graffiti on a stretch of those thoroughfares between Interstate 90 and Sprague Avenue. 

Work on that effort reportedly started earlier this week. 

The agreement comes on the heels of a separate gateway cleanup accord between the city and the state transportation department, which was announced earlier in March. Through that agreement, DOT will reimburse the city for cleanup activity the city's Code Enforcement Department performs on state-owned land. The state agency has agreed to put up $440,000 for those activities and is seeking another $400,000 to put toward the agreement, which extends through 2025. 

Those efforts are in addition to new plans to put federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars toward shelter housing and addiction services. About $5 million will go toward assisting in relocating Catholic Charities' House of Charity and $1 million for addiction treatment. That's on top of initial allocations of about $1 million in money for opioid addiction treatment, which comes from the first payments the city has received from two opioid litigation settlements with manufacturers and distributors of the drug. 

It's a multipronged approach to addressing the problems that are apparent to the tens of thousands of drivers that flow through the intersections of Second and Third avenues and Division and Browne streets daily, a portion of whom that entrance provides their first impression of the city. 

The hope is that the collective effort makes the city cleaner and safer. And that it does so not through a sleight of hand of sorts that moves those vulnerable populations to less visible parts of town, but by getting them the help they need and by giving them opportunities to be contributing members of our community again. 

Authentic solutions to these real problems have been a long time coming, and we're hopeful that these first steps are the correct steps in the direction of permanent fixes.