How the grades work, where every number comes from, and, just as important, what this data can’t tell you. If you find an error, the corrections policy is at the bottom. Errors get fixed and disclosed, not buried.
The scorecard grades one question: is Spokane attracting employers that raise wages?
The theory is old, boring, and well supported. A regional economy grows when its employers sell to the outside world. That means manufacturers, software firms, engineering and professional services, and headquarters. Those employers bring new money into town, and they tend to pay above-average wages. That money becomes local paychecks. Paychecks become spending money. And spending money is what lets a coffee shop on Monroe or a storefront on Garland make rent. Local-serving sectors like health care, retail and government are essential. But they mostly move around money that is already here.
So when this page says “good-fit employers,” it means employers in traded sectors who pay above the regional average and hire the skills Spokane already has. A traded sector is one that sells outside the region. The eight measures follow that chain. Jobs. Who is creating them. What they pay. What households have left to spend. And whether that spending reaches storefronts.
Green, shown on the scorecard as Strong, means Spokane beats its benchmark (usually the U.S. or Washington state) or is clearly improving. Yellow, shown as Mixed, means near the benchmark, or the signals point in different directions. Red, shown as Weak, means below benchmark and not improving. The color names and the plain-language names are the same three grades. Earlier change log entries use the color names.
The overall call. The top of the scorecard reports one verdict for the region: off track, mixed, or on track. The rule is fixed before each reading and applied mechanically. Off track when weak measures outnumber strong ones. Mixed when they tie. On track when strong measures outnumber weak ones. Yellow and mixed measures never decide the call on their own; they are the middle of the board, not a tiebreaker.
There is no letter grade and no combined score, on purpose. The eight measures are not equally important. They are not independent of each other either, since spending and storefronts move partly because jobs move. Averaging them would suggest a precision this data does not have. A three-state verdict gives a reader the headline without inventing math to justify it.
Grades are judgment calls, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A formula would look more objective while hiding the same judgments inside weightings nobody reads. Instead, every grade is argued in one paragraph, in public, next to its source. If you think a grade is wrong, the evidence to argue with is right there. That’s the point.
One rule keeps grades honest over time: a grade only changes when the data changes, not when the news cycle does. Each quarterly update notes every grade change and why.
A second rule keeps the record honest. Before any figure is updated, the old edition is frozen into the public archive, exactly as it was published. Archived editions are never edited. If one of them turns out to be wrong, the correction shows up as a new entry in the change log below, and the original stays visible. A scorecard that can rewrite its own past is not a scorecard.
Some measures now carry a line chart of their history. Two rules govern those charts, set here before any of them can matter.
Trend lines show data, never grades. The grades on this site begin with the August 2026 edition. We will never reach back and grade a past year, because a grade applied after the fact cannot be checked the way a published one can.
Vintages are named when they differ. The history charts use QCEW annual averages, which run about five months behind and currently end with 2025. The headline jobs figure uses monthly ESD data through mid 2026. When the newest year and the newest month tell different stories, both appear, each labeled. Pay history is in the dollars of each year, not adjusted for inflation, and says so where it appears.
The pulled history is committed to this site’s repository and linked beside each chart, so anyone can download exactly the numbers the chart was drawn from.
A grade can move for two different reasons, and they will never be dressed alike. Data change means Spokane changed: the same measure, read the same way, produced a different number. Measure updated means the ruler changed: a card was replaced or its method revised, as this page has already announced for the unemployment card in November.
Every moved grade in a quarterly update will carry one of those two labels. When a measure is replaced, the note will say so plainly, in this form: this measure replaced the unemployment rate beginning November 2026; August’s grade is preserved in the archive and is not directly comparable. A scorecard that silently swaps rulers between readings is not keeping score.
The roadmap lists tempting additions: permit turnaround, corridor vacancy, land readiness, employer expansions, graduate retention. The rule set now, before any of them arrive: the top level of the scorecard stays at eight measures. A new measure earns a place by replacing one, with the swap labeled and logged, or it lives inside an existing measure, inside the plan, or on its own page. Adding cards every quarter would turn a scoreboard into a warehouse.
Photographs on this site are either taken by the maintainer or used under an open license with the photographer credited by name, with a link to the original. Every photo is dated where it appears. A photo is never presented as evidence for a current number. The numbers carry that weight; a picture only shows what the numbers are about.
| Measure | Source | Updates |
|---|---|---|
| Job growth | WA Employment Security Dept. (ESD); BLS | Monthly, ~6 week lag |
| Jobs and pay history | BLS QCEW annual averages | Annual, ~5 month lag |
| Sector mix | Spokane Workforce Council (Lightcast); ESD | Quarterly to annual |
| Unemployment | ESD / BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics | Monthly, ~6 week lag |
| Wages | BLS Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics | Annual, ~1 year lag |
| Household income | Census American Community Survey | Annual, ~1 year lag |
| Retail sales | WA Dept. of Revenue quarterly releases | Quarterly, ~2 quarter lag |
| Storefront vacancy | CoStar, as published by local brokerages | Quarterly |
| Population | WA Office of Financial Management; Census | Annual |
Geography: figures cover Spokane County or the Spokane metro area, unless a city figure exists and the card says so. That is a limit of the data, not a choice. Reliable job and wage numbers are only published at the county and metro level.
Read the scorecard with these six limits in mind. They’re why some claims you might want to make from this page shouldn’t be made.
Two sources deserve a specific disclosure. Vacancy data comes from CoStar. Sector data comes from Lightcast. Both are private datasets that local groups republish. Neither can be checked against raw public records without paying for a subscription, so both are labeled wherever they appear.
The calculator is a teaching tool, not a forecast. It shows the local multiplier at work. That is the well-documented finding that jobs selling to the outside world create extra local jobs, while jobs serving local demand mostly do not. The ranges are adapted from published research. Moretti’s estimates run about 1.6 extra local jobs per manufacturing job, and near 5 per high-tech job. We widened those ranges and pushed them down on purpose, because economists argue about the exact size even while they agree on the direction. Every other assumption appears on the tool itself, in round numbers. It does not model the cost of incentives, pressure on housing, or the odds of landing any one employer.
This scorecard is kept by one Spokane resident, on personal time. It takes no money from anyone. It is not tied to the City of Spokane, any campaign, party, developer, or business group. It exists for one reason: to keep attention on the numbers that decide whether this region’s neighborhoods thrive. Background, possible biases and the corrections policy are on the who made this page.
Corrections: if a number is wrong, send the source. Verified errors are fixed within a week and logged below, permanently. Disagreements about grades are welcome too, and the strongest counterarguments will be linked so readers can weigh them.
v4.9, October 2026. Two real photographs and five small drawings. The asks now carry a photo of the watch party crowd at the Pavilion in Riverfront Park, taken 19 June 2026 by T85cr1ft19m1n and released CC0, placed beside the residents’ ask because showing up is the point. The living page carries Duncan Garden at Manito Park in bloom, taken June 2015 by Roman Eugeniusz, CC BY-SA 3.0, with the date disclosed in the caption. Both were verified on their Wikimedia Commons file pages before use, per the photo policy: open license, named credit, dated, and never evidence for a current number. The chain in part 2 gained five small line drawings, one per link, in a neutral color so the grade colors keep their monopoly on meaning. No number changed. No grade changed.
v4.8, October 2026. A warmer coat of paint, and only paint. The cool gray-green surfaces across the site became warm cream and sand, cards and panels gained rounded corners and a soft shadow, and the small labels became pills. Nothing that carries meaning moved: the teal and basalt brand colors are unchanged, the three grade colors and their backgrounds are unchanged to the digit, every chart keeps its white surface and neutral ink, and no number, source, or grade changed.
v4.7, October 2026. A redesign of how the page reads, not what it says. No data changed. No grade changed. The page now opens by answering its own question: the headline asks whether Spokane is on track, and the verdict answers in the same words. A numbered table of contents doubles as the story’s outline. Each section teaches the idea it uses before using it, and the page ends on the next test instead of trailing off. The eight measures now wear their questions as names: Job growth is “Are we adding jobs?”, Who’s hiring is “Who is doing the hiring?”, Unemployment is “How many are out of work?”, Paychecks is “Does an hour pay enough?”, Incomes is “What do we take home?”, Spending is “Are we spending locally?”, Storefronts is “Are shops full or empty?”, and People is “Are people moving here?”. Same eight measures, same data, same sources. Only the labels became plain questions, and each card’s one-line result now answers its own question. One line was corrected for consistency: the hiring card’s result still said growth sat in one sector, which the sector record corrected to two back in v4.3. It now says two. Part 4 now states when Believe Spokane’s five-year goals were set (March 2023, about three and a half years in as of this edition) and that no public update yet carries running totals against them, with the updates linked so a reader can check. The asks gained a group for residents. Small interactions were added in plain JavaScript with no tracking: the contents bar highlights the part being read, the part 3 chart asks for a guess before it answers, and the chain draws itself once. All of it stands down for readers who prefer reduced motion, and the page still works with JavaScript off. No number changed. No grade changed.
v4.6, September 2026. Two more answer pages, and the site is now findable. The minimum wage in Spokane, and what jobs really pay answers the region’s most-searched wage question: $17.13 an hour in 2026, the state rate, since no eastern Washington city sets its own, verified against the Dept. of Labor & Industries pages, with the calculator’s eight industry pay figures in one sourced table. Who actually employs Spokane carries the two claims the public record supports free of charge, labeled as reported claims (Fairchild is the largest employer and four of the top 12 are health care, per Greater Spokane Inc., citing the Journal of Business 2025 Book of Lists), plus the full sector record the scorecard already holds. A sitemap and robots file were added so search engines can index the site. No number on a card changed. No grade changed.
v4.5, September 2026. Added a page: Is Spokane a good place to live. It answers the question people actually type when they are deciding whether to move here, with the same figures the scorecard already carries and the same source links. Three figures appear there that are not on a card, each sourced: the county’s median home value and poverty rate (Census ACS 2024, one-year), and the state minimum wage (WA Dept. of Labor & Industries). The page is refreshed each quarter with everything else, and the runbook now includes it. No grade changed.
v4.4, September 2026. Presentation only. The homepage calculator now draws its range as a chart that moves with the slider: jobs hired along the bottom, extra local jobs up the side, the low estimate solid, the high estimate hatched, and one scale for every sector so a flat wedge really is flat. The hero background is now the real QCEW jobs line for Spokane County, drawn with no axes and no numbers; the sourced version stays in the Job growth card, and a committed script redraws it from the data each quarter. The owner matrix, the money flow diagram, the card charts and every fold-out data table now span the full width of their sections, and the page gained more room between sections. No number changed. No grade changed.
v4.3, August 2026. Five new data pictures, and one substantive correction the new data forced. The correction first. The hiring card said one sector drives nearly all growth. Pulling the full sector-by-sector change from QCEW, 2019 to 2025, showed that is not what the record says: health care added 6,159 jobs and logistics and warehousing added 5,059, together about three in four of all net new jobs, while manufacturing, finance, information and retail all shrank. The card now says two sectors, the chart showing every major sector is on the card sorted by absolute jobs gained and lost, and the underlying rows are committed and downloadable. The grade is unchanged; concentration plus shrinking traded sectors is the same warning, stated more accurately. The pictures. The employer comparison is now two bars sharing an axis, the direct 500 solid and the ripple drawn as a hatched range because it is an estimate, not a forecast. The outside-money explanation became a flow diagram, with regional patients drawn crossing the boundary so the health care nuance is visible rather than asserted. The causal chain now marks the break at employers explicitly. The plan gained an owner and target matrix, four published goals against five actors, each actor opening its detail. The grading rule is drawn as a three-state scale on this page, and the archive’s grade dots carry letters so colour never carries meaning alone. Removed: the illustrated storefront block. The site now has the real vacancy figure, a real photograph, and a sector record; a drawing that restated them had become decoration. It remains in earlier archived editions. No grade changed.
v4.2, August 2026. The employer calculator grew from five industry presets to eight, on both the full tool and the homepage version. The additions are logistics and warehousing, hotels and tourism, and construction, chosen because they fill the space between the existing poles: logistics sells beyond the county at middle pay, construction pays well but mostly serves demand already here, and tourism brings outside money in at pay low enough to limit the ripple. Their wages are 2025 BLS QCEW industry pay for Spokane County, the same source as the trend charts, and the exact rows are committed to the repository and linked from the calculator’s methodology table. Their multiplier ranges follow the tool’s standing method: anchored to the published estimates, widened, and discounted downward, with the reasoning stated in the table so a reader can argue with it. The dropdown now orders industries by the size of their ripple. Also corrected: the homepage calculator had been carrying a health care wage of $75,600 while the full calculator’s sourced figure is $83,100, so the two tools could disagree slightly on the same inputs. Both now share one figure, and an automated parity check between the two preset lists ran before this shipped. No grade changed.
v4.1, August 2026. Polish, and two rules registered before they can matter. The rules: every moved grade in future updates carries one of two labels, data change when Spokane changed and measure updated when the ruler changed, with replaced measures marked not directly comparable to their archived predecessors; and the scorecard’s top level stays at eight measures, with new information earning a place by replacement or living a layer down. The polish: the eight closed cards now share one exact anatomy ending in a quiet view-details cue, so a reader meets eight scores rather than eight small reports; opening anything animates gently and not at all for readers who ask motion to stop; landing on a section from a link briefly marks the heading; geography labels explain themselves on tap or focus; the calculator’s numbers change instead of the interface; phones get a single Jump to menu with full-size touch targets instead of four; and the fonts load only the weights the pages use. The archive page now opens with the trajectory so far, one verdict per edition with its eight grade dots, which will become a timeline as editions accumulate. No figure, source or grade changed.
v4.0, August 2026. Refinement, and then the architecture stops moving. Five changes. The “what changed” section came out for this first edition, because an empty room adds a stop; its note now rides with the subscribe block, and the November update will promote it back to a full section, which the update runbook now instructs. The story section trusted its first explanation: it is now the causal chain plus one disclosure holding the flywheel and the longer prose, while the twelve-year jobs chart moved into the Jobs measure where it belongs, and the storefront drawing and Garland photograph moved into the Storefronts measure, next to the 5.3% they illustrate. The asks are grouped by who can act: city leaders, then colleges, then Washington State, mirroring the lever map. Questions and objections moved out of the asks menu into a bucket renamed Check the Work, which now holds objections, how grades work, the methodology and past editions, because an objection is not an ask and the bucket name should tell a first-time visitor what they will find. And each published target in the plan now carries tags naming the actors who can move it, a small responsibility map connecting goal to owner. Nothing left the site. No figure, source or grade changed.
v3.9, August 2026. Restructured the page from a report into a product. The old page was ten numbered chapters and asked to be read in order. The new one is built in three layers: what is happening, why, and the evidence, with each layer one click deeper than the last. The verdict and the eight measures now fill the first screens with almost nothing in between. A “what changed” section sits directly under the measures, thin in this first edition and central from November on. The tax objection moved into a new “questions and objections” section near the end, joined by four more objections stated in their strongest form: unemployment is low, health care growth is good, City Hall controls little of this, and population growth is success. Skeptics get a destination without steering everyone else through a tax debate. The published targets and the lever map merged into one section, the plan, because they answer one question: who is supposed to do what, and toward which goals. The lever map itself became a matrix, six actors in rows with what they control and a status, each opening to detail. The four peer cities plus Spokane’s own Expo ’74 story are now a five-card playbook. The section numbering came off, because numbers said “read me in order” and the page no longer asks that. Geography labels now explain themselves on hover. The per-measure correction line shrank to two words. Nothing left the site: the material a first-time reader no longer wades through is one click deeper, where the reader who wants it can still get it. No figure, source or grade changed.
v3.8, August 2026. A copy edit, guided by one instruction: stop arguing and trust the scorecard. The opening now goes from the question to the verdict in about half the length, and the explanations it used to carry, what prosperity means here, what is and is not being graded, live where they belong instead of blocking the door. The homepage narrator changed from “we” to “this scorecard,” because one person maintains this and the plural quietly implied an organization; first person still speaks on the who-made-this page, where it is honest. Each measure now leads with a plain conclusion a reader can scan in a breath: jobs are shrinking, growth is concentrated in one sector, storefronts are flat, people are still arriving. The tax objection moved behind a disclosure: still on the page, still taking Greater Spokane Inc.’s poll head on, no longer routing every reader through a tax policy debate. Several lines that implied motives were rewritten to state facts instead, and the four city case studies were cut by about half with every citation kept. The Riverfront Park claim was narrowed, because turning rail yards into a park proves this city can finish a long civic project, not that the same mechanism lands wage-raising employers, and the smaller claim is the stronger one. The calls to action collapsed to one, get the quarterly update, with challenging a grade as the secondary. And one correction: the page used to say every number was public and a reader could look them all up. That overstated it. Retail vacancy and sector data come from private datasets, disclosed in this methodology all along. The page now says what is exactly true: every grade links to its source, most data comes straight from public agencies, and privately sourced figures are labeled. No figure or grade changed.
v3.7, August 2026. Added a fifth case to the “It’s been done” section: Spokane itself. Rail yards and trestles covered Havermale Island for decades until the city tore them out for Expo ’74, the first world’s fair with an environmental theme, and the grounds became Riverfront Park. The clock tower, the last piece of the 1902 Great Northern depot, stands in the photograph beside the text, taken in 2024 by Steven Cordes and used under the Unsplash License with credit. Claims are cited to HistoryLink and the City of Spokane’s own Riverfront Park history. This is the strongest possible answer to “cities cannot change on purpose,” because the proof is local, and the section now says so. No figure, source or grade on the measures changed.
v3.6, August 2026. Two more history charts, and the site’s first photograph. June unemployment, 2015 to 2026, in the unemployment tile: each point is the published June figure from BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics, the same month the headline uses, not seasonally adjusted. The 2026 point from that series reads 3.8%, which independently matches the figure already on the card. Health care’s share of all county jobs, 2014 to 2025, in the hiring tile: the share has been above one in five for over a decade and is at its highest point now, 21.3%. The formula is disclosed where the chart appears, health care jobs across all ownerships divided by all covered jobs, both from QCEW. Both series are committed to the repository with download links. Per-person income history was attempted and is not included, because the public sources for it require an API key this project does not yet hold; it stays on the roadmap rather than arriving through a side door. The photograph shows the 900 block of West Garland Avenue in 2016, the Garland marquee with For Lease signs in the windows beside it, by Charles Burns under a Creative Commons license, credited and linked where it appears. Its caption states plainly that a 2016 photo is not evidence about today’s vacancy. A photographs policy now sits above: open license or the maintainer’s own camera, named credit, dated, and never presented as evidence for a current number. No grade changed.
v3.5, August 2026. The site now shows time, and it now lets you test the mechanism without leaving the page. Two history charts. Jobs in Spokane County, 2014 through 2025, and average annual pay per worker over the same years, both drawn from BLS QCEW annual averages pulled directly from the source and committed to the repository with a download link beside each chart. The jobs chart is honest about what it shows and what it cannot: annual averages climb through 2025 and flatten in 2024, while the 2,900 job decline at the top of the page is mid 2025 to mid 2026 monthly data, too recent to appear in annual figures. The caption says exactly that, because a reader who spots the difference unaided would be right to ask. Pay history is labeled as unadjusted for inflation. Rules for all trend charts are now pre-registered above: lines show data, never grades, and grades are never applied backward. The calculator now runs on the page. Pick a sector and a headcount and the ranges update in place, using the same math and sources as the full calculator. It shows ranges only, and it appears only when the browser can run it, so the page without it is unchanged. Both charts can be read as tables. No grade changed.
v3.4, August 2026. Three additions, prompted by a review of what the best public-sector sites do well. Every measure now carries a comparison. Five of the eight already showed where they sat against a benchmark; three did not, which meant a reader had no way to judge whether the number was good or bad. Two of the three gained a comparison bar. The third, population, gained a line of text instead, because the sources report only the direction of growth and not a rate, and drawing a bar would have meant inventing one. Every chart can now be read as a table. A bar shows a shape; a table gives the exact figures, which matters for anyone checking the work and for anyone who cannot see the chart. The tables are generated from the bars themselves, so the two can never drift apart. Every measure now carries its own correction link. Doubt happens at a specific number, not in the footer, so the route to challenge a figure now sits directly beneath that figure and its sources. No figure, source or grade changed.
v3.3, August 2026. Fixed a rendering fault. Two of the section backgrounds were painting over their neighbours, so sections three and four looked like one long block, six and seven looked like another, and a stray band of white appeared at the end of section seven where the bleed stopped. The cause: the backgrounds run edge to edge using a very large shadow, and that shadow has to be clipped to the height of its own section or it spills upward and downward as well as sideways. Two of the three background styles carried that clip and the third did not. Adding it restores the alternation that was already correct in the markup. Worth noting how this was missed: an earlier check confirmed that no two neighbouring sections shared a background colour, and that was true. The colours were different; one was simply painting on top of the other. The check measured the wrong thing. No figure, source, grade or word changed.
v3.2, August 2026. Type sizes only. The verdict had grown to be the largest thing on the page, larger than the headline it is supposed to answer, which put the hierarchy backwards. A reader’s eye landed on the grade before the reason for caring about it. The headline is now the largest element, the verdict sits below it and above the section headings, and the three steps hold at every screen width rather than converging on a tablet, where the verdict and the section headings had been rendering within a third of a pixel of each other. The verdict lost size and gained weight, so it still reads as the answer without outranking the question. No figure, source, grade or word changed.
v3.1, August 2026. Bug fix pass, no change to any figure or grade. Four real faults, found by auditing rather than by looking. One: the scorecard page had no top-level heading at all. Rebuilding the header a few versions ago turned the site name from a heading into ordinary text, which left the main page of the site with nothing for a screen reader or a search engine to identify it by. Restored. Two: the description of the flywheel diagram still used the retired colour words, so a reader using a screen reader heard green, red and yellow while the page itself says strong, weak and mixed. It now uses the same words as the rest of the page. Three: clicking a section link on a phone scrolled the heading underneath the navigation bar, because the offset was set for a single-row bar and the bar wraps to two rows on a narrow screen. Four: the methodology, calculator, who-made-this and archive pages had different navigation from the scorecard, so a reader who followed a link out of the main page lost the menu and the way to subscribe. All four now carry the same header. Also removed fourteen blocks of styling left behind by earlier revisions that no longer applied to anything.
v3.0, August 2026. Wrote the seams. The ten sections were already in a defensible order, but each one began cold and none of them pointed at the next, so the page read as ten good sections rather than one argument. Every section now ends with a single line that poses the question the following section answers, and that line is also the link to it, so the narrative and the navigation are the same object. The scorecard also gained a forward reference to the published regional targets, because a score means more when the reader knows early that a standard exists and that this page checks against it. No section moved, no figure changed, no grade changed. The order was tested against a four part structure: the claim and its evidence, the mechanism and the objection to it, the actors who could move it and the proof that moving it works, and finally the ask. Every section held its position under that test.
v2.9, August 2026. Presentation only. The background surfaces now rotate strictly rather than alternating unevenly. Three surfaces cycle in order across the sections, with the darkest one held back for the asks, where it marks the one place the page asks a reader to do something. Previously two sections at the top shared a surface and the pattern broke into streaks further down, which read as accidental. The rules between sections came out at the same time; when every neighbour differs in colour, a line between them is redundant. The section navigation collapsed from a nine-item list into four menus, each opening to the sections beneath it, built from the browser’s own disclosure element so it needs no script and works on a phone. No figure, source or grade changed.
v2.8, August 2026. Four structural changes, no change to any figure or grade. The verdict is now its own numbered section rather than the tail of the opening block, so it reads as the first chapter of the page instead of a continuation of the masthead. The edition date moved below the opening paragraphs, where it belongs as a detail rather than the first thing on the page. Navigation labels are in title case. And there is now a way to be told when the numbers change: a link in the header and two blocks in the page, pointing at a form that collects an email and nothing else. The commitment attached to it is one message a quarter, on the day the new grades post. Sections renumbered to run one through ten with the verdict first. Also relabelled the section comments in the source, which had drifted out of order during an earlier rearrangement and caused a block to be inserted in the wrong place.
v2.7, August 2026. Fixed the page alignment. Text and exhibits had been sitting on two different left edges about 180 pixels apart, alternating the whole way down, because running text was held in a narrow column while the grids and diagrams broke out wider. That arrangement works when the wide thing is a picture. Here the wide things are the scorecard itself, the actor cards and the city cards, which are the main content, so the main content began well to the left of its own heading and read as a fault. Everything now sits in one container at the wider measure and shares a single left edge. Paragraphs still stop at a readable line length, they just do it by capping their own width rather than by living in a narrower box. The pages that are mostly reading, the methodology, the calculator, the who page and the archive, use a narrower container than the scorecard does. No figure, source or grade changed.
v2.6, August 2026. Structure and surfaces. The top of the page is now a conventional header, with the name and mark on the left and the site links on the right, and the whole area above the fold sits on the same tinted surface used elsewhere on the page. Each of the nine sections carries a number, so the page reads as a sequence rather than a scroll. The surfaces those sections sit on now alternate properly; two adjacent sections had been sharing a tint and merging into one long region. And the tints themselves got deeper. This was the real problem: the old tint measured a contrast ratio of 1.09 against the page background, where 1.0 is identical, so the sections had been alternating correctly for some time and simply could not be seen. Text legibility on the new surface was checked rather than assumed and passes at every size. Also fixed a layout fault that had shipped earlier: the wider exhibits centre themselves with a left margin, and four of them carried their own margin shorthand later in the stylesheet, which quietly cancelled it. The flow diagram, the street drawing, the money panel and the actor diagram had been rendering with their left edges 279 pixels off the side of the screen. Found by measuring every one of their positions rather than by looking. No figure, source or grade changed.
v2.5, August 2026. Rewrote the top of the page. It opened with a diagnosis, which sat oddly under a masthead that promises a scorecard about prosperity. It now opens with the point of the exercise instead: we want our kids to be able to stay here. The lines under it define what the word prosperity means on this page, in the plainest terms available, which is a paycheck that covers a life in Spokane. The connective to the verdict changed from the formal question to “so how is that going?”, so that off track reads as an honest answer rather than an accusation. The formal question, whether Spokane is attracting the kind of employers that raise wages, moved down to head the eight measures, where precision matters more than plainness. The copy is also written closer to how people actually speak, with fragments and contractions, because the earlier version read as something written rather than something meant. And it concedes the obvious: the grades are judgment calls, the numbers underneath them are not. No figure, source or grade changed.
v2.4, August 2026. Added a section taking on the strongest objection to this page’s argument. Greater Spokane Inc.’s Pulse poll found in April 2026 that 68% of Spokane-area voters had actively considered moving away, and when asked why, jobs and wages did not appear among the reasons at all. Taxes led at 21%, then government leadership at 19% and cost of living at 17%. That is a real finding from the region’s own economic development group, and quoting only the friendly half of it would have been dishonest, so the section leads with the full breakdown. It then argues that the two answers describe the same squeeze from opposite ends: a tax bill is a share of what you earn, Washington ranks 49th of 50 for how much more of their income lower earners pay, and Spokane earns about 80 cents on the state dollar against the same tax structure. Three limits are stated in the section itself rather than buried. The tax figures are statewide and there is no Spokane version of them. Washington has been getting less regressive, not more, and moved off last place in 2024. And the poll surveyed voters, who skew older and more settled than the people deciding whether to start a career here. This is the first section on the site that makes a claim about state policy rather than regional outcomes, which is why its limits are printed next to it. Sources: GSI’s Pulse community poll, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Who Pays? seventh edition, January 2024. No figure or grade on the eight measures changed.
v2.3, August 2026. Layout, no content change. The top of the page had three heavyweight headlines stacked on each other, the site name, the question and the verdict, so a reader’s eye had nowhere to land, and there was no hook at all before the scaffolding. The masthead now recedes to masthead scale. The fold opens with the thing a resident has actually seen, new apartments on Monroe with empty storefronts underneath, which is this page’s own downstream argument said plainly. The question became a small line above the verdict rather than a competing headline, so the verdict reads as the answer to it. The note about this being a report card on Spokane rather than on any employer moved below the verdict and got shorter; it still sits above the fold. Sections got more space between them. And the exhibits, meaning the score grid, the flow diagram, the goal tiles, the ecosystem diagram, the city cards, the lever cards, the money panel and the street drawing, now run wider than the text. Prose stays at a narrow reading measure on purpose, because widening running text hurts it. No figure, source or grade changed.
v2.2, August 2026. The verdict now shows its own scale. “Off track” on its own told a reader nothing about how bad that is, whether anything sits below it, or what better would look like. The hero now carries all three possible verdicts, off track, mixed and on track, each with the rule that produces it, and marks which one the region is on. It also states what would move it: with three weak measures and one strong, one weak measure turning strong or two turning mixed would put Spokane in the middle. That sentence is arithmetic from the published rule, not an opinion, and a reader can check it against the eight grades. Recomputing both is now step 5a of the quarterly runbook. No figure, source or grade changed.
v2.1, August 2026. Added one illustration, placed at the end of the causal chain: a drawing of a commercial block with the apartments full upstairs and half the ground floor papered over. It is captioned as a drawing rather than a photograph, and the caption says plainly that the vacancy figure is the evidence and the picture only shows what that figure looks like at eye level. A landmark illustration was considered and set aside. A montage of the Clock Tower and the Monroe Street Bridge would say “isn’t Spokane nice” directly above a verdict of off track, which is the wrong note, and any error in those silhouettes would be obvious to exactly the readers this page is for. No figure, source or grade changed.
v2.0, August 2026. Visual rebuild, no change to any figure, source or grade. The page had solved the wall-of-text problem on paper while still looking like an article: six or seven different ideas that all rendered as an eyebrow, a heading and two paragraphs. This pass gives each idea its own shape. The eight measures are now a four-across grid of tiles, each carrying its geography, its grade, its figure and a small bar showing where it sits against its benchmark, and each opening in place to full width for the chart, the reasoning and the sources. The causal chain is a diagram with the numbers in it rather than a line of text. The lever map opens with a diagram of the six actors around the regional economy, and the cards behind it collapse. The four peer cities lead with asset, move and result instead of a paragraph. The asks are numbered. Added a geography key explaining why some cards say County and others say Metro or City, since the site asks readers to hold that distinction. Added a panel contrasting money that enters the region with money already circulating in it, which states plainly that neither kind of work is worth more than the other, and that only one of them makes the pot bigger. Added a section naming Greater Spokane Inc.’s published five-year targets, because the honest framing of this project is not that the region lacks a plan. It is that somebody should be keeping score against the plan that exists. Every word of the previous prose is still on the page, behind a disclosure.
v1.9, August 2026. Correction. This page made two claims about named institutions that were wrong, and they were live for several hours. Both are fixed here rather than quietly patched, because that is the rule this project runs on. First: the lever map implied Greater Spokane Inc. had no published plan or public reporting, and asked for one. That was false. GSI’s Believe Spokane campaign publishes five-year goals, including 5,000 jobs and $1 billion in new capital investment and 300 internships, along with progress updates, and GSI runs a public regional economic indicators dashboard. The card now credits that, and the ask has changed from “publish the plan” to “publish progress against the plan,” which is the real gap. Second: this page said no local school publishes where graduates in key fields end up. That was also false. Gonzaga publishes an interactive First Destination dashboard that can be filtered by academic major and by geographic location, and Whitworth publishes graduate outcomes as well. The ask now credits both and states the actual gap, which is that the reports are not comparable across schools, so no one can add them up. Also changed, for fairness rather than accuracy: graduate retention is now described as a diagnostic for the employer ecosystem rather than a grade on any university, because a school that produces engineers who cannot find local work has not failed, it has produced evidence. And the anchor employers card no longer reads as a grade on individual companies. The weak signal describes traded-sector hiring across the region, not the performance of any employer investing here. No figure and no grade on the eight measures changed.
v1.8, August 2026. Added a second ask, this one aimed at Washington State rather than at the colleges. The state’s Education Research and Data Center already links graduation records to Employment Security Department wage records, and already publishes what graduates earn by school and by major. It does not publish where they work, only that they work somewhere in Washington. Employer location is already in those records, so the county cut is a different view of an existing report rather than new research. The ask names the blind spot too: it would catch graduates leaving Spokane for Seattle and miss those leaving for Boise. Also fixed two things on small screens. The section bar scrolls sideways on a phone but gave no sign that it did, so a chopped word read as a bug; it now fades at the edge. And chart labels were taking 96 pixels of a 335 pixel row, which squeezed the bars; labels are narrower on phones now. No figure, source or grade changed.
v1.7, August 2026. Renamed. This was The Spokane Employer Scorecard. That title reads as a scorecard of employers, the way a restaurant scorecard grades restaurants, and a business owner could reasonably land here and think they were the one being judged. That was never what this is. The page grades the region, not any company in it. The new name says so, and a line above the fold now says it outright. Nothing else changed: no figure, no source, no grade, no measure. The August 2026 edition in the archive carries the new name, because the rename happened inside that edition rather than after it. Earlier entries in this log use the old name and are left exactly as written.
v1.6, August 2026. Visual identity, no content change. Added a mark: three basalt columns of uneven height, which read equally as the rock this city sits on and as a bar chart, and which match the coloured column already running down the left edge of every measure. It now serves as the site favicon, which did not previously exist. Moved the accent colour from lilac to a river teal, and added basalt charcoal as a second. The reason is a constraint rather than a preference: green, amber and red can only ever mean a grade here, which rules out the otherwise obvious ponderosa green and brick red, since a brand colour colliding with a grade on the same screen would be a defect. Set every figure in tabular numerals so columns of numbers align on the decimal. Replaced the social preview image, which was the flywheel diagram, with a card carrying the mark and the standing question. No figure, source, grade or piece of copy was changed.
v1.5, August 2026. Review pass, no figure or grade changed. Retired a planned measure: the council attention audit is dropped from the roadmap. Counting how often an agenda mentions employer attraction is a weak proxy for results, it is gameable, and a zoning or infrastructure item can matter enormously without using the words. It also pulled the project toward political watchdog and away from scorekeeper. In its place the roadmap now lists city-controlled outputs that can actually be measured: permit turnaround time, employment-land readiness, business fees, and major employer expansions retained or won. Claims softened where the evidence was thinner than the wording: the lead line now reads “employer growth isn’t keeping up” rather than asserting an absence of high-paying employers, which the data supports less directly; the case studies are framed as four cities Spokane can learn from rather than four cities that looked like Spokane, and no longer claim none of them got lucky. Labels: lever-map statuses now read Unanswered, Data gap or Not graded in neutral type, so that the graded vocabulary (strong, mixed, weak) appears only where something is actually being graded. Anchor employers keeps the only graded status because it alone is tied to a measure. Added a Who made this page carrying identity, background, funding and the corrections policy, and made the calculator comparison carry a prominent “illustrative multiplier range, not a Spokane forecast” label.
v1.4, August 2026. Two substantive changes and one structural one. Substantive: the “who’s actually hiring” card no longer says health care simply serves people already here. It now states that much of health care serves existing local demand while Spokane’s role as a regional referral hub treating Idaho and Montana patients does bring outside dollars in, which is what the calculator’s own multiplier basis has said all along. The claim was too strong and the two pages disagreed. Also retired the phrase “career-grade jobs” in favor of “higher-wage jobs,” because the economic distinction being drawn is about wage level and whether a job brings outside money into the region, not about whether someone’s work counts as a career. And the flywheel caption no longer calls fixing the missing gear “the city’s job”; it is the region’s challenge, with city hall responsible for pulling its own levers toward it. No figure, source or grade changed. Structural: the eight measures now sit directly under the verdict, ahead of the argument, and carry an explicit note that they are regional outcomes rather than any one institution’s performance, with the lever map labeled as the separate accountability half. Started the public archive at past editions: each quarter the outgoing edition is frozen unchanged before any figure is touched, and archived editions are never edited. Added a “what changed this quarter” line above the measures, which carries content from the November update onward.
v1.3, August 2026. Presentation only. No figure, source or grade changed. Rebuilt the scorecard page around progressive disclosure so a reader gets the story in ten seconds, the eight measures in two minutes, and the full evidence when they want it: each measure now opens to reveal its benchmark chart, its “why it matters” paragraph and its sources, with nothing removed. Added an overall verdict at the top (off track) under the mechanical rule now published above, replacing an unlabeled tally the reader had to interpret. Added plain-language grade labels (strong, mixed, weak) bound to the existing color grades. Added a homepage teaser for the employer calculator, showing multiplier ranges only. Turned the lever map and the four city case studies into cards, carrying their status lines and citations across verbatim. Prose that previously ran ahead of the numbers now sits behind “read the longer explanation.” Nothing was deleted from the page.
v1.2, August 2026. Added the lever map (“Who moves which levers”), assigning specific levers to the city, the regional recruiters, higher education, anchor employers, the state, and residents. Status lines there follow the same rule as grades: tied to a graded card, tied to a source, or stated as an open data request. Higher education is not yet graded; its first measured item will be transparency itself, starting with program-level graduate retention in the region.
v1.1, August 2026 (pre-launch review). Re-graded unemployment from green to yellow and made its labor-force caveat the headline; replaced the household-income headline with per-person income (yellow) pending full-time earnings data; updated retail sales to the newest county quarter and labeled the city figure’s vintage; added geography labels throughout; tightened the calculator’s multipliers (tech capped below Moretti’s published maximum per more conservative county-level research, health care raised for Spokane’s regional referral-hub role); added Pittsburgh as a fourth case study. Net effect: fewer greens. Honesty over comfort.
v1.0, August 2026. First publication. Eight measures. Planned additions: new business applications per resident (Census Business Formation Statistics), city permit turnaround time, corridor-level storefront vacancy, and city-controlled outputs where the data can be obtained: permit turnaround time, employment-land readiness, business fees, and major employer expansions retained or won. Also queued: median earnings of full-time workers (ACS S2001), working-age employment rate (Spokane Trends 2.4.2), pre-registered numeric grade thresholds, and a peer-metro comparison column.