Safe and Healthy Spokane task force member Melissa Mace (at the podium) was one of several speakers who announced the group’s final recommendations to improve criminal justice and behavioral health last week.
Young Kwak photo
After nine months, the privately funded Safe and Healthy Spokane task force has finished looking for solutions to myriad issues within the criminal justice and behavioral health systems, narrowing the focus to 14 recommendations the community should tackle.
The task force of more than 30 people was convened by Greater Spokane Incorporated, Waters Meet Foundation (formerly Empire Health), Downtown Spokane Partnership, Greater Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce and Avista to address the “unprecedented drug and mental health crisis that is overwhelming our community’s safety and health resources.”
The idea for the group came together after Spokane County voters rejected a 2023 ballot measure that would’ve increased the local sales tax by 0.2% (20 cents per $100 purchase) for 30 years to pay for a new jail. The private funders decided to model an effort in Whatcom County that brought together experts and people with lived experience to identify necessary investments in health and public safety before successfully passing a ballot measure to build a new jail.
With the addition of four subcommittees, the Safe and Healthy Spokane task force brought together more than 100 community members to discuss issues within healthcare (including substance use and mental health treatment), the courts, jail facilities, housing and more. Participants included professionals who work in each area, as well as people who’ve been incarcerated, gone through treatment or have other insights from personal experience.
Last week, several task force members shared the culmination of that work at a press conference.
“Escalating behavioral health needs and public safety concerns have strained families, livelihoods and public resources across Spokane County. And while we have wrestled with these challenges for far too long, we have yet to break the status quo and meaningfully address some of these challenges head on,” said Emilie Cameron, president and CEO of the Downtown Spokane Partnership.
The group did not recommend that officials put forward any sort of ballot measure to pay for a new jail or behavioral health investments.
Instead, the primary recommendation is to create an independent “accountability and coordination council” to permanently keep the momentum of the task force going. Some recommendations include steps that can be taken immediately — for instance, data employees at various agencies are already collaborating on how to better share information with one another and the public — while some actions may take more time, such as investing in more people who want to work in behavioral health.
“A central truth emerged through this process: A community is only as safe as it is healthy, and it is only as healthy as it is safe,” Cameron said. “This is not the end of the process. In fact, this is just the beginning.”
Over the next few weeks, a handful of task force leaders will conduct a stump tour of sorts to share the ideas with local city councils and county electeds.
ACCOUNTABILITY COUNCIL
The Safe and Healthy Spokane report states that the proposed accountability and coordination council should: not be housed within any single government entity, be designed to live outside the pressure of political cycles, and include members with “subject and systems expertise” as well as “people with the power and authority to make decisions, align resources and effect change.”
“The council should bring together the public, private, nonprofit, philanthropic, Tribal, victims’ rights and lived-experience partners that the work requires,” the report states. “This effort requires cross-jurisdictional commitment and dedicated staffing and operating support.”
To create such an entity, the report suggests convening “the Planning Team and Advisory Group” leads from the task force to design the structure over the next three to six months. After defining the decision-making authority and roles of the council, the report envisions it will take six months to a year to get participating jurisdictions to sign intergovernmental agreements.
Ideally, the task force asks that the council have the authority to escalate and resolve issues when work stalls on implementing any of the recommendations.
“Without a formal structure to drive this work across systems and across time, every other recommendation here is at risk of the fate of prior efforts: partial adoption, uneven implementation, stalled decision-making, and the loss of public trust,” the report states. “The community cannot afford that outcome again.”
OTHER PRIORITIES
During the presentation on Thursday, June 11, task force member Chud Wendle, executive director of the Hutton Settlement and a longtime critic of how the city addresses issues downtown, said he became vocal about vacancy rates and crime from a business and property owner viewpoint.
“That property manager lens led me to one simple answer to this problem: We need a new jail,” Wendle said. “Well, over the last nine months, I have to tell you, thanks to these individuals here and to the others on the task force, they’ve opened my eyes … educating me on the complexities and shortcomings in our current judicial system.”
Two of the task force recommendations include investing in a modern justice facility and housing.
“Modern, right-sized justice facilities and community-based treatment, crisis stabilization, diversion, reentry, prevention and housing capacity must be planned together, because each makes the other work,” Wendle said.
Melissa Mace, a counselor and executive director of the NAACP Spokane, said the recommendations are designed to meet people where they are.
“You cannot build anything on the worst day of somebody’s life,” Mace said. “It is a moment to call somebody in to get to their level, to see them truly, and then make a plan to move forward.”
Fellow task force member Angel Tomeo Sam, who co-founded the nonprofit Yoyot Sp’q’n’i, led the opposition campaign for the 2023 ballot measure to fund a new jail. A member of the Confederated Colville Tribes, Tomeo Sam shared her perspective as someone who’s been incarcerated and works with people dealing with substance use and domestic violence issues.
She highlighted the task force recommendations calling for improvements in diversion, upstream prevention and culturally responsive services.
“In Native communities, we’ve always understood that we’re only as strong as our most vulnerable relatives,” she said. “That is why these recommendations matter. They recognize that not every crisis is a crime. They call for expanding alternative crisis response, strengthening culturally responsive services, investing in youth and young adults before they reach a breaking point, and building the workforce needed to make those services available when they need them.”
Safe and Healthy Spokane task force leaders noted the work is just about to start as they share their recommendations with elected officials.
Young Kwak photo
JAIL WORK CONTINUES
Separate from the task force discussions, Spokane County is already renewing efforts to replace the county’s two jail facilities.
In April, the Spokane County Board of County Commissioners unanimously started the “essential public facilities process” to site a Justice Center that would replace or “augment” the downtown Spokane County Jail and Geiger Corrections Center near the airport.
In May, the commissioners also hired a consultant to create a justice center needs assessment. CGL Management Group will be paid up to $211,000 to summarize and update previous jail needs assessments the county has paid for over the last two decades, assess the buildings and jail population trends, and present recommendations for various scenarios if the county builds a new facility. That will include suggestions for the number of beds, how many square feet of space might be needed, and what the operations and maintenance needs would be.
The Safe and Healthy Spokane recommendations will also factor into that work, which started last week, says Mike Sparber, Spokane County’s senior director of law and justice.
The county is asking the consultant to “look at the space, supervision, where can we get efficiency out of it? What are the safe and unsafe things that we need to be evaluating? What are the population drivers that are bringing people into the jail?” Sparber says. “There’s a lot of things that they’re going to take into consideration.”
On June 9, the commissioners agreed to send an application to the Washington state Criminal Justice Training Commission to request grant money and ask for permission to levy a 0.1% sales tax for criminal justice purposes.
State lawmakers created the new sales tax in 2025 under House Bill 2015, which also created a three-year local law enforcement grant program. The county would only be allowed to levy the tax (which doesn’t require voter approval) if it also receives a grant from the program.
If approved by the Criminal Justice Training Commission, Spokane County would not start collecting the new tax until the end of June 2028. Cities and counties are not allowed to levy the new 0.1% sales tax if their voters have rejected a similar criminal justice sales tax within the previous 12 months.
NEXT STEPS
Tomeo Sam tells the Inlander that the community “really should ride this wave of this collaborative effort” by the task force. Through the process, she says she’s built camaraderie with Wendle and others who used to disagree with some of her ideas and who argued that taking care of people does not help with public safety.
“It’s something that I’ve never seen Spokane do,” she says. “We did a good job of keeping politics out of the room. … This is an issue that is permanent, so really, creating something like a council that has longevity beyond elected cycles, beyond the next crisis that we’re in, it’s something that’s going to be really key in keeping this momentum going.”
Zeke Smith, president of the Waters Meet Foundation, hopes that any council formed out of the work has a comprehensive focus and doesn’t simply mirror other criminal justice groups convened in Spokane County in the past.
“I would hope that it actually goes beyond just the criminal justice system and that, similar to these recommendations, it’s about a holistic and integrated system,” Smith says. “I also think that part of what has been a challenge in the past is that you’ve had one jurisdiction who kind of like anoints that body, and different people get into those roles, decide they don’t want that input, and they get rid of it. Well, that can’t happen.”
He thinks there’s still enough energy among participants to push local officials to act so this doesn’t become just another report on a shelf.
“There is really an expectation that those bodies are going to take this report and figure out, ‘How do we move forward?’” Smith says. “A lot of what’s in there doesn’t actually require new money to make it happen. … If we do want to ask taxpayers for more money, the more that we can show them that [the] government is actually working more effectively together and using their existing knowledge more effectively, the easier it’s going to be.”
RECOMMENDATIONS
Read the full report at safehealthyspokane.org
Create an accountability and coordination council
Create a robust, shared data system
Formalize upstream prevention (before arrest or hospitalization) partnerships
Integrate peer support at every step
Formalize “warm handoffs” to the next service
Scale alternative crisis response models
Establish coordinated intake assessments shared with all providers to avoid duplication
Strengthen pre-trial diversion options
Focus on high utilizers of criminal justice and health systems
Expand culturally responsive services
Establish a youth and young adult prevention and response system
Invest in the behavioral health and justice system workforces to build up staffing
Invest in modern, integrated justice facilities and a coordinated network of community-based facilities that advance public safety and community health
Strengthen housing options