Three years after Spokane County voters rejected a $1.7 billion, 30-year tax hike for new jails and improved mental health and addiction treatment services, and nine months after a task force was formed representing dozens of governments, organizations and interest groups, the group’s “bold road map” was finally released Thursday.
For nearly two hours, conveners and task force members praised the group for setting aside politics and finding common ground, agreeing that the county needed “modern” justice facilities, more investment in addiction treatment and other social services, and additional affordable or homeless housing – much of which, though not all, was proposed in some form three years ago.
“This report is a summation of nine months of hard work,” said Mike Sparber, senior director of law and justice. “… We sat at the table, we looked through some challenging topics, and at the end of it, we decided that we could meet. We don’t always have to agree on everything, but we could meet on enough things to try to get some recommendations moving forward, so I’m very proud of the work that all of us did.”
Sparber’s comments were echoed by more than a dozen people who spoke at the news conference. Politicians and community activists had feuded over Measure 1 in 2023, contributing to its overwhelming rejection by voters of all political stripes, but now they were presenting a shared vision for the future.
Central to the report’s findings is a need for better coordination between all aspects of the justice system, housing, behavioral health, treatment services and the governments that fund them.
Yet the report included no measurement of the system’s current capacity and no specifics about how much investment was needed in which sector. When asked exactly how many beds would be needed for adequate homeless services, incarceration or treatment programs, no one on the task force could give an estimation. The report makes no determination about whether a new jail is needed or the existing facility should be modernized.
The report instead uses phrases like “appropriately sized justice facilities” and securing “adequate funding,” and references to other work groups that will determine what that entails.
A minority of task force members – most left the news conference without taking questions – said that the lack of specificity was “by design.”
“That gives breadth to the work,” said Melissa Mace, executive director of Spokane NAACP. “… The focus is on the people and the need, not the numbers, because that blocks the full purpose of the group. We need to focus on the people that need help. Period. We need to focus on who needs help. Period. Numbers and beds and all that stuff is very distracting to the fact that we are in crisis.”
With at least a framework in hand, a consultant hired by the county will begin assessing the county jail’s facilities to better understand what modernization entails, according to Sparber.
“They started yesterday,” Sparber said. “They’re coming in to do an evaluation of our current facilities, the infrastructure and how well it’s working. The overcrowded conditions, they’re looking at the functionality of it.”
Their analysis should be finished in four to six months, Sparber said.
One of the task force’s clearest recommendations was a need for a “coordinating council” to take the task force’s broad recommendations and ensure they are implemented.
Spokane County Superior Court Presiding Judge Tony Hazel argued this coordinating council was necessary to create a more humane criminal justice system and prevent the currently unified approach from fracturing. Prosecutors, dispatch, emergency services, behavioral health services, law enforcement, public defenders, victim advocates and people who are impacted by the criminal justice system should be a part of that coordination, Hazel said.
“Why have past efforts failed?” Hazel said. “The coordination structure in the past has always been temporary. It’s always been in the form of a pilot program, or it’s a temporary momentum that builds to build that coordination. It usually doesn’t get the composition of the coordination perfectly correct, because key stakeholders are missing. And then always, time goes on, focus goes away.”
The coordination council needs to be permanent and be able to hold any individual government accountable for retreating back to politics over partnership, Hazel added. However, the task force appeared to make no specific recommendations on exactly who would be on that council, how it will be formed, how it will hold governments accountable or to what metrics they would be held.
“There’s intentional flexibility that’s given in how that coordination structure will be designed,” Hazel said. “We intentionally left some flexibility and let the governance structure sort some of those details out.”
And despite repeated statements Thursday or scattered throughout the report that more funding was needed, there was no discussion about how to secure that funding, whether a sales tax was necessary or when such a proposal might make it to the ballot.
Almost every task force member already left by the time they were asked why a sales tax wasn’t discussed in the report; Angel Tomeo Sam, who helped run a campaign against Measure 1 in 2023, argued that introducing the tax to the discussion would “open a door for politics to come and be present, and that, in the past, has really disrupted this work before.”
Spokane Councilman Michael Cathcart believes it’s still possible a sales tax could land on a November ballot, pointing to the ongoing efforts of various parallel work groups that are now tasked with making the task force’s recommendations concrete and figuring out what it will take to accomplish them.
“There are still a lot of question marks,” Cathcart noted, which need to be addressed before the community could be presented with a clear breakdown about how the revenue from a new tax will be used – the lack of which bogged down Measure 1 three years ago. While the county would receive the lion’s share of the tax revenue from a proposal like the one in 2023, each city also would receive some portion, and there has been little discussion about how those funds would be used, Cathcart noted.
There are also questions about whether other taxes currently being eyed by the county and city, which would not require voter approval, could impact voter sentiment ahead of a November ballot measure, he added.
And a tax measure can only move forward as quickly as all of the currently optimistic partners remain on the same page, Cathcart said.
There were already hints at Thursday’s news conference, despite the generally genial atmosphere, of some of the political roadblocks that local governments will need to hurdle.
“I respectfully ask our elected leaders, including our mayor of Spokane, to have faith in the work the task force has done, and not to demand that their personal agenda supersedes our work,” Hutton Settlement Executive Director Chud Wendle said at the tail end of his speech, seemingly a reference to a June 1 letter written by Mayor Lisa Brown.
In that letter, Brown wrote that her administration generally supported the task force’s recommendations but believed that certain aspects needed to be prioritized due to the region’s limited resources. This included convening a coordinating council – nearly identical to the task force’s recommendation – fully funding pre-trial services and the existing county jail to better determine what new facilities were needed, and improved coordination of existing resources available to the county and cities.
While Brown has since argued that this letter was meant to suggest immediate steps forward, it raised alarms for several members of the task force and other elected leaders.
“Before the proposal is made public, she sends a letter to torpedo it,” County Commissioner Josh Kerns told The Center Square. “She tries to be the queen of Spokane County.”
Ultimately, the task force’s vision for a unified, regional approach to public health and safety will come down to elected leaders making it a reality.