(The Center Square) – After months of build-up, the Safe and Healthy Spokane Task Force released its final report on Thursday, urging the region to impose taxes to fund “modern, integrated justice facilities” and a “network of community-based facilities,” two years after residents rejected a countywide jail tax.
The 14 recommendations come as several local jurisdictions consider councilmanic tax hikes and other proposals to place on the August and November ballots. The report will likely inform another tax measure that Spokane County leaders must decide by August whether to put on the ballot this fall.
The privately led group called on elected leaders to create a coordinated public safety and behavioral health system under a cross-sector accountability and implementation body; data-reporting dashboards; crisis response, workforce, diversion, pretrial and high-utilizer programs; and to invest in “appropriately sized” justice facilities and community-based behavioral health infrastructure, among other measures.
One central question remains unanswered: how much will the recommendations cost local taxpayers?
“The failed 2023 ballot measure to fund a new jail and services in Spokane County was not a verdict against change. It was a signal that the community needed a more honest, more complete, and more genuinely community-built roadmap,” the task force argued in the 71-page report released Thursday.
The 2023 failed jail measure would’ve cost taxpayers 2 cents on every $10 spent at the register for 30 years, generating an estimated $1.7 billion. That revenue would’ve funded the construction of two new justice facilities to replace the aging and understaffed downtown jail and Geiger Correctional Center.
About 63% of voters rejected the countywide tax after critics argued that the plan didn’t do enough to address priorities like behavioral health, since the jails were only estimated to cost about $540 million.
Some regional officials and supporters of the measure placed some of the blame at the time on Mayor Lisa Brown for not endorsing it during her 2023 mayoral campaign. While Brown has publicly signaled support for the task force’s recommendations, she sent a letter to the group last week urging caution.
“The city generally supports each of the Task Force’s recommendations,” she wrote in the letter before urging the prioritization of existing means rather than immediately pursuing more correctional spaces.
During a press conference on Thursday, Brown joined task force members and reiterated her support.
“My administration wholeheartedly supports all the recommendations that the Safe and Healthy Task Force has put forward,” Brown said Thursday, before going on to say that not all can happen at once.
“I happen to think that if we could snap our fingers here today and make them all happen at once, we could all be snapping — because we can’t, we will have to prioritize, and we will have to phase how to get this work done,” Brown continued. “That’s not a personal agenda, that’s responsible governance.”
Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels also addressed the media and said there wasn’t a single thing in the report that he didn’t recognize as a gap in Spokane County’s justice and behavioral health systems.
Nowels said the challenge moving forward is implementing the report, given limited financial resources.
“It is up to us as elected officials to prove to you, the citizens and the taxpayers, that we are going to expend our limited and valuable taxpayer funds on things that are ultimately going to help get better outcomes,” he said, referencing a revolving door that taxpayers are subsidizing with a divided system.
