Residents should be receiving ballots in the mail for a special election to go before King County voters this month that would provide funding for mental health services around the county.
Proposition No. 1 would fund behavioral health services and capital facilities, including a county-wide crises care centers network; increased residential treatment; mobile crises care; post-discharge stabilization; and workforce supports, according to levy language.
The nine-year property tax levy would assess residents $0.145 per $1,000 of assessed value beginning in 2024. The 2024 levy amount would be the base for calculating annual increases in 2025-32.
Speaking at last week’s Queen Anne Community Council meeting, District 7 Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis said, as the city’s representative on the Regional Policy Committee, he worked with King County Executive Dow Constantine and County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay to come up with a crisis response for behavioral mental health or behavioral health situations triggered by substance addiction to help fill a need in the communities. He said King County has a very small number of places that can accept people in crisis and remove them temporarily from the public.
“This is having an incredibly bad impact on our community safety in the city of Seattle and in King County, and it’s not good for any of the parties involved, the people in crisis or other community members who are in people in crisis to not have this effectively mitigated,” he said.
COUNTY, STATE ROLES
In 2018, King County had 355 residential treatment beds to serve people experiencing some sort of mental health crisis. That has declined to about 244, Lewis said, adding much of the reason stems from how local behavioral mental health providers are compensated by the state.
“The state of Washington over the last several years has not been living up to its obligations on behavioral mental health or behavioral health in general, really, and the result of that has really put a massive burden on counties, King County included, to try to figure out strategies to make up that difference,” Lewis said. “This measure in front of us would get as back to at least parity and hopefully more than where we were in 2018 before the pandemic in terms of residential crisis beds that people can be taken to remove them off the street.”
If passed, the funding would be used to build five regional behavioral health crisis center: one in north King County, one in Seattle, one on the east side – Bellevue/Factoria/New Castle area, and one in south King County – Federal Way, Auburn, Kent area. The fifth will be focused on youth and their behavioral health challenges they are experiencing, specifically. While that center is likely to be in Seattle, no definitive site will be selected until after the levy passes.
All five centers would have to be set up and operational by 2029, but preferably sooner, Lewis said.
Each center will be able to take people 24 hours a day on a walk-in basis under a “no-wrong door” policy of access, which is different from how many crisis response centers operate right now.
“Our current system is really reliant on emergency rooms and jails be in the King County Jail or municipal city jails,” Lewis said, adding jails turn away a lot of referrals, and it is not sustainable to rely on emergency rooms to respond to the crisis.
Lewis said it is anticipated that a significant number of the stays would be for less than 24 hours to stabilize the person in crisis, and after that they would be discharged. He said 20 spaces will be reserved for people coming in for 24 hours or less. Each center will have about 16 spaces for up to a two-week stay.
“The national average for facilities of this nature in other jurisdictions is about a nine-day period if someone has a more serios issue that they need to work through and then work with people to get them some sort of referral to some kind of placement on the other end of the crisis-care center,” Lewis said, adding that might be transitional housing or treatment program.
In total, Lewis said, about 100 new beds will be added to the whole system in the county, but hopefully more depending on how it is set up.
LAW ENFORCEMENT OPTIONS
Overall, the new system will allow law enforcement to be able to transport people who are in crisis but not a good fit jails or hospitals to a place where they can have their needs met. Each crisis care center will have designated responders at any given time to evaluate people in need.
Lewis said King County will be charged to implement the system, which is based on an extensive model used in Maricopa County, Arizona.
“While this is a really critical investment, it, in and of itself, isn’t going to be enough to fix all the issues that we’re facing,” Lewis said, adding there will still be holes in the behavioral health system that will need to be filled, but without the levy, it will be harder to fix some of the other challenges the county is facing around transitional housing.
While nobody disputed whether the levy was necessary, a few members were dismayed that this added property tax will put further strain on senior citizens and people on fixed incomes living in Seattle.
“Well it’s a worthy endeavor, but I’m a person who has a parent with serious mental illness, and I’ve been a longtime member of NAMI, and I understand the importance of this facility and support them, but there’s a problem, and that’s that the City Council has made no accommodation that’s going to help us mature, retired people and longtime residents be able to stay in our homes because we keep getting one property tax after another, and we just can’t handle it,” Community Councilmember Sharon Levine said. “it’s almost like I’m being forced to vote no for something I believe so strongly deserves to be built.”
Residents have until 5 p.m. April 25 to return or have their ballots postmarked for them to count.
For more information on the levy, contact Dan Floyd, deputy director, Behavioral Health and Recovery Division, Daniel-DCHS.Floyd@kingcounty.gov.