A group of Spokane community leaders is moving closer to releasing its ideas for improving the region’s response to public health and safety-related problems.
Members of the Safe and Healthy Task Force reviewed their set of 14 recommendations at their final scheduled meeting today.
Task force member Zeke Smith from the Waters Meet Foundation says the findings cover a variety of topics, including the type of organization that would monitor how changes are carried out.
Smith says the task force issued two recommendations related to new or renovated facilities.
“One specifically around the right sizing of jail or correctional facilities and then other types of facilities that are necessary for crisis response and behavioral health and other programs. And then a second recommendation that's about the need for increased housing, specifically transitional housing,” he said.
Details of the recommendations could be made public within the next week or two. The plan would then be forwarded to the region’s elected bodies. They could decide to put a public safety-related ballot measure on a future ballot. That would likely ask voters for money to replace Spokane’s 40-year-old downtown jail. Local officials have struggled for years to come up with a plan for an alternative to the aging facility. In 2023, voters said no to Measure 1, which would have increased the sales tax for 30 years to fund a new jail.
(Hear from two task force members in an interview from our April 16 Inland Journal.)
Task force members have been researching how cities such as Miami divert people with addictions or mental health issues away from jail and into treatment. They’ve received briefings and advice from retired Miami Judge Steven Leifman, who is credited with developing the plan that allowed Dade County to close some of its detention facilities.
Smith and task force member Stacey Cowles say the findings go beyond replacing a single facility.
“We really have to be thinking about this as a system. And if we focus on just the jail and what happens in jail and who should or shouldn't be in jail, we're kind of missing the larger system structure that needs to be in place,” Smith said.
“It's not just criminal justice. It goes across mental health and health, and business and job training and housing, because all of these things are linked together,” Cowles said.
He says the group’s list includes low-cost suggestions that can be accomplished right away. Those include improving transitional support systems for people as they leave jail and treatment programs.
“We have a lot of work to do here, but man, it's great to have at least a vision of where we could get to, and I think that's really going to be powerful,” he said.
