A small stream of King County sales taxes devoted to helping people in mental health and drug-induced crises has worked and should be renewed when it expires later this year.
ONE bright spot for chronically underfunded mental-health- and substance-abuse-treatment systems has been a small stream of sales tax approved by King County in 2007.
The 0.1 percent bump in the King County sales tax generates about $58 million a year, funding an array of prevention and diversion programs that the state and federal governments should pay for, but don’t.
Instead, it’s up to local government to step up and patch holes in the safety net. The Metropolitan King County Council this fall should reauthorize this sales-tax stream, called Mental Illness and Drug Dependency (MIDD), for another nine years, but with tweaks to reflect what is working, and what’s not. This tax is not subject to a public vote under state law.
The most visible service funded by the MIDD is the Crisis Solutions Center, a 46-bed facility in the Chinatown International District. It gives police officers a place to take people in crisis other than jails and hospital emergency rooms and also houses round-the-clock mobile crisis teams to respond to calls countywide.
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“Our officers care about the most vulnerable members of society and don’t want to take people to jail and see a revolving door” in and out of detention, said Kent Police Chief Ken Thomas during a tour of the facility last week.
Overall, the diversion center and other MIDD programs are working. For people served by MIDD-funded programs, jail admissions fell by 44 percent, and the number of days they spent in psychiatric hospitals fell by 10 percent.
The Metropolitan King County Council should be sensitive to the added tax burden, even one as small as 0.1 percent. But extending MIDD does not add a new tax, and the mental-health system certainly needs all the added help it can get.
In renewing MIDD, the County Council should pay close attention to what works. It has plenty of data to decide; the program has a very strong focus on outcomes and data tracking.
An analysis found that focusing on housing for people in crisis had the best payoff. Getting people with serious mental-health challenges stable homes should be a central goal of the next round of MIDD funding.
When the council renews the tax, it should also send a message to Olympia and Washington, D.C. A functional mental-health and chemical-dependency system is a state and national problem and needs strong support.