By Brittany Miles
Last April, King County voters overwhelmingly approved the Crisis Care Centers Levy, which funds behavioral urgent care. I have followed the measure closely as the parent of a teen with early-onset schizophrenia, because one of the five centers is designated for children and youth. I, along with other parents of children with severe mental illness, hope the centers support kids who desperately need help.
But since declaring victory, the Metropolitan King County Council has not been transparent about the next steps. After hearing no updates for several months, I published an op-ed asking county leaders: “Now what?” It was not until late summer that the planning team began engaging with the community. Kate Baber, the county’s Crisis Care Centers planning director, started monthly community meetings, and interviewed key informants, including me, to learn more about the crisis. By late December, King County Executive Dow Constantine sent the plan to the King County Council. Now, we are in the legislative process, with early investments starting midyear.
Sounds good, right? Well—maybe. During the run-up to the election, the council had a solid communication plan to inform voters about the cost and benefits of the levy. The core message: The Crisis Care Centers are the missing piece in our behavioral crisis response, and the cost of $1.2 billion over nine years is worth it to save lives.
Voters agreed, but they may have missed the fine print. The first center is not scheduled to open until 2026, with one center opening each year until 2030, and that is only if the county does not encounter the kind of delays that are common in major procurement and real estate transactions. I learned about this timeline last May, when King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay posted about the schedule on Twitter. It felt like a bait and switch—business as usual by King County political leaders, who focused on selling voters on the levy’s long-term value instead of being up-front about the lengthy process it will take to site and build the crisis centers.
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Even the 2026-2030 timeline seems optimistic. The centers will attract a diverse population to suburban neighborhoods, which may make residents uneasy, so we should expect the siting process to go through a NIMBY stage. It will take a lot of time for the cities that are open to the centers to convince their residents of the good they will do for the local community.
Kenmore, for example, expressed an interest in being home to one of the crisis centers, but its city council just voted down an affordable housing development that had been in the works for years. How likely is it that a crisis center will work in a community that rejects low-income housing in response to a backlash from residents? Hopefully, other cities, like Bothell, Lake Forest Park, Burien, Kirkland, Kent, Renton, Auburn, Redmond, Bellevue, and Seattle, are devising plans to effectively manage residents’ criticism and opinions on the proposed change to their community.
What do we do until the centers are open? Baber’s Initiative Planning Team, which leads the implementation process and planning for the levy, wisely recommends increasing mobile crisis response. There are multiple community agencies and partners that do the work of crisis de-escalation with local law enforcement. If a loved one is in danger or needs immediate support, they will receive connection to care and avoid arrest or worse consequences.
There is a gap for kids with severe mental illnesses who need higher-level care. I sought outpatient providers during a recent crisis, but they turned us away because they couldn’t provide the necessary level of care. While kids like mine may be a smaller population, there are few options when these kids are in crisis and parents are flummoxed about what to do. The emergency room at Seattle Children’s Hospital is overburdened and cannot always admit kids who need their stabilization services most. Late last year, it took multiple to Children’s ER to get my child admitted for a 10-day stay. They required higher-level care to stabilize, and this helped immeasurably. If we did not get them admitted, I have no idea where we would be today.
I applaud the work Crisis Care Center Initiative Planning Team has done so far done so far to plan for the Crisis Care Centers. In the meantime, though, the team the needs to address the gap in services for kids with severe mental illness. While there are programs available, they are not equal to the needs of the diverse pediatric population. My most ardent wish is that the first center in 2026 will be for kids, because no one has a satisfactory answer to where they are supposed to go in times of their greatest need.
Editor’s note: This post has been edited to remove a paragraph that said families with private insurance are unable to access mobile outreach and response services. In fact, they are eligible for these services. PubliCola regrets the error.
Brittany Miles is the single parent of a 15-year-old with early onset schizophrenia and a member of the Kirkland Regional Crisis Response Community Advisory Board.
I guess it must not be funded by this levy, BUT, I was recently at Northwest Hospital (Aurora neighborhood, 125th Street) and their new residential behavioral health hospital addition is nearly complete. It looks like a fine facility with a relatively large capacity and the folks at NW Hospital (now UW Medicine) have always treated me with great care and compassion. I hope this facility goes a long way toward addressing untreated mental illness and substance abuse in Seattle.
There are also no places that take kids for addiction. No detox, no inpatient. No co-occurring (mental health and addiction).