By Erica C. Barnett
Standing in Occidental Square on Tuesday morning, City Councilmember Sara Nelson announced a proposal to earmark 25 percent of a forthcoming one-cent sales tax increase to “evidence-based treatment” programs for people with addictions, name-checking Lakeside Milam, the residential treatment center in Kirkland, as an example.
“What I’m fighting for is simple, and it’s to put treatment at the heart and the center of the city’s policy agenda,” Nelson said. “We can’t keep deferring investments in treatment while watching the same people cycle through homelessness, overdose, emergency roomsm and jail over and over and over again.”
Nelson’s office estimated that a 0.1-cent sales tax would bring in about $35 million each year, or a little under $9 million for treatment programs. “When we invest in getting people off the street and into treatment, we prevent crime, reduce emergency room responses and make every neighborhood safer,” Nelson said.
Purpose Dignity Action, which runs the LEAD diversion program and the CoLEAD encampment resolution program, showed up to support Nelson’s proposal. The group, which hasn’t always seen eye to eye with Nelson, has adapted repeatedly to Seattle’s changing political climate, most recently embracing changes to the city’s drug laws that effectively forced LEAD to reverse its approach and go back to partnering directly with police to get new clients, rather than relying on community referrals, which don’t require an arrest.
“To be clear, any serious public safety system must prioritize how we responded with complex behavioral problems, especially when those needs are contributing to harm or distress in neighborhoods and business districts,” PDA deputy director Brandi McNeil said Tuesday. “Ignoring that reality only prolongs the cycle. Confronting it head on is how we build safer, healthier communities.”
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The state legislature gave cities and counties the authority to pass a 0.1-cent tax increase for public safety, including behavioral health care programs, earlier this year, and King County is considering its own version of the tax. Unlike a separate proposal to increase business and occupation taxes on gross receipts above $2 million, the sales tax does not require voter approval; if both taxes pass, Seattle’s cumulative sales tax will rise to 10.55 percent, the highest combined sales tax in the country.
“Lending support for a sales tax increase is not something that I take lightly,” Evergreen Treatment Services director Steve Woolworth said. “However, if this tax to support public safety is adopted, I strongly support dedicating a portion of the revenue to funding low barrier shelter services, jail diversion and alternative response, and the coupling of behavioral health, permanent, and supportive housing.”
Nelson has expressed skepticism about harm reduction and housing first programs in the past, arguing that it’s time to “move beyond the harm reduction phase” toward abstinence-based recovery, which advocates often shorthand as “recovery” to distinguish it from models that try to reduce harm from drug use without conditioning treatment on total abstinence.
And although Tuesday’s speakers all represented groups that embrace harm reduction alongside traditional sobriety-oriented treatment like that offered at Lakeside-Milam, Nelson was flanked by a much larger contingent of allies from “treatment first” groups like We Heart Seattle, Battlefield Addiction, and The More We Love, whose leaders Nelson thanked in her remarks.
We Heart Seattle has not gotten any city contracts—yet—but The More We Love recently received nearly $600,000 after Councilmember Cathy Moore earmarked $1 million for the group. (The lower amount reflects the fact that the group didn’t sign its contract until earlier this month). The More We Love will use the money to expand its shelter in Renton, an abstinence-only facility that “exits” women and their children if they fail to to make it through abstinence-based treatment and stay sober after they graduate. In its contract, The More We Love calls this a “low-barrier, high-accountability” approach to helping victims of sexual exploitation and gender-based violence.
Just before Nelson’s press conference started, the US Senate passed a budget bill that will impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, depriving millions of Americans of behavioral health care and treatment.
The state law giving cities the authority to pass public-safety sales taxes does not dictate how much has to go to police, behavioral health care, or other programs. In other words: There’s nothing in the authorizing legislation that says 100 percent of the money can’t go to behavioral health care, as opposed more spending on the police department, which already makes up an overwhelming plurality of the city’s budget. Nelson and Mayor Bruce Harrell are among the city’s most ardent proponents of police spending, so it’s unlikely that either will propose increasing the 25 percent cap in Nelson’s bill, though another city councilmember (hi, Alexis Mercedes Rinck!) could.
Asked if she had Harrell’s support for her proposal, Nelson said, “The mayor has indicated support of the principle, of the idea, and it will have to wait until we get closer to the to budget to figure out what, what the departments are proposing for reductions” before talking about how to spend the tax.
Asked if Harrell supported Nelson’s proposal, a spokesperson for the mayor said, “We’ll analyze this proposal in full when we receive it in the context of the overall budget, revenue solutions, and public safety needs.”
