By Phil Ferolito
Yakima Herald-Republic
YAKIMA, Wash. — After sitting mostly empty for five years, the Yakima County jail on Pacific Avenue will begin housing suspects who are being treated for mental illness.
During a regular business meeting Tuesday, Yakima County commissioners approved a $475,000 annual contract with Central Washington Comprehensive Mental Health to house inmates whose trials are pending while they undergo mental health treatment.
The contract is the first real promise that county officials have seen for putting the minimum-security jail to good use since it was closed at the end of 2010. Built in 2006, the jail’s sole purpose was to house inmates under contract from other communities. But authorities were forced to close the structure when the county lost several inmate contracts worth millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the jail’s construction debt will loom over the county until it expires in 2022.
The contract with Comprehensive Mental Health is a step in the right direction toward getting the jail to one day pay for itself, Commissioner Kevin Bouchey said Tuesday.
“I think it’s fortunate that we have this opportunity,” Bouchey said. “I’m optimistic that this will lead to more use of the facility. Hopefully, this will open doors to future opportunities.”
Comprehensive Mental Health secured a roughly $2.2 million annual contract with the state Department of Social and Health Services to oversee the pretrial inmates as patients. The contract stems from a federal judge’s April decision known as the Trueblood ruling, which requires the state to quickly deal with a huge backlog of suspects needing competency evaluations and competency restoration treatment.
Suspects undergoing treatment are expected to be moved into the county’s facility March 1, said Comprehensive Mental Health CEO Rick Weaver.
But first, some remodeling is needed, such as erecting partitions to divide large bays into smaller quarters.
“Large bays don’t work well for someone hearing voices,” he said. “We’re tying to make this more of a residential treatment facility rather than a prison.”
Occupying only one of the jail’s four pods, Comprehensive Mental Health will provide staff — roughly 40 workers — while the county Department of Corrections will supply two corrections officers to operate the pod’s control room and provide security. The jail is composed of four pods, each with enough room to house up to 72 inmates, for a total of 288 beds.
Comprehensive Mental Health has a long history of working with the county through a number of services, including a mental health program in Yakima Superior Court, and mental health staff are also present at the county’s main jail downtown.
“We do a lot of stuff with the county,” Weaver said. “We do work in the courts, we work in the jail. We feel that we are a good team and that’s why we decided to work with the county.”
Comprehensive’s contract with the state expires at the end of 2016, with the option of renewing it for another year. Weaver said he believes the contract will go well beyond 2017 once the state sees how well the operation works.
Over the past decade, state hospitals have seen an increase of 8 to 10 percent annually in the number of cases that need pretrial mental health services, said Tim Hunter, state hospital forensic policy and legislative administrator in Olympia. “So we’ve seen an increasing number and we don’t expect that to turn around, he said by phone Tuesday.
That increase has caused a demand for 90 additional beds statewide by January, forcing the state to reach to outside providers for help in order to meet the ordered deadline, he said.
The state is also working to establish a 30-bed contract at Maple Lane School near Rochester, a vacant facility that most recently served as a juvenile rehabilitation facility for boys, and another 30 beds at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, 20 miles west of Spokane, Hunter said.
Eventually, the state plans to increase the number of beds and staff at its two hospitals to accommodate the increasing case load without any backlog, he said.
“We’re very happy to be contracting with Comprehensive Mental Health and are hopeful that this will be an effective program,” he said.
With three pods capable of holding up to 220 inmates still available at the Pacific Avenue jail, county Department of Corrections Director Ed Campbell is working to secure more contracts to put the jail into full use.
He said he’s working with federal authorities to house low-level inmates in the federal system, enough to fill half the jail. He hopes to have that contract finalized by May.
He’s also working on a few other contracts, but he said it is too early to disclose details.
“I am actively negotiating several other contracts right now,” he said.
Copyright 2015 Yakima Herald-Republic