Regional Policy Committee backs sending 2-year MID renewal to full council amid audit concerns

The Regional Policy Committee voted to send a proposed ordinance that would renew the Mental Illness and Drug Dependency (MID) sales tax for two years to the full King County Council, after committee members and several city mayors said short-term renewal would allow the implementation plan and additional accountability work to proceed in tandem. Chair Von Reichbauer opened the item after staff briefed the committee on the 2024 MID annual report.

The MID briefing, presented by Sam Porter, Council Policy Staff, and by Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) staff, summarized the 2024 annual report and linked it to Proposed Motion 20 20 five-two 37, which would accept that report. Robin Fomen, MID coordinator, told the committee the MID is a 0.1% sales tax that in 2024 supported 54 initiatives, served just over 28,000 people through 181 providers and community partners, and recorded total expenditures of approximately $113,600,000. “This is really a high level, summary presentation,” Fomen said, noting a data dashboard with initiative-level detail is available online.

The report highlights program-level outcome measures DCHS tracks: for MID initiatives with assessed outcomes across jail bookings, emergency department admissions, and inpatient psychiatric hospital admissions, long-term trends among participants showed reductions in use of those systems — psychiatric hospital admissions were…