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LINC model seen as promising but stalled by housing and unclear Trueblood grant status
Summary
County committee members said the LINC (Link) model requires respite and temporary supportive housing that Whatcom County currently lacks, and that a Trueblood grant the county received was derailed when a partner agency could not fulfill its role.
Whatcom County's Incarceration Prevention and Reduction Task Force Legal and Justice Systems Committee discussed April 8 whether to pursue a Seattle-style LINC model for justice-involved residents, but members said the model cannot move forward without a housing component.
Caleb (committee member) described the LINC model's housing needs: "the LINC model comes with 2 forms of housing. There's, a respite housing and then there's temporary supportive housing. And both of those would need to be in place in order for the function of LINC, to be effective in our community." Several people who visited Seattle raised the same point.
Maya (Executive's office representative) told the committee that the group that traveled to Seattle concluded it could not implement the model locally without housing and that the county's Trueblood grant process had an implementation problem. "We got the grant. The judge approved it, but we couldn't follow through on it because the partner agency, Lake Whatcom Treatment Center, was unable to fulfill their part of it," Maya said. Committee members said they had not received a full explanation from the executive's office and asked Kayla (executive's office staff) to present a status update on the Trueblood grant at a future meeting.
Members asked Melora (staff) to share supporting data and budget materials from their Seattle visit so the committee can compare outcomes and definitions, including how LINC measures recidivism. The committee agreed to place the Seattle/LINC materials and the Trueblood update on the agenda for the next meeting and to coordinate with a work group that is forming to consider diversion and reentry models.
Committee members emphasized that housing is a recurring dependency across Justice Project goals and that without concrete housing resources a LINC-style program cannot be implemented as designed.
