Whatcom County committee weighs new jail scenarios as behavioral care center funding and operations remain uncertain

County planners and advisory committees on March 17 reviewed new jail-planning scenarios and trade-offs between capacity and behavioral-health services, while staff warned that operating funds for a co-located crisis center remain uncertain.

Kayla Schoppressler, executive's office, told the joint meeting of the Behavioral Health Committee and the Legal and Justice Systems Committee that the design-build team is working from a $205 million budget target to produce refined alternatives that balance bed capacity and therapeutic space. “At a $205,000,000 budget, it is gonna be very difficult to meet everyone's goals from this facility,” Schoppressler said, adding the team will show alternatives that shift capacity and program space.

The packet materials distributed to committee members included older preliminary budget figures; staff acknowledged those earlier numbers (variously listed in materials as roughly $105 million to $155 million) may not be reliable going forward and said a 4% sales-tax escalation assumption had been included in past estimates. Committee leadership said scenarios 1 and 4 have been set aside and that scenarios 2 and 3 remain under active consideration.

Schoppressler described an expanded Behavioral Care Center planned for the Division Street Behavioral Health Campus that would include crisis relief services and up to 32 inpatient beds, prioritized for prosecutorial diversion but available to other community members. “We originally had roughly $11,300,000 from the state for the 23-hour crisis relief center,” she said, and county staff also submitted an $11,000,000 congressional directed spending request to help cover construction.

County staff stressed that capital funding and operational funding are separate problems. Schoppressler said the plan is to build the physical space for the 23-hour unit now but delay bringing on an operator for that component until there is greater certainty about ongoing operational revenue from the state.

Members raised persistent tensions between building capacity and investing in therapeutic design and services. Wendy Jones, a retired county jail chief and community representative, asked whether the new facility can be constructed to allow future expansion; Schoppressler said the design-build team is evaluating expansion potential but warned that planning for easier expansion requires capital investments that trade off against program space. A number of members emphasized trauma-informed design elements—lighting, windows and staff spaces—as priorities that add cost but can influence outcomes.

Heather Flaherty, cochair of the incarceration task force, urged the committee to examine what is driving 2025 bookings before locking capacity assumptions: she cited large percentage increases in specific booking categories—failure to appear, controlled-substance possession and Department of Corrections detainers—and said some increases may reflect court or warrant issues rather than rising violent crime.

Several public-safety leaders recounted cases where booking exceptions enabled care: Rebecca, chief of police for the City of Bellingham, described an instance in which a booking enabled acute stabilization and transfer to Western State for longer-term treatment, underscoring the interaction between policy thresholds (such as involuntary-treatment standards) and care access.

Committee members requested clear priorities to guide trade-offs and asked staff to supply the refined scenario analyses and the new jail-capacity and behavioral-health analyses within weeks so the committees can deliver recommendations to the county executive by the end of next month. Schoppressler said the county is also treating demolition of the existing jail as a separate high-level placeholder cost (staff cited a conservative $8,000,000 estimate), and that reuse of the existing building is not currently planned.

The meeting closed with an acknowledgment that the community expects a human-centered system as well as a new facility, and with a request that advisory committees identify the behavioral-health components they cannot live without as staff refine scenarios.