Lance Dickie /Snohomish County Council gets the link between public-safety and treatment

Mention increasing taxes and most politicians develop a facial tic. For all their apparent fondness for spending taxpayer money, taking a tax vote is tough for any elected official.

Complimenting politicians triggers a rebellious spasm in the typing fingers, but here goes:

The Snohomish County Council took an informed, brave vote in the midst of a recession to raise sales taxes one-tenth of a cent. Money raised will be spent to improve and expand services for the mentally ill and drug and alcohol abusers to keep them out of trouble with the law.

Innovations could include triage centers for people who need treatment, not another trip to jail. Police officers would be trained to make yet another judgment call: Charge a person with a crime and take them to detox, or book them into jail?

Yakima offers a successful, working model for triage centers, said Councilman Dave Gossett, who steered a package of mental-health and chemical-dependency plans and financing through council.

Law enforcement is a big supporter of options to expensive, repeated stays behind bars. Over time, jails evolved into de facto mental-health institutions with no resources.

Virtually no help is available elsewhere in Snohomish County. Only a handful of publicly funded beds in detox facilities and residential centers exist, while the tally of individuals and families that want help numbers in the thousands.

The link between public safety and an absence of services for the mentally ill and substance abusers is direct and unambiguous.

Council adoption of the sales-tax bump was hardly a spontaneous act. Gossett said the council had explored how to proceed since 2006. One approach was a pricey property-tax increase.

Add in time-consuming and endless pushing and shoving between the County Council and County Executive Aaron Reardon. Raising taxes is a prickly topic even in a nest of Democrats. The council shifted its attention toward the tenth-of-a-cent sales-tax increase, an option created for counties by the 2005 Legislature.

A blue-ribbon citizens panel on criminal justice endorsed adoption of the sales-tax increase, calling it a high priority. Then the council asked the executive to compile statistics on need and outline a response. Meanwhile, the council and executive continued a daily test of wills that resembles a cross between "Advise and Consent" and "The Honeymooners."

A half-dozen candidates for testosterone detox and anger management come to mind.

The council eventually hired its own social-services expert, a former department head abruptly fired by Reardon. She produced a matrix of plans and services designed to tell taxpayers exactly what they might expect for their money. Acknowledged but undefined are performance measures to track what is accomplished at what cost.

Gossett said the county is dealing with a very large problem with inadequate resources. People need and want help. The results, he said, would be people not cycling through jail and the courts, and an end of criminal activities connected to addictions and mental-health problems.

Citizens get it. Turnout at public hearings before the vote was huge and supportive.

Snohomish is one of nine counties to use the sales-tax option. Councilman John Koster, a conservative Republican and the council's lone member of that party, was away on county business and missed the tax vote. In a phone call Wednesday, with only the slightest of palpitations, Koster said he would have voted yes. The current system is a revolving door, he said, and the link between offering treatment and public safety — a priority of government — is legitimate.

Paul Guppy agrees. He is a respected tax analyst and vice president of the Washington Policy Center. He is adamant Snohomish and other counties embrace accountability and avoid leaps of faith about what might be accomplished. But there is an explicit connection, Guppy said, between treatment programs and saving money on jail costs and the rising costs of policing.

Snohomish County Council took a tough vote tied to core functions of government.

Lance Dickie's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ldickie@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera