Tax has raised $60M for Pierce County behavioral health. How's it being spent?
Since implementing a new sales tax in 2021, Pierce County has generated $61.5 million to improve its behavioral healthcare system. By the end of 2025, the county says it is planning to have made nearly $57 million in investments to the region's behavioral health infrastructure.
In December 2020, the Pierce County Council passed Ordinance No. 2020-138s authorizing the collection of a one tenth of 1 percent sales tax to fund behavioral health and therapeutic court programs within Pierce County.
Pierce County Human Services spokesperson Kari Moore told The News Tribune the county has spent $37.9 million on services, including agency contracts and transfers to other Pierce County departments, as of April 22. She said approximately $19 million has been obligated and anticipated to be spent by the end of 2025.
Opioid-related overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in Pierce County and have been since 2020, according to Human Services. Last year, 423 people died from accidental overdoses in Pierce County and more than 75% of them involved opioids.
According to data from Human Services, suicide rates in Pierce County are higher than the state's and country's average for residents aged 20-74, and over 85 years old. Suicide rates for individuals aged 20-39 are nearly triple the state-wide average in Pierce County.
In 2023, the county conducted a Community Needs Assessment to identify areas of need within the region's behavioral-health system.
The assessment found one out of every four respondents said they needed behavioral-health resources, food, or other health services.
Respondents living outside Tacoma consistently identified behavioral-health needs more often than respondents living in Tacoma, with 45% of respondents living outside Tacoma saying they needed mental-health or substance-abuse counseling in the past year but could not get it due to long wait times for appointments and lack of availability with providers.
Margo Burnison is the manager of Behavioral Health Services for Pierce County Human Services. In an interview with The News Tribune, Burnison said the county has been making a push to create and support a variety of mental-health programs in areas outside of Tacoma.
She said many of the programs are focused on raising awareness of mental health and increasing access to the full spectrum of services available.
During a Pierce County Council Health and Human Services meeting April 15, Burnison presented the county's current and future investment into the behavioral-health system.
The county plans to spend $3.7 million on community education programs through 2025, according to Burnison's report. She said much of that spending will have been on Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department's Teen Mental Health First Aid program. She described the program to the council as 'education on what mental health looks like, what it is, and what to do if somebody they know is struggling.'
Burnison said Pierce County has implemented the program in every school district and is one of the few counties to have done so. She said the county is also working to expand the program to adult workplaces in the region to improve mental health in work cultures.
The county has planned for $3.5 million towards Substance Use Disorder treatment programs, including an expansion to withdrawal-management services and outpatient and community services.
The county plans to have spent $3.9 million by 2025 on wellness, prevention and early-intervention programs. That includes community behavioral-health clinics administered by Comprehensive Life Resources and the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department's Nurse Family Partnership program.
Burnison said the Family Partnership Program puts healthcare professionals into mentorship roles with new parents, to educate on healthy parenting and foster positive relationships with the healthcare system.
'Really this is trying to get to the crux of, where we don't see a lot of services happening, which is before someone is in crisis,' Burnison told the council about the prevention and early-intervention programs.
The county plans to spend $6.8 million on outpatient and community-based services by 2025. Those programs will include 'culturally-attuned counseling' for humanitarian immigrants administered by Lutheran Community Services and mental-health community education administered by the Asia Pacific Cultural Center and mental health vouchers for the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.
By the end of 2025, the county is planning to allocate more than $18 million towards behavioral-health services and programs that intersect with the criminal-justice system.
One of the programs noted during the Human Services presentation involves hiring seven mental-health professionals who will co-respond with the Pierce County Sheriff's Office on calls involving a behavioral-health crisis.
According to the county, the co-responders will have the authority to commit someone for involuntary treatment for five days.
Other programs under that category are additional resources for therapeutic court programs across the county.
In an interview with The News Tribune, Burnison said people with behavioral-health issues often end up in the criminal-justice system, especially when they reach a point of crisis. She said programs are intended to divert them out of the carceral system and help them get the treatment they need to 'break the cycle' of incarceration.
One of the largest planned behavioral-health investments is a more than $20 million plan to bolster youth and school-based services. The investments include student-counseling services at Clover Park Technical College, a program focused on preventing behavioral-health crises for individuals with autism and developmental disabilities, and various types of mental-health education and youth-engagement programs.
Burnison told The News Tribune the investments in youth programs are in part because the county identified a need to do so but are also part of a greater effort to increase mental-health awareness across the whole community, beginning with the younger generation.
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