Tacoma has a significant number of people struggling with mental health and drug or alcohol problems. Local government and nonprofit agencies that deal with them struggle to come up with enough money to pay for the services they need. A funding method used around the state could be implemented here to address this need.

"I think this is a very important development." Allen Ratcliffe, local psychologist

The Legislature granted county governments the authority to collect one-tenth of 1 percent sales tax to be used for delivery of mental health and substance abuse services.

Amnon Shoenfeld, director of King County's Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division, played a key role in that government's implementation of the tax. He discussed how this was done during a recent meeting of Tacoma City Council's Public Safety, Human Services and Education Committee.

Shoenfeld said legislators gave counties this authority because they realized the state was not doing enough to fund these services.

King County Council decided in 2006 it wanted to levy this tax. This decision was made in part because of the large number of mentally ill people who were ending up in the county jail, according to Shoenfeld.

The county executive asked Shoenfeld to take the lead on the effort. He met with mental health and drug treatment providers, police departments and city councils around King County to gather feedback. They assembled a list of 50 strategies to meet the county's needs and narrowed it to 30 that would receive funding. "It took a lot of meetings with a lot of community groups," he remarked.

In 2007 he submitted a plan to the council and they implemented the tax. In April 2008 the county began collecting the revenue. It did not start spending the money until fall 2009. It raises $45 million a year.

Shoenfeld said this schedule was adopted because of the size and population of King County, but the process is often shorter for less populous counties. So far 18 of Washington's 39 counties have this tax. Two put it up to an advisory vote of the people. He said that in Spokane County it received an approval rate of about 60 percent of voters.

The Legislature's original direction was for this money to be spent on services. In 2008 it modified this to also allow for it to go toward housing.

This idea has been presented to Pierce County Council, but it did not implement the tax. In 2010 the Legislature gave authority to cities with a population of at least 30,000 in a county of at least 800,000 people to levy tax. Since then city officials and some legislators that represent Tacoma have pondered moving forward with the tax on a citywide basis.

Linda Villegas Bremer, director of the city's Human Rights and Human Services Department, said several programs have been identified that would receive funding if the council decides to levy the tax. One targets chronic minor offenders, meaning individuals with mental health or substance abuse problems who are frequently jailed for committing minor crimes. A list of these people has been compiled and city and county officials have spent four years examining ways to serve them. The idea is that providing housing and social workers for them is much cheaper than continually incarcerating them.

Councilmember Marty Campbell pondered what businesses in Tacoma think of a sales tax increase. He asked if staff had sought their feedback and was told they had not.

Councilmember Victoria Woodard said she did not want to move too fast to levy the tax, saying the council needs more conversation with the community. "However, I do not want to lose sight of the urgency of why we want to do this."

Diane Powers, an employee in Human Rights and Human Services, said many service providers have wanted this stream of revenue for some time. "There has been so much energy in the community to get Pierce County to pass this," she told council members.

Allen Ratcliffe, a local psychologist, was the only citizen to testify. He said there are many homeless people in town who are ineligible for Medicaid and need a source of funding for services. "I think this is a very important development," he remarked.