EVERETT — As Snohomish County’s elected leaders delve into plans for next year’s budget, a central challenge has emerged: How to shrink spending without compromising safety.
Among the programs potentially at risk in 2017 is a sheriff’s office initiative that teams up deputies with social workers to try to steer drug addicts into treatment. It’s seen as one of the most promising ways to combat the community’s problems with opioid addiction and related property crimes. Those troubles are invariably described as an “epidemic” or “crisis” in the halls of government.
“Budgets are critical to dealing with a crisis,” County Councilman Brian Sullivan told his colleagues Tuesday. “I feel like the last couple of years, we’ve been talking about it but not coming up with a comprehensive plan to deal with it.”
Anyone can learn about public safety questions and other aspects of the proposed 2017 budget at County Council Chambers on Wednesday. The hearings, at 10:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., are set to take place on the eighth floor of the county’s Robert Drewel building on 3000 Rockefeller Ave., Everett.
County Executive Dave Somers released his 2017 spending proposal in September. It included an operating budget of about $238 million. That’s $8 million more than the current budget, but it isn’t enough to keep pace with rising costs in salaries, benefits and other areas.
The executive’s budget includes a 1 percent increase in the general property tax levy. That would add less than $3 to the property tax bill of a home assessed at $300,000.
About 75 cents of every dollar in the county operating budget supports cops, courts and corrections.
The pain could be acute at the sheriff’s office, which stands to take a $2.4 million cut across its law enforcement and jail operations. Programs at risk of being cut include work release, fraud investigations and some collision investigations, along with the Office of Neighborhoods.
The current conundrum comes after voters in August rejected by a small margin a 0.2 percent countywide sales-tax increase. Proposition 1, as the measure was known, would have raised $15 million for the county’s public safety departments.
The issue has been campaign fodder for candidates competing for County Council’s District 5 seat in the upcoming election. Councilman Hans Dunshee, a Democrat from Snohomish who was appointed to the job earlier this year, and his Republican challenger, Lake Stevens City Councilman Sam Low, agree that deaths and property crimes spawned by heroin and other opiates are a top problem facing their district.
Dunshee on Tuesday turned in a four-page list of public safety programs he wants to preserve, including the Office of Neighborhoods.
Council Chairman Terry Ryan, who is the council’s lead budget writer, said many of Dunshee’s concerns are shared by everyone on the council.
“The question becomes, if we want to go this direction, how do we fund it?” Ryan said.
The county’s elected leaders also have been talking this fall about ways to better manage and pay for the Snohomish Health District, which has lost more than one-third of its workforce since 2009 and now has the equivalent of fewer than 150 full-time employees.
Ryan expects to release his version of the budget Nov. 7. He and his council colleagues could vote on a final package the following week.
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465; nhaglund@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @NWhaglund.
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