TACOMA — The cost of locking up sexually violent felons on an island is growing, and Washington state lawmakers of both parties say officials should consider moving the Special Commitment Center to the mainland.
The mental-health treatment facility for sex offenders, which costs $42 million a year, had shared McNeil Island with a prison, but budget cuts shuttered the prison in April.
“If it costs a fortune to run this thing on the island, why are we doing that?” House budget chairman Ross Hunter told the News Tribune of Tacoma. “Let’s run the thing where it’s less expensive.”
But nobody is clamoring to have nearly 300 sex offenders in their backyard. Opposition has built in the Centralia area to housing them at the shuttered Maple Lane School, a juvenile detention facility in Grand Mound. Another choice, Western State Hospital, may not be well-received either.
Sen. Mike Carrell, whose district includes both McNeil Island and Western State, said he would fight a move to the psychiatric hospital in Lakewood.
A sexual psychopath unit operated for years at Western State. The Legislature repealed that program before creating new civil commitment powers in 1990, along with a secure, prison-like commitment center instead of a hospital setting. After a stint in Monroe, the center ended up at McNeil Island.
The facility currently houses about 285 offenders, or those deemed so dangerous the courts have confined them even though their prison sentences are over.
With the kind of austerity measures being contemplated to bridge a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, Hunter told the newspaper he’s beyond the point of making political calculations about which cut will be popular. Every cut is hard now.
The remote island location adds $6.6 million a year to the center’s costs, according to a consultant’s study released this month — or nearly $23,000 per resident, the News Tribune reported.
Because of that potential savings, the Legislature could borrow some of the money it needs to fill the budget gap, then pay back the debt using the future savings from leaving the island.
Under one scenario, the financing scheme would allow lawmakers to capture $44 million in this budget period, according to legislative staff calculations.
Lawmakers might have to subtract from that the money needed to replicate the center elsewhere. The Department of Social and Health Services says that kind of renovation might cost $48 million at Maple Lane, so the Legislature would have to skip some of those upgrades to achieve any savings.
Security would have to be increased, Special Commitment Center CEO Kelly Cunningham said.
Other costs would fall away. It’s expensive to run an island, with its ferries and tug boats, separate power and water systems, and 4,400 acres to be patrolled.
Officials say they need 23 more workers next year — mostly security officers to patrol the island and boat operators to bring people and equipment on and off.
DSHS has been able to make some cuts. Ferries and barges run less frequently.
The agency was awaiting this month’s report on what the center could do to hold down costs, but consultants saw little beyond what had already been done.
They did suggest about $500,000 a year could be saved by contracting out more of the food service budget, which has nothing to do with the island location.
The alternative to the new costs is finding a new site. DSHS officials say they wouldn’t do it without collecting public input.
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