(Image: King County)
Proposals are due by March 21st for providers to be part of King County’s $1.25 billion crisis care center program as the location of the first of five planned new facilities will be in Kirkland.
Connections Health Solutions will run the first facility in the program that is envisioned to create a network of five walk-in centers across the county by 2030.
Connections and the City of Kirkland opened the crisis center in August 2024. Its selection into the program enables Connections to purchase the $39 million building while providing funding to operate a 24/7 mental health care facility. Service is planned to ramp up this spring.
CHS reported here on the voter-approved county levy in spring of 2023. Costing median-value homeowners an estimated $121 a year over a nine year period, the levy could raise as much as $1.25 billion through 2032 to fund creation of the five crisis care centers and increase mental health services in the county. The centers will provide services ranging from urgent care and prescription refills to multi-week treatment, the Seattle Times reports.
“All of King Countyβs crisis services are available to everyone, regardless of insurance or ability to pay,” the announcement of the planned opening of the first center in Kirkland reads.
The county says it is beginning the process of selecting the additional four locations. By the end of 2025, the county’s health department says it aims to “select behavioral health organizations” to run the second and third crisis care centers.
The final two operators are expected to be chosen by 2026, with the goal of all five crisis care centers open in 2030.
Proposals for the next round are due by March 21st.
The county says it also recently expanded the number of 24/7 mobile crisis teams it supports. “Over 20 teams travel across the county to de-escalate behavioral health crises and support people in person,” the county says. You can call or text 988 or the Regional Crisis Line at 206-461-3222.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
ππ£πΌπ·π±π³πΎπππ¦πππππ»Β
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support πΒ
Truly hoping that this will start to make a dent in the amount of mental health crises on the street, and perhaps people will be able to get care without being so afraid of the conditions – it is a real (if potentially overblown) concern for some that people will walk out worse than they walked in, both financially and mentally. I have acquaintances who’ve visited places and outcomes have been mixed.
Everyone’s trying their best – its difficult to afford to live here, and if you lose stability its difficult to get it back, or build more stability if you have some. We need deterrence but we also need a ladder, and that ladder is ridiculously difficult even for an able bodied and minded person, of which almost nobody trying to climb it is.
In Kirkland ? Who,is the target – google employees ?
As if just because it’s relatively wealthy Kirkland doesn’t have problems… nope, people have problems and falter there too – but when they do there’s nearly nothing to turn to, so they end up here, where there’s services or they die, like the guy who was living in the tunnel just off Northup on the 520 bike trail… He was sleeping pretty much in sight of the crisis center, but it’s opening a few months too late for him.
Itβs about time the rest of King County started shouldering some of the loadβ¦