Around 50 people attended last week’s meeting (Image: CHS)

By Matt Dowell

King County officials reaffirmed the value of a planned mental health Crisis Care Center on Broadway at a community meeting last week but members of the public pushed back — “Why here?”

Officials tell CHS the meeting was the next step in a process they say is both just beginning — and well under way. There is an offer for the property on the table. More community meetings are being planned.

Meanwhile, a letter sent to District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth protesting the consideration of the Broadway at Union property for the new center has made waves in the neighborhood business community.

Meeting attendees inside Seattle U’s Wyckoff Auditorium and organized by the county and the GSBA chamber of commerce Thursday pushed for keeping the crisis center out of Capitol Hill and shifting the focus to a new location. Ice cream entrepreneur Molly Moon Neitzel took the mic.

“I’m Molly Moon, I’ve lived on Capitol Hill for 22 years. I have gone from a partying kid on one side of the Hill to a mom on the other side of the Hill. I’ve [operated] a thriving business in the Pike/Pine corridor for 16 years. I located that business there in a thriving time for the Hill. Our neighborhood is in crisis.”

“I think probably everyone in this room supports the mission of the Crisis Care Centers and believes that they need to exist,” Neitzel said. “The need for first responders to have the ability to take these folks in need to a Crisis Care Center — we can all give a standing ovation to that mission.”

“Do they need to come to a neighborhood in absolute dire crisis for the last five, six, seven years? No they do not.”

“I would encourage you to look at a site that is in a neighborhood that doesn’t have so much crisis going on right now.”

CHS broke the news last week on the county’s plans to open a facility in the former Polyclinic building at Broadway and Union as part of the $1.25 billion Crisis Care Centers measure approved by voters in April 2023. The nine-year levy calls for a network of five facilities that provide walk-in behavioral health care. The first opened in Kirkland in March.

The centers provide urgent treatment to anyone experiencing a mental health or drug- and/or alcohol-use related crisis. Treatment is followed by “wraparound care” – after getting through the crisis stage, patients are directed to resources or other healthcare facilities suited to their needs. Advocates say they are a place for first responders to quickly hand off patients to specialized staff, freeing up the first responders to manage other issues.

But some who live and own businesses and property in the neighborhood are concerned that locating the facility at the corner on the edge of First Hill and Capitol Hill will add to crime and public safety issues that have continued to fester around the Pike and Broadway core.

Kelly Rider, director of the county’s Department of Community and Human Services, told the crowd of 50 that the county is committed to an open public dialogue while the process moves forward — both on the siting of the center and on its subsequent implementation.

“We at the county have been internally deliberating about this site,” she said. “We have been doing due diligence about the cost, about the feasibility of the space, and how we would use that space for a couple of months now.”

“We’ve been keeping things internally focused just to understand, is this something that we want to do?”

“That decision has not been made.”

But Rider and her team said that a purchase and sale agreement was put in place for the Polyclinic facility in January. Contingencies are also in place should the county deem the site unviable, but barring that, it will go in front of the King County Council this summer for approval. Rider said that if the process is not interrupted, closing would happen at the end of 2025. The earliest the center could open is 2027.

Officials Thursday also made their case for why the location makes sense — and the urgency.

Heather Venegas, director at King County Recovery Coalition, spoke about the people some fear will be added to the neighborhood’s streets: “The truth is they are all over Capitol Hill already. They are at our ERs.”

If the Crisis Care Center were built, some would instead go or be sent to the center for specialized services that emergency rooms cannot provide.

“Instead of being thrown back out on the street, they would be supported with care for whatever their crisis may be and then taken to the next place in their process.”

Rider said that the Polyclinic site offers a number of hard-to-find advantages. It’s large enough to support the Crisis Care Center, which calls for 30,000 square feet of space. It has the right zoning and is already built out for health care services. And it’s centrally located.

“[The center needs] something that is quickly accessible by different modes of transportation, whether that is someone that might be transit dependent or bike dependent. But also folks who are coming from multiple places throughout any crisis response zone. We want to make sure they can get there quickly if they’re in a crisis.”

“Thinking about the I-5 corridor, the I-90 corridor, how traffic in Seattle flows becomes an important factor. If you live anywhere in the city, how might you get where you need to go in order to access this kind of service?”

Alternatives are limited.

“We’ve looked at a lot of buildings [for similar projects] in Seattle over the last five years, so we have a fairly good sense of what properties have been and do become available in the city of Seattle,” Rider said. In two years of talks with the city about where the Crisis Care Center could go, “There’s barely been one, maybe two buildings that have come up in that time and they have not been workable for this kind of site.”

Rider also maintains that the center would improve public safety. First responders (law enforcement, paramedics, firefighters) currently have nowhere to take folks experiencing a behavioral health crisis. The center, which promises a quick handoff from first responders to care takers, frees up first responders to respond to the next issue. The wraparound services provided at the Crisis Care Center, which does not require that the patient has health insurance, have a better shot at keeping the patient off of the street.

The letter
Those issues aren’t mentioned and aren’t addressed in a letter sent to Hollingsworth’s office in April asking her to intervene in the county process. The Stranger reported on the letter and included names of business owners from the neighborhood listed as having signed onto the protest including Neitzel.

“We, the undersigned community members, business owners, organizations, and stakeholders, strongly support the establishment of crisis care centers in Seattle; however, we firmly oppose the proposed placement at the Polyclinic building on Broadway. Capitol Hill and First Hill have reached a saturation point regarding their capacity to manage the impacts associated with drug addiction and mental health crises,” it reads. “The addition of another facility here would exacerbate existing instability in neighborhoods already burdened by frequent violence, rampant drug activity, and severe pressures on local businesses and residents.”

While Neitzel spoke at Thursday’s meeting, many others listed did not and did not attend. As is common when these kinds of letters become public, some business owners say they did not intend to sign on to a letter. They will now have time to speak out — or speak up for the new facility.

Next steps weren’t announced at the meeting but CHS is told last week’s session was a first step in what is hoped will be series of meetings that expand beyond the GSBA and the preliminary conversation centered on the business owner pushback.

“It was the first phase of several community outreach events they are hoping to host, including a larger town hall down the road,” a person familiar with the planning told CHS. “They had a tight deadline which is the cause of the tight turnaround.”

Thursday, Rider and team promised more community meetings soon, but nothing has been scheduled. In the meantime, county officials will continue vetting the site at Broadway and Union and weighing community feedback.

The Kirkland Crisis Care Center is open and provides walk-in services to anybody experiencing a behavioral health crisis. You can call or text 988 or the Regional Crisis Line at 206-461-3222. More information here.

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