King County officials are working on plans for a public meeting to answer questions and concerns around the proposed mental health Crisis Care Center at Broadway and Union.
CHS reported here on pushback over public safety concerns against the planned facility in a meeting with business and property owners as Department of Community and Human Services officials made the case for the emergency and walk-in clinic that would be part of a $1.25 billion network of five facilities across the county.
The Capitol Hill Community Council says it is working with the county to set up the next meeting with wider community goals and the organization has launched a survey to gather feedback in advance of the session.
Kelly Rider, director of the county’s Department of Community and Human Services, said that a purchase and sale agreement was put in place for the former Polyclinic facility in January. Contingencies are also in place should the county deem the site unviable, but barring that, the $50 million plan is on track to 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.
Rider says 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.
Critics worry that it will only add to public safety concerns in an area troubled by crime and public drug use. “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,” ice cream entrepreneur and Pike/Pine business leader Molly Moon Neitzel said during the May meeting with neighborhood business and property representatives.
No date has been set for the next meeting that is hoped to include a wider representation of the neighborhood.
In the meantime, the community council meetings Wednesday night for its regular May session with an agenda including the Lid I-5 effort and a campaign to improve service performance on the #8 bus route. The Capitol Hill Community Council will also hold its first “Election Night” since the organization’s re-started last year.
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Sounds like the Crisis Center is coming to Broadway in 2027, regardless of constituent concerns about creating another magnet for the local drug market.
There is already a youth homeless center going in on Pine and Broadway and multiple low barrier housing facilities that have gone in over the last 5 years within blocks of here. It seems like King County and Seattle officials have decided that Capitol Hill should be like the tenderloin in San Francisco and East Hasting in Vancouver, a place to dump drug addicts and the mentally ill from across the region. Please contact King County, Seattle and State elected officials to let them know that Seattle’s historic gay neighborhood shouldn’t be turned into the Tenderloin. It makes no sense to locate it here in a dense and vibrant but struggling area. This is the wrong location.