October 22, 2023 Dena Jensen

🟥🟩Comparison of our County Executive’s remarks, one month apart, related to the amount of funding from the 2023 ballot measure sales tax that was to be made available for non-jail projects.🟥🟩

🟥Whatcom County Executive Satpal Sidhu at the June 12, 2023 Incarceration Prevention Reduction Task Force meeting where the Justice Project Implementation Plan was up for a vote:

“If you look at that at this money is available – I don’t know if you can see my cursor – but if you look at 2032, the green part is the capital cost of this project. That’s why, in first four years, five years – that’s when bulk of the capital cost is being put down to bring the capital cost down.

“If you look at this graph, green, green, I am saying again, green is the part with the capital cost. Everything above green, which is three times the capital cost, three times the capital cost, is for all other programs. I don’t now how more clear it can be.

“The committee, the IPRTF, the Executive’s office, Council Members talked to individually, Mr. Buchanan all have been part of this – that how we can allocate more and more money towards behavioral health programs. And it is very visible. Green is the only capital cost in this graph. I fail to understand, when people say, ‘this is not enough money.’ There’s more than enough money. Three times the money which is being spent on capital.”

Link to the meeting video where these remarks were made: https://youtu.be/ywj7BNTQJqw?si=Ko_c0h-h6mWqG8D7&t=5757

🟩Whatcom County Executive Satpal Sidhu’s exchange with Whatcom County Council Member Ben Elenbaas a month later on July 11, 2023, the day the Council held a workshop on the ballot measure sales tax for the new jail and other projects that was approved that night. The Council was considering inserting language to ensure a minimum of 50% of sales tax revenue after the first 4-6 years – not three times as much, but a minimum of 50% – would go to non-jail Justice Project projects. Elenbaas had been arguing against inserting the 50% minimum provision for non-jail projects as being too restrictive :

Council Member Ben Elenbaas: “What happens in the event that spending from this tax, the need is 63% for incarceration and behavioral health’s need is only 25%? And the rest is, okay we’re saving this for next year. Like, what do we do in that situation?

“’Cause our language [proposed for the ordinance] says a minimum of 50% gets spent on behavioral health. So does that lower the amount we can spend on incarceration? I read it that that would – that that’s what would happen.

“I guess, what do we do when the need for spending on incarceration is greater than 50% of the need for spending on mental health? What do we do?”

Whatcom County Executive Satpal Sidhu: “Yeah, I wanna remind the Council that in one of these discussions, I said, what we have seen today, may not be the same 5 years from now. I think we are so stuck on our past. We are trying to solve issues which have been last 5 years or 10 years, we have seen. We cannot predict the future. More flexibility to that council at that time is valuable.

“Let’s not just see, what is happening today will be the same thing happening 5 years from now, 10 years from now. I think we should always be cognizant of that.”

Link to the meeting video: https://whatcom.granicus.com/player/clip/965?view_id=1&redirect=true&h=a5cba22fbc1f40bd6cc2e6ef9f9173a6