HomeMy WebLinkAbout041026 emial - Written Public Comment for April 10 Joint Special Meeting - Item 2_ The 2026 Jefferson County Budget and Parks and Recreation fundingALERT: BE CAUTIOUS This email originated outside the organization. Do not open attachments or click on links if you are not expecting them.
To the Board of County Commissioners (Commissioners Brotherton, Eisenhour, and Dudley-Nollette), Sheriff Pernsteiner, and the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office:
I'm submitting this comment to address the glaring hypocrisy in the county’s 2026 budget crisis and the unacceptable way taxpayers and grant funds are currently being managed.
The county is currently mandated to cut $250,000 from the Parks and Recreation budget. In response, the county and Commissioner Dudley-Nollette have established a community donation
fund, relying on citizens to crowdfund $85,000 to $250,000 just to keep basic recreation services running for our youth through the end of the year. It is entirely unacceptable to ask
the community to donate money to save children's park programs while the county simultaneously siphons massive amounts of overhead from behavioral health grants. For example, under
the $1 million RCORP-I grant alone, Jefferson County pocketed over $247,000—a full 26% of the grant—strictly for "indirect administrative costs." The county is actively padding its
own bureaucratic bloat while gutting community services for kids and families.
To make matters worse, the county’s own statements admit that the General Fund is draining rapidly due to skyrocketing "risk liability coverage." Citizens are losing their parks to cover
the costs of the county’s own negligence. This liability is a direct result of sloppy county governance, including a documented history of failing to protect Personally Identifiable
Information (PII) and publishing unredacted, sensitive citizen information in public meeting packets. Taxpayers should not be footing the bill for the county's liability payouts and
privacy breaches.
At the same time, there is a massive, unchecked conflict of interest running through the heart of the county’s behavioral health and justice systems funded by the 1/10th of 1% Mental
Health Sales Tax. Discovery Behavioral Healthcare (DBH) receives hundreds of thousands of these tax dollars to provide wrap-around case management and jail services. Yet, the Board
Chair of DBH is Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Chris Ashcraft, and a sitting Board Member is Sheriff Andy Pernsteiner.
The exact same officials who have the discretion to divert vulnerable people before arrest are sitting on the board of the organization that gets paid county tax dollars to assess those
individuals after they are thrown in the county jail.
This conflict is made even worse by the Prosecutor's Office's current lawsuit against DSHS. Prosecutor Kennedy is aggressively suing the state for failing to provide competency restoration
services, yet his own prosecutors and Sheriff Pernsteiner's deputies routinely fail to trigger RCW 10.77 competency evaluations for individuals in obvious, documented cognitive decline
here in Jefferson County. Instead of legally pausing proceedings for mental health evaluations like other jurisdictions do, our county defaults to standard arrest-and-book cycles, criminalizing
behavioral health crises while pointing the finger at the state.
Jefferson County does not have a revenue problem; it has a priority and accountability problem. I'm requesting a full, independent audit of the "indirect costs" the county takes from
behavioral health grants, and a public explanation of how the Sheriff and Prosecutor can ethically lead the organizations receiving the mental health tax funds while failing to utilize
basic competency diversion laws on the street.
Amber Armstrong
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