Every year, the city of Spokane gets a bill from Spokane County Detention Services. According to the city, the bill for 2025 was $3 million more than anticipated.<\/p>\n
The significant increase led the city to conduct an independent audit and a review of the city\u2019s jail contract and costs to determine if finances could be improved, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown wrote in a letter Feb. 27. The audit analyzed the jail\u2019s records from 2016 to 2024, according to deputy city administrator Maggie Yates.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the city was charged $7.42 million in jail costs, which was expected, according to Spokane spokeswoman Erin Hut. The 2025 bill was more than $10 million, according to city documents obtained by The Spokesman-Review.<\/p>\n
\u201cUndoubtedly those costs have risen faster than anticipated, and we want to get to the bottom of that,\u201d Brown said in an interview with The Spokesman-Review.<\/p>\n
The audit by Spokane city staff was presented to the City Council during a finance and administration committee meeting last week.<\/p>\n
Mike Sparber, the Spokane County director of law and justice, said the increase is due to the jail\u2019s transition to a new medical provider after NaphCare severed a 10-year-old contract to provide medical care to county inmates in June. A Virginia-based company called Mediko took over the contract in February.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a while there, we had to keep both medical providers in the transition,\u201d Sparber said.<\/p>\n
Mediko will receive nearly $15.8 million for providing medical, dental and pharmaceutical care in Spokane County detention facilities for the first year, which will grow by 3% annually to $16.7 million in 2027, $17.2 million in 2028 and $17.75 million in 2029. Those totals are less than what NaphCare was set to receive. NaphCare was asking the county for a 35% payment bump that would have cost the county $22.6 million in 2026 and more than $23 million in 2027.<\/p>\n
Spokane seemingly anticipated the increase in medical costs, since Brown wrote a letter to the county commissioners inquiring about treatment for people with serious mental illness or substance use. The letter notes that roughly 60% of the county jail population had previously been treated for behavioral health issues.<\/p>\n
Brown wrote that the county jail was eligible to receive long-acting injectable anti-psychotic medication at no cost, but that NaphCare needed to secure and administer the medication at a larger scale to meet the needs within the jail. Spokane County and the County Commissioners never responded to Brown\u2019s letter.<\/p>\n
Labor costs for the county have also gone up, contributing to the larger 2025 bill, Sparber said.<\/p>\n
The contract between Spokane and Spokane County for detention services, the 2011 Interlocal Agreement, is 15 years old and is the most recent agreement between the county jail and the city.<\/p>\n
The audit confirmed that there is no fraud, waste or abuse between the jail and the city, the city\u2019s internal audit manager Danielle Arnold said during a meeting on Monday. The audit did reveal several areas that can reduce risk and improve transparency \u2013 which Sparber takes issue with.<\/p>\n
\u201cA portion of the audit said we haven\u2019t been very forthcoming with some of the numbers,\u201d Sparber said. \u201cWe have a data dashboard that is open to the public and we want to make sure that they understand that\u2019s available to them, as well as the city, to use to look up cases.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brown disagrees.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been calling out for about a year that one of the significant issues is having the health care provider bill Medicaid for health care costs so the federal government is also helping to participate in the funding. One of the conclusions in this audit is that we should have a seat on that committee, we haven\u2019t had much transparency into it,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n
Following the audit, the city has plans to formally request a seat on the Request for Proposal committees related to the jail, a seat on the Medication Transformation Project team and access to the city\u2019s misdemeanant population on JailTracker, the county\u2019s jail population management tool.<\/p>\n
Brown recommends the city start a committee to oversee the jail, which would review the existing contract and find provisions in which the city would be interested, review the County Detention Service\u2019s quarterly reports, evaluate the county cost schedule and develop a draft of reporting objectives to send to the County Jail Advisory Committee. The committee would be made up of the deputy city administrator, chief financial officer, a Spokane Police Department liaison, municipal court administrator, prosecutor and public defender.<\/p>\n