City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, and welcome to the Tuesday, 05/12/2026 study session of the Olympia City Council. For the record, we have a quorum with all council members present with council member Barron joining us remotely tonight. So we have just one item on our agenda, and it is the discussion of the municipal court services transition to Thurston County District Court. And we have our assistant city manager, Debbie Sullivan, here to kick us off.

Thank you, mayor. For the record, Debbie Sullivan, assistant city manager. And tonight, I am joined by Frankie Peters, the Thurston County court executive officer, district court judge Sam Meyer, court commissioner Paul Wohl, Brianna Pinkston, the City Of Olympia's chief prosecutor, and Diane Whaley, the city of Olympia's public defense coordinator. In 2025, the council made a thoughtful yet difficult decision to transition Olympia's Municipal Court to Thurston County. And in this transition, Olympia retained prosecution and public defense while district court assumed all other court functions and programs.

On 08/04/2025, Olympia provided the required six month notice to the administrative office of the court of the signed interlocal agreement between the city and Thurston County. Staff immediately got to work on the complicated task of transitioning the work to district court. This involved countless staff hours from human resources, IT, the Olympia Police Department, community planning and economic development, court, probation, public defense, legal, parking, public works, and that's just the city staff. It was enormous. I think the only department I did not mention was parks.

I'm happy to report that on February 4, Olympia's municipal court officially closed and successfully transitioned to Thurston County District Court. And the purpose of tonight's study session is to update you on that transition, the comprehensive rate study, forecast what's on the horizon for 2027, and discuss therapeutic courts. There are other aspects of the Plum Street site that continue to be in transition, including moving prosecution to City Hall and the Yashiro Japanese Gardens. Those projects will not be part of tonight's conversation, but council will be briefed on those items at a future date. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Frankie Peters.

Perfect. Thank you so much. And, please jump in with questions at any time, and we'll probably be passing mics back and forth. But I just wanna say I really appreciate Debbie going through the list of everybody who was involved in this process because it was absolutely extensive. I think we were happy enough that right at the beginning, Debbie ended up getting a meeting together with the entire city side.

We sat in a big room and started going through a plan because that's the biggest piece that we identified early on. And I wasn't shy about saying it when we first had this conversation. I was like, that's a big lift. This is something. If you told me this was gonna have to happen and you asked me for my timeline, I would have said year and a half, maybe two years for us to be get accomplished, and we were able to pull it off in six months from the signing of the ILA to get services stand up.

So I think that was a real benefit to the city and the county and our partnership and what we were able to provide. I mean, Melinda and Thanh and Sean and everybody that were involved throughout this entire process were absolutely amazing. And Debbie speaks to the city's involvement throughout this process, and she probably can click over to slides as we're talking about this About this process and we did the same on our end. We ended up getting our IT, our human resources, our facilities, central services, everybody at the table so that we can start going through the plan because we recognize that this was too important for us to try to build the plane as we're flying it. We're gonna need to take those proactive steps to identify those gaps and start addressing those to the extent that we can knowing that we have that six months to get everything stood up.

There's gonna be some things that we're gonna continue to work on to make sure that we're covering all those services, but let's get this all stood up and take all the steps we can to make sure that it's effective as possible. And that's where we kinda started off because I recognized that the last time we talked was almost exactly a year ago. So a lot of this is what we've been working on following the signing of the ILA and making sure that we have the resources identified, who to talk to, when to talk to them, what gaps within the processes we wanna make sure that we address. The interesting parts with the courts is with the courts, we're all doing the same what, but the hows are gonna be different from every single one of the 172 courts you see across state of Washington. So we have to go through and go, how is Olympia Municipal Court doing their business?

How do we do our business? How do we make that work together? So that was a lot of the processes that we discussed as we started getting everything ready for the transition phase. Judges, anything on that? Do you wanna kick it off with the new commissioners?

Sure. Part of the I still have to get used to the microphone. Of course, when city of Olympia transferred over to Thurston County, we needed to hire a new court commissioner and someone you know well from the City Of Olympia, Jacob Stillwell, came from the City Of Olympia to go work for the work for us at the county, and he's doing a he's doing a great job. I guess I should well, it's also gonna point out that, okay, he came from the city of Olympia, seated to my left, Paul Walt. It says commissioner on there, by the way, but he's Brett Buckley's retiring.

He's running for Brett's position. He did not get an opposition, so that's only partially true that's commissioner. He's essentially a judge elect now because he doesn't have an opposition in the upcoming election. But, anyways, he came from the City Of Of Olympia as a prosecutor. Our benchmate Kayla Wilcox, is a former prosecutor from the City Of Olympia. Back in the early two thousands, I worked part time in prosecution for the city of Olympia with Kayla and somebody else. I don't City Of Olympia is kind of the cradle of district court judges in in Thurston County. But so we have a strong City Of Olympia background. And, Jake has, hit the ground running. He's doing a great job and, you know, really, really doing well.

And one of the other things that we wanted to talk about is we start getting the staff onboarding. So we've onboarded 14 staff. And when we say that generally, it seems like, yeah, it's a big number. It's a lot of work that goes into it. We ended up doing well over a 100 interviews, reviewed over a thousand applications to make sure that we had the best team that was going to support the court services.

It was a very extensive process. We have absolutely fabulous teams over there, especially our probation department. They have already made a huge headway. We've already seen huge reductions in our noncompliance through the courts. Even with this about 30% workload increase that we're seeing, There's already been a decrease about 20% in the noncompliance that are coming in, and I attribute that to the work of the probation counselors and their support of everybody that's justice involved, making sure that they're getting the resources that they need in order to be successful.

So that's been absolutely fabulous. We've also, expanded into Building 1, which is right next door to us. That's so that we can have space for

I apologize for interrupting. I just wanna say one thing about the new staff member. Several I don't know the number, but several former, staff members from the municipal court here in Olympia are now working for Thurston County, and they're doing a great Ashley did a great job here. They're doing a great job for us as well. Sorry for interrupting, Frankie. Go ahead.

For Building 1, the main intent of that building was, to get sufficient space for probation and for our therapeutic courts as well as getting our fifth courtroom. So we were able to stand that up. That was more later in the process. There's a little bit of a rush to get it all, done because what we wanna do is make sure that we're identifying the most cost effective approach, and long term approach as we're talking with the county about expanding to not expanding, but finding new building downtown. And the next piece and a lot of this, again, Sean and Melinda, they are on my quick call list for everything that comes up.

The court case document transfers, this is a huge lift. I mean, from the front end value, we see everything on TV. Right? Walk into a courtroom and everything just magically happens. But the fact of the matter is there is hours, days, weeks worth of work that goes into just getting the documents from one system to another system to get the case files from one system to another system is just because I love data.

The fun part about it is every single file that we end up transferring from one case management to the other, even though we're using the same JIS, they call it, we still have to go in and manually transfer a case from Olympia to Thurston County. Each one can take fifteen minutes to forty five minutes. We've transferred over 2,500 cases. We ended up having our team come in for weekends on end to sit down and have some food, put on some music, and start getting to work transferring these cases. So we're very happy with that.

And then the document transfer piece, again, Melinda and Sean doing so much work on the back end for Olympia, to stand up what that transfer process was, data migration, ensuring that it fits with our case managements, our document management system, and then working with our IT over at the county to end up bridging those gaps. Months worth of work. All successful. We have everything in there, and it's been fabulous. Parking is one that we are still in the process of developing.

It's one that we ended up identifying when we've been working through our gap analysis and recognizing that we wanna ensure that we're following the processes that are set by the supreme court as far as how cases are filed with the court and the format by which they're filed. So we ended up identifying that early on. And then as everybody knows, I'm assuming, is the city of Olympia has their t two parking management system, and we have our JIS system. So the biggest thing was how are we going to get these cases from here to there? What we're working on currently is the city of Olympia is partnering with their t two vendor in order to get that system to drop information directly into ours.

That's a process all in itself. But what we had to do is sit down and go, okay. What's the stop gap so that we can provide the services in the meantime? And what that is is just a manual process. So what we're doing is all those parking tickets, once they get cited by the officer, is there manually walked over, driven over to us, and then we have our staff that have to go through and manually type and enter them into the system. So and I do know that one of the frustrations with, parking from our community members is and frequently enough, they'll come in just a couple hours after they end up getting a ticket. And they're like, hey. I wanna pay this. We don't have it yet. We haven't had a chance to get it in yet.

We greatly apologize. Come back in a couple days. Let's get this taken care of. We provide all the information if they wanna pay over the phone, or they can come back in and see our bright and shiny faces. So that's kind of a stop gap that we've had to do, and we're looking forward to here in the relatively short time being able to transition that so that it can go from t two over to the administrative office of the courts back into our system so that we can have all those within our system without that manual entry within a day.

So that'll be very, very beneficial to all of our community members that are hoping to get those taken care of as soon as possible. The other piece of it is the payment side of things. Right now, within the system, because we use our GIS and a reporting structure that comes through, when infractions are cited, there isn't it's not like a criminal or speeding ticket or anything like that where you have a defendant name associated with it. It's all based off of the license that it's getting cited in and sent over to the court. So what we have right now is we're working with our vendor, and we should, in very short time, have that module built that allows for all those payments to also be done online.

So they can do it over the phone. They can come in. They can see us. We have different options for that, but this will further wrap around those services so they can also go online with a click, put their case number in. Now I'll tell you, we could do it right now, but what I didn't wanna do is create even more difficulty for everybody that's coming in. So what you can do is you can put in your case number, but the problem is you have no reference to it. Right? It's not gonna say John Smith. So we don't want somebody to come in and hit a two instead of a one. All of a sudden, you're paying somebody else's parking ticket, and we're in a worse situation than we were before.

So we wanna be thoughtful to everybody as they're coming in seeking the services of the court, making sure that we have that full wraparound service built in, and we're looking forward to that very, very soon. And then, of course, partnerships. This has just been amazing. We've been able to, have Diane and Brianna come in and have all of their teams come in, meet with our judges. We're always, open phone line if there are any questions or anything like that that we can answer answer, and they've been absolutely fabulous. But that's something that we wanna continue to build and ensure that we're always keeping open lines of communication. Any questions? I feel like I'm just talking over here.

Frank, I'm just gonna

say thank you for your work on the parking. I know that there's all this other work for for bigger cases of and and entering all that backlog and all that, but the the parking affects so many people in a small way that I'm I'm really grateful for that time and attention.

It does. Thank you. And and, again, the the Olympia team has been absolutely fabulous because I know we have a lot going on, but they'll sit there and keep following up with us and making sure that we're taking all the steps, whether it is just a meeting to touch base. But there there's a lot of work that Tan and her team have to do in order to coordinate with AOC to make sure that all those requirements are followed, build those gaps between the AOC and our system. And Citi has really been doing some great job on that.

As far as the current court support, we ended up talking about this bit last year when it was asked of us what our levels of service are. We touch a little bit on probation. As far as probation, and I say this all the time, the what our approach to probation is it's not a badge knocking on the door trying to find out if you have liquor hidden above your cabinet. I mean, that that that's what a lot of people think when they think probation, that it's a big gotcha game. The whole intent with how we end up setting up our probation counselors is in support of all those justice involved that have been provided orders by the court so that we can get them the resources that they need to be successful in the program.

What we've realized early on is it does not take much to have somebody not meet their obligations to the court because they don't have transportation. They don't have employment. So it's been really beneficial to have this first line of communication with everybody that's going into probation so that they can set them up with the services, put them in contact with our resource hub or any of the other community partners that we have to make sure that they get everything they need so they can be successful. We also have our mental health and intensive supervision division within probation. This is one that we ended up establishing in around, I believe it was 2018.

And this was really in recognition that we wanna be able to provide further support that's similar to our therapeutic options in the post disposition phase of the life cycle of a case. Therapeutic courts are kind of that predispo phase of the courts. And what ends up happening is because of resource constraints, you can only have so many people that are inside those programs. So we're sitting there going, okay. How can we expand our services to ensure that they're getting a similar level of care for those that might not want to enter into a year or two year long intensive supervision therapeutic court.

So this is the option that we ended up coming up with, and it's been wildly successful. The probation team works very closely with our therapeutic courts. They go to conferences, the same trainings. They're able to bring back all of that information to support those that they're serving, and it's been great. We also have our county pretrial services that is assisting with the Olympia cases as well so that they can, again, just as probation does, provide resources to those that are just involved as well as making sure that there's compliance with substance monitoring, urinalysis testing, anything like that.

And then we have you know much more about the resource hub. You wanna talk about the

resource hub?

I'll talk. The resource Judge, you're my Oh, sorry. I know. I I get carried away, and then I get nervous, and I forget to hit the button. But the Thurston County resource hub is set up just right across the street from where we are in district court, and it's a great organization run by Nate Block.

They do on-site, substance use evaluations, on-site mental health evaluations. They can provide assistance for housing, employment, education. They're also partnered with sound legal aid so they can provide civil legal aid for you know, you don't need to be we're talking in the construct of criminal offenses and probation and things of that sort, but that doesn't need to be the case to take advantage of the resources get the resource of. They do civil legal aid for, family loss situations, domestic violence, civil domestic violence situations, landlord tenant issues, and it's a, five day a week, service that provides all those things, and they really do a great job. And pretty much anything that, some of the disadvantaged among us could look for, it can be found there at the resource hub.

And then also what we have on-site too is Friendship Diversion Services. We have a contract with them as far as supporting, again, substance monitoring. So our probation department as well as pretrial services works directly with them. And then, of course, our therapeutic options in mental health and veterans court that we've been discussing as far as what the plan is for that. Again, it goes back to the courts all do the same what.

But what's that how look like? What does that model look like? We've been very, proud of our mental health and veterans court. It's a model that we've had in place, and we've been continuing to develop over the years. So we're gonna continue to work on that with the teams and keep seeing where that takes us. Oh, spot that button. And then the rate. Were there any questions about that so far? Okay. Rate study is something that's coming up quick on us.

So what we end up doing is every four years, the county ends up doing a comprehensive rate study for all services at Thurston County District Court. So this includes city of Tumwater, Lacey, Rainier, and then we'll be wrapping into Nino and Olympia. And I appreciate the approach that the county ended up taking for this. Historically, what we ended up is we had a decades old rate study that went through that was very case file based that the on staff for the county ended up conducting. And it worked great for when we had implemented, but what we wanted to do is make sure that we brought somebody in that had a specific experience in rate studies and especially complex rate studies when you have multiple partners that are involved with it.

So the county is going to contract with and I forget what the name of the vendor is, but they're gonna contract to have that rate study completed. I believe that's gonna be before our board next Tuesday so that they can proceed with that rate study process. And then at that point, the contractor will come on board, and we'll have an opportunity to start sharing all the information that we have, all the resource needs, all the case filings, proceeding counts, all the data. And they're gonna go through and do their magic and end up working through that rate study process. And what we're hoping here is in the next few months, we're gonna be able to bring that information to you all so that you can review and see where that is even if not in final form so that we can start having conversations.

This is what the contractor is bringing in. This is what we're seeing. Is there anything that stands out to you all so that we can work together through that process and the development of that rate study and what that looks like when it comes to contracts next year. So we end up doing those every four years. We're hoping that this model will be something that we can start replicating so that we can keep bringing it to the cities earlier and earlier each year because we know that everybody is looking at their own budgets and how those are working, and we don't wanna wait until October every single year. So let's build a model that can start getting this information out sooner and earlier. So that's what we're currently working on.

Is October when you expect this process will wrap up, or is there a timeline

for No. Right now, what my expectation is and because the rate study, it's it's not done by me, it's done by the county itself. Right now, we're in May. I'm thinking that we should be able to have some information to start sharing in July. But usually in years past with the way that the rate study was conducted, it was usually that SeptemberOctober time that we got all that information in, and that gave us about two months to have a discussion.

For me, that's not enough. And then, looking ahead, some of the things that we've been, working on that we're very excited to get, stood up here within this year is, DBMRT and, victim impact panels through our on-site probation. We have three of our probation counselors getting trained this month and three more next month so they can be certified in DVMRT and teach their own courses within probation. Domestic violence, moral Information. Recognition therapy.

It is so in the community, domestic violence treatment is very difficult to find, and it's difficult for those justices involved to accomplish. What this is is an on-site model by which they'll work with the probation counselors through different phases. They have a workbook essentially, and they're gonna work with the counselor through these phases in order to fulfill that requirement so that it's more meaningful to them, and it's not something that we're gonna send them out into the community to spin wheels on the attempt to find.

And it It would also be much less expensive for them, to do it through the probation department rather than a private provider.

This one I had to put up. My team would roll their eyes at me because I bring it up all the time, and I probably already put it up on slides beforehand. But business process reviews, it's something that we're always doing within all of our departments at the court. It's something that I feel that we always have to do. How are we doing things, and can we do things better? It's something that we can't ever sit on and just say, hey. It's been working for this long, or it's been working good for this long, so why fix it? We always wanna look at our processes, see what tweaks we can make, where efficiencies can be had, and how we can further support our communities. Next year is gonna be another big year for us. We are transitioning to a new statewide case management system.

This isn't something that we get to raise our hands for. It's provided by the state. We have to do it, but it's going to be a big transition. It's a process that's probably gonna start in about March, and that is just to prepare for implementation of October. So it is going to be our year long process by which we bring in a brand new case management system to support all of our business.

And then with the business process reviews, we're always going to look at technology improvements where we can create greater access. I know that I've been talking with attorneys, about this. We wanna be able to, bridge gaps and make sure that we can address ways to more efficiently file documents with the court, without any errors and workflows or documents breaking as they transfer from one place to another. So we wanna make sure that we're, doing our due diligence and making sure that that process is as smooth as possible, as well as access to the courts generally as we're talking about with parking and the payment options and access to the courts. That is my very quick rundown of everything that we've been working on over the last year.

Wow. That was quick, But a lot of work, which was clear, presentation, so thank you. Councilmember Madrone.

I'm curious about, you know, the status of renovations that are that that are maybe underway or have been done, but also longer term, the move of the courts to downtown and just any information you have to share on that?

As far as the renovations that we have for that temporary stop gap, those are all done. We're we're running efficiently within the buildings that we have right now. As far as the actual timelines that the county has for the building downtown, I don't have any exactly. I know that they are currently getting ready to kick off the RFP process that'll allow to bring on that contractor so that they can start going through the actual development of that space. They've already gone through and done the feasibility analysis.

The buildings look amazing. District court's really excited for this opportunity. And right now, we're just kinda waiting for that contractor to come on board so that we can start getting into those next phases of going, what's this actually gonna look like? Who's gonna be where? What's the timeline going to be?

All county services are are gonna be there before 2029, but I expect what they're gonna do, what's been relayed to us, is there's gonna be a prioritization for the courts to get over there sooner than later. So they're gonna work on us getting into Building 1 And 2. They're calling it the back end with that short brick, and we got our own little water fountain in the front and everything. So they're gonna work on getting us into that space as soon as possible knowing that where we're at right now, we're hoping that the building doesn't fall down into the the shoots.

Councilmember Green followed by councilmember Gilman.

Thank you, mayor Payne. Thank

you for that and all of this transition work. I I wrote down a phrase which you used multiple times already, which was something to the effect of getting people the resources they need to be successful in that system. And if that's sort of the way you approach this work, I just really appreciate that because I know how complicated and daunting it can be for a lot of folks. I don't suspect you have firm data on this, but have you heard any feedback from folks as far as either like confusion as to why am I going to the county when I'm here or what am I or appreciation or like have you heard any feedback since this change, one way or another from the folks needing to access the services?

Well, the judges might hear more than I have, but I'll tell you that I have not heard any actual concerns from anybody or why are you making me go here?

No. I've kinda heard the opposite. People ask me where do they need to go, if especially if they have to go to a probation appointment. And they're used to the idea that something like probation in court might be in different places and it's great to be able to tell them it's all here and so, my experience has been they appreciate that it's centrally located, easy to access.

Thank you. Okay. Councilmember Gelman.

Thank you. So I I'm thinking about our reimagining public safety efforts and that a a a big wedge of that work was about reducing the stickiness of the justice system. And so I'm wondering with a little experience now if Diane and Brianna might talk about our our our efforts about how people, were treated with outstanding warrants, rates of our incarceration versus, alternatives, and and fees and obligations. Where where how how relatively sticky does it feel compared to the the hopes we had?

Yeah. I'm trying to work for her. I mean, we're still, you know, just barely over three months into the process. I with it being, like, a one stop shop, I I haven't noticed or had any complaints about a lot of difficulty or hoops that you have to jump through now that we're with county. I think that our I monitor our jail population every morning, and we were hovering, averaging between fifty and sixty every morning.

And right now, our average is around 40 in custody. We've had a couple of weeks where we'll have a few days of 30. And I always ask OPD, do we think that that's real? Or is there a mess up here? But because it seems to be the average, is staying around that, like, 38 to 44.

I do think that we are trending down in at least the amount of daily population that we have in custody. We're still court cases are always when you're arraigned, it's set out maybe six weeks until your next one. And so we're still kind of in that beginning phase of seeing what is the return rate of people to come back. We've only had you know, if you were arraigned right when you we transitioned back to county, then you've probably only had one court date since then. And I don't think that I've seen extremely high FTAs.

But, I mean, that's I think that we'll need a longer period of time to see what that trend is with the warrants of people coming back and coming back to court like they're supposed to. I have not noticed an uptick in warrants at least.

Brianna? FTA?

Failure to appear. Sorry.

Okay.

Thank

you. When you fail to appear at a court hearing, it could be called an FTA warrant.

Thank you. Oh, Diane, please.

Just be brief. I was just gonna say from the defense perspective, I would say that I haven't seen any sort of uptick in the warrant rates increasing as far as failures to appear in court. I feel like the warrant quash process has been seamless, and I'm very grateful of the really excellent communication between the court and defense, especially, to get those warrants quashed, and, making that process very clear in black and white as to where to direct people because public defense has a large role in directing people on how to do that. As far as the incarceration rates, I haven't seen a trend yet. We'll just have to, in time, kind of watch that.

I am proud to say, though, that we have changed some processes as far as our access to inmates since the transition. So that's been extremely positive. And as far as fees, again, that's another one that we're just gonna continue to monitor as it's

a little early. Thank you.

Thanks. I actually I see councilmember Barrett has a question, but I also have a question. Councilmember Barrett.

Yeah. Thank you. We've there's there's a great report, and I I wanna thank everyone for the presentations. We've heard a lot of good news, and the the transition's going well. And and I'm I'm personally pleased to hear this.

There's a lot going on in the court system. We'll have new facilities, but I just wanted to ask our panelists what they see as the challenges confronting the court. This isn't necessarily a transition issue, but what are the biggest challenges confronting the court as you see it and the delivery of these services as it pertains to city of Olympia and their court services?

Well, I I could I can speak to that. I think the challenges that we experience now have been going on for quite some time, and those challenges would be poverty, substance use, substance abuse, and substance and, and mental health issues. I think a combination of and a lot of times, those three three things, unfortunately, run together. But, those are been challenges since I've been doing this since 2008, and they've been challenges then, and they remain challenges. But that's what I would identify. And that a lot of that goes to the probation department things and the way we treat folks post disposition in terms of therapeutic courts and the probation department that's and now that we're fully staffed in probation, we can do a lot more with, with those things.

Thank you.

So, along the lines of what, council member Gilman was asking about in our, in our in a local agreement, it talks about us working towards expanding evidence based programs. And and considering our reimagining public safety goals, I'm just curious about how are we, what will that process look like in terms of, engaging with us and moving, towards expanding those those kinds of programs.

Let's just transition into my slides. Oh,

we have more. Okay.

Yeah. Thank you for that unplanned segue. I don't I don't know what I'm doing. Just pushing, pulling. Okay.

Okay. So, that's really what I'm here to talk about today is kind of giving an update on our perspective from the prosecutor's office of this transition, and how we see the process moving forward with developing or, integrating a therapeutic court at Thurston County. So as we said, we're just a little over three months into the transition. The first few weeks were a little rough, I think on for everybody. You know, we had very, very heavy court calendars, and we were in court till five or 05:30 every day.

I don't think we liked that. I don't think defense liked that. I definitely don't think the bench liked that. But that, you know, we we kept saying we have to get a time to see how we even out in like the next month. And the way that the court calendars are set up now, they are kind of ever changing a little bit We're tweaking as we go, which is something that we really appreciate from our office is that if something's not working, the county is very open to saying, just call Frankie and say, hey, this is what we're seeing and it's being really difficult for these reasons.

And then it's a discussion, and then they're willing to, make changes as we go. And that's happened over, you know, that first couple of weeks were really rough, and now we are, in court a lot less hours than we were in the very beginning. We still have a lot of court calendars that we have to appear at, but instead of going till 05:30, we might get out at 03:30, which is a huge difference for, the attorneys to be able to return back to their office and continue kind of their in office work. So that has really evened out, which I think we're really, really grateful for. Not feeling the pressure of having 100 cases on in a morning, which is what we used to have.

Now an attorney might have 20 cases on in the morning, and it's a lot more manageable and cases are a lot, we're able to to pay a lot more attention to the cases, and give them a full effort in the courts than rather than just a number being pushed to the system because we gotta get out by noon and people need breaks, and we don't really have that problem anymore, which has been really great, for for my office. And I would assume also, the defense attorneys are probably happy about that as well. As I said, the calendars are kind of adjusting as we go. We just got information today that they're gonna change again in June, and it's always for the best. It's not something that we're all ever against.

Every time I'm presenting with a new calendar option, we're always really grateful because it's always going in the right direction. And so that's just that collaboration that we have with the county where it's really an open door policy, and we are able to bring our concerns and vice versa. They'll bring their concerns to us. The bench is very open where we are able to talk to the bench about their feelings on calendaring and how we can maybe fix things going forward. And so it's really evolving in a really positive direction at this point.

One of the difficulties we have now just from my perspective or my office is that, you know, we now kind of have two IT departments that we work with because the county has their own systems that we have to get we had to be onboarded to. That was a really big, project that did not go smoothly, because our in house IT doesn't know what their in house IT does. So, a lot of collaboration had to go in on that end, getting the IT departments to speak the right language so that, we can communicate properly and everyone can get up to speed about the different programs that we're having to use. And after the first couple of weeks, again, it's kind of been a smooth transition for that process as well. When it comes to one of the things that we focus a lot in our office is obviously our victims that of the crimes that we're prosecuting.

And so that has been a challenge for us because we have multiple courtrooms in multiple buildings with multiple judges at multiple times. We're coming from Olympia. We had one judge, one courtroom, one time. And so just making sure that everyone knows where their case is, where they can be, how they can be heard, where they're going. That has been a lot of work that our two advocates have done.

And anytime that a calendar changes, that's a lot of work for the advocates because they are having to make sure that they're going back and reminding people or what the changes are. So that has been a a really big deal for our advocates. And, again, when we've had concerns about notice issues or anything that we feel like we weren't prepared ahead of time for because there's been calendar changes, that's just a very easy quick call to the county, and everything gets fixed pretty seamlessly. And so we have yet to come up against a roadblock where we weren't able to figure out where do we go from here. They've just been very flexible, and that's been really, really great to work with.

The other thing is just the day to day of filing. Like, where does where do we send our filings to? How does the case flow work? You know, we have a lot of documents that go into court every day that need to get to the police department that night and need to get to our victims that night. And so those are just little things that we don't maybe we didn't think about ahead of time, then you're in it, and you're like, oh, yeah.

We have to figure that out too. But it all is getting figured out pretty quickly, and we really have not had a lot of hiccups or bumps in that area. Because as I said, getting the right information to the right people on a timely manner is really, really important in the system because that's people's lives. And, you know, officers need to know what, they had the legal authority to do after a court hearing. So that transition, has also really been, I wouldn't say seamless, but, it's not as hard as I anticipated it to be.

So we really appreciated the work of, the works in the in the clerks the the people in the clerk's office who have been able to, help us through all of these issues that have come up. You know, right now, we're not currently offering a therapeutic court for the Olympia, cases, but that's what we're working towards, and that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Right now, the Thurston County has these three, therapeutic courts. They have the state's veterans court, the mental health court, and then the Lacey has their own mental health court as well. And so I've spoken to the city prosecutor for the city of Lacey a lot about how their mental health court system works, what they're doing, how they get people in.

Just trying to see if that's something that we wanna bring to the Olympia table to see if that's where we wanna go in that direction. So the past couple of months have been more of kind of fact finding and trying to understand how the systems they already have in place work. And then now we'll kinda transition into, is that gonna work for the city of Olympia as well, or do we need to maybe go a different therapeutic route? And that's where we're kinda starting at this point because we have, we I've spoken to kind of the key players of the courts that are already in existence. And if something that is working is already in existence, then, I'm not opposed to incorporating Olympia into that as well.

So that's kind of the direction that we'll be, we'll continue to to talk about.

Brianna? Yes. We have a question from councilmember Green.

Yes. Yeah. On the prior slide, broadly speaking, what would be the distinctions or what would be the the need for having separate, like, the state mental health court versus a Lacey or an Olympia mental health court? Like, what might be different offerings there that would necessitate two separate ones?

I actually don't know, what goes behind that, so I'll ask the court.

It's it's not necessarily the offerings. So we have our mental health and veterans court as a department within the court that provide those services. But what this allows is for those attorneys and those prosecutors for the city of Olympia or, sorry, the city of Lacey to address their case without any having to have the state prosecutors and the state attorneys, and they're addressing theirs. So we provide that docket space, and it would be a similar thing once Olympia has the opportunity to review and go, okay. This looks like a good model to us. Let's look at the mental health court. We would do something similar and say, okay. Here's that docket space. So that way, there isn't any competing time where Brianna or Diane have to sit there and wait for a state prosecutor.

Okay. Thank you.

I have a question about the the interim period. So don't have a therapeutic court right now. So what what's happening with the people who who are identified or maybe need those services now in the interim?

The difference that we have right now with, the county is that specialty probation that they offer. So they have mental health probation counselors and intensive supervision. So they're still on probation, but those counselors, if you're assigned to that caseload, those ones are going to be, I I keep wanting to say intense, not intense, but they're gonna be, I think, even more hands on than a regular probation officer. And, so we have cases that come in where we think that this needs a little bit more attention or if we're gonna, if someone's gonna go on probation and we think that the main issue that they're experiencing is experiencing is a mental health issue, then we'll ask the court, can we make sure that that's the probation route that they go, rather than just general probation? So we do have at least specific, areas in the probation department where we can send cases that we think are more suited for kind of, a more therapeutic approach than I would say general probation would be.

Okay. And do they have an opportunity to go back at some point if they wanted to without reoffending, of course, but they have an option to go through any particular alternative program or or anything like that?

Not once you're through to the probation round because if you're in probation, then your play your case has been, you've essentially most likely pled guilty to something. And so now you're on probation, and then that's the route that you're going.

I see. Okay. Thank

you. Okay. So what Olympia wants to create, we, you know, we want a therapeutic court that's structured for success and holds people accountable while providing necessary treatment and services. And I think that's what probably every therapeutic court, is striving for. A lot of the people that we see that in some of these programs, one of the main things that they're lacking in their life is structure, and that's what those programs are offering them.

I think that's what the probation department in the interim is offering them, more structure of giving them timelines of and meeting appointments and getting them on this path where they are, you know, meeting the expectations that are put out in front of them. And so that's what we're we're hoping for a program that is structured to the people that we help in the city of Olympia. City of Olympia people, they are clientele in my mind, and I've worked in several jurisdictions. I used to work for Thurston County prosecutors. The City Of Olympia has a little bit different of a clientele.

We have a downtown core where the county doesn't. City Of Lacey doesn't really have a downtown core area. So the people that we see in our jurisdiction are a little bit different than other jurisdictions as we wanna tailor it to what the people of Olympia need. How do we get them to succeed? What services do they need?

And also at the same time, holding them accountable for whatever criminal behavior landed them where they are with us. And so I think it takes time to, like we said, look at the courts that they currently have going right now, the mental health vets court, and see if that could be tailored to a city of Olympia clientele or if we need to look elsewhere more of the community court route, which is what we previously had. So the goals that we're hoping for when we are looking at starting up a therapeutic court is we want a fast track to services. A lot of time in this, the system can take, you know, a few months to get your case through the system. Our, the time where we charge a a case to the time we a case goes to disposition can be really lengthy.

At the time now with the county, they've really shortened that time. We used to have a lot of continuances continue, continue, and then you'd be nine months down the road. Your case hasn't been resolved. And in that meantime, you're not accessing any services. And that's not good for a defendant. That's not good for a victim. It's not good for the community. Working with Thurston County, they really limit the amount of time that a case can kind of languish. And so that's been really great in the interim. But we are also looking to get people services even faster.

We know that one of the main things that a few of the main things that we have in Olympia is we have a housing issue with a lot of our population in the court system. We have a lot of mental health issues and a lot of substance use issues. So getting them through the system to conviction isn't going to help them. Getting them through the system with services is what we're looking for. So to be able to have a system where we can fast track access to those services is one of our really big goals.

And right now, the judges are really good at arraignment when they see someone that may be experiencing some kind of crisis or another. They're always telling them about the resource hub. You know, you don't have to have a conviction. You don't even have to be in the system to access the resource hub. And so the bench is really proactive about getting that information out to anybody that comes before them.

And so that's one of the ways that, at least in the interim, when we're not when we don't have a therapeutic court, those are just ways that we can get people services faster than we typically would because we have it's essentially an on-site location at the court where they can go, quickly as walk ins and get services that they need. You know, we're wanting to create a therapeutic court that provides intensive support for participants. So, just like you know, I know we talked about probation. They are a lot more hands on. But for people that go into therapeutic courts, we need even more hands on.

We need to provide that daily structure. And sometimes that's calling them every morning to remind them to take their medication. That might not be something that a probation officer would do, but that could be something that a therapeutic court system can do. So we're looking for a program that can really give the extra hand holding to the participants to get them to where they need to be to be successful. Quality over quantity.

That's a really big deal for at least coming from my office. We you know, I spoke to the city of Lacey attorney. I think in their mental health court right now, they have five participants, and I think they max out at seven or eight. And I think that's kind of telling. If you don't have a huge population in that court, then that's a lot of intensive help that those people that are in that court are getting.

And those people that are committed to making the changes, accepting the services, accepting the help, to get to the other side of that program. And so I don't know that we would want a program that, is maybe that narrow of amount of people. But the idea that they're really vetting and making sure that people that go into these programs are ready for the programs are you know, if someone that can they foresee can be successful in that program. And so that's what we're hoping to whatever program that we build in the future, we're wanting it to make sure that it really has good quality, which is why it also it will take a little bit of time to get there because we need to hone in on what we're wanting. And also a system that provides accountability for crime victims.

You know, at the prosecutor's office, our kind of goal is we represent everybody. We represent the city and the community. We represent victim's rights, and we represent a defendant's rights. We need to make sure that everyone is treated fairly and equally. And victims are a really big part of that. And, you know, you can it's very easy for victims to feel like they're not being heard. You go into a court system, and the person at the table every day is the defendant. And that's who the court's talking to. That's who probation's providing their services to. You know, they have their own attorney staying up there with them.

And so it's easy for a victim to feel like they're really lost in that because they don't I'm not their attorney. I will represent to the court their wishes, but I'm not their attorney. You know, they don't have a probation officer who's helping them, guide them through, after someone's been convicted of a against them. You know, the court will obviously address them if they know that a victim's in the courtroom and they have something to say. The court is really good about recognizing that.

But, again, the system is really focused on the benefit of a defendant in that court system. So we also wanna make sure and and be really aware of whatever therapeutic court system we go with and how we proceed forward that victims are still seeing the accountability for a crime that was committed against them, and they're still feeling the support from the system as well because they are a very big piece of it. Okay. Whoops. Alright.

How do we get there? So that's kind of where we're starting right now. You know, we're about, just a little over three months in, and we're just starting to have those conversations, like this one where we're gathering all the key players to get together to decide what is the best for Olympia. You know, we did have, obviously, a community court here, and I think that that was very specific to an Olympian municipal court. But now we have multiple judges, and we have a different system.

And so, not saying that community court wouldn't work in in, Thurston County. It most certainly can work in there. But there's just other players now at the table than there ever used to So gathering those people, having those conversations, with between prosecution and defense, the judges, the court staff, and then the probation department, which I believe the therapeutic courts right now, they're called the care coordinators. Is that what we're called? Okay.

So we would call, maybe, like, a case manager. But in, Thurston County, they're called care coordinators, and that's exactly what they're doing. And they have multiple care coordinators, that work with their existing programs. And so those are people that are really well suited to know, what the clients need and what what access they need and how they can get it. And so, and I have not met them yet. So those are people that I would be really interested in talking to and getting to know more about, how they proceed in their systems.

I just wanted to make one quick point, and that is the care coordinators for our therapeutic courts are not part of the probation department. That's separate and apart from probation. And so I I'll toss it back to you, Rihanna. Sorry sorry for I apologize for interrupting.

Judge. And as I said, Olympia are it's just a little bit different. I think everyone always says, like, oh, Olympia is a little bit different. And we are. The the people that we support are very different, or the structure of the city is different.

And so we wanna make sure we do our due diligence in making sure that we're doing the and setting up the program that is best suited for our clientele, for the people that we support in our community that addresses some of our systemic issues that maybe another jurisdiction doesn't see, that Olympia sees. We wanna make sure that we're doing whatever is the best program going forward. And so that's gonna take some time. And then part of that is doing the observations of the current therapeutic court system. So I've talked to Frankie about their systems.

I've talked to the city of Lacey about their systems. But I think, at least from my perspective, our next step on my end is to go and observe some of those, hearings and how those therapeutic courts work, kind of for myself to understand what the flow is, what kind of, clients they have in there. And then that will be also be able to shape how we move forward with the city of Olympia.

Brianna?

Yes.

So, one of the things we're really big on here at the city is community engagement. So my understanding is our our court used to have, like, a municipal, community advisory body. I've been to, like, your, your veterans court, graduation. So I think about, like, people who are alumni who might have something to offer, to this process in terms of, like, what was their experience, that could help shape this. It's just kinda where I'm going with with that.

I think you'll end up with a better product. Obviously, all these key players are great, but, I think the people, that are impacted or have the potential to be affected, would be great to include or talk to.

Mhmm. No. I I don't disagree. And luckily, Diane keeps a lot of information and statistics and everything, so she has a lot of that information. And so that'll be, part of the discussions going forward of when when we're creating it, who needs to be at that table to help create it.

Okay. So the challenges that I see right now, and this is what I see, but also speaking with the players at the table today, you know, this isn't a, something that we can just kind of hop into and start overnight. We can't just transition the community court over and say, okay. We're gonna start doing community court now. You know, there it takes time to understand the program that we're wanting.

And even though Diane and I have been in that program and, worked with it for several years, you know, the people at the county have it. And so that takes, it takes a lot of work to start up a therapeutic court. And because they don't currently have a community court, that was kind of a new realm that we will have to walk through together to get to the point where we feel confident and that's the direction we want. And that takes time and not only to create it, but also, you know, in our weekly schedule. Our weekly schedules are very, very busy.

You know, we have court calendars every morning and afternoon. So finding where to literally put, a therapeutic court calendar, is something that, you know, we have to look at. What time and space do we have to add that into our already very busy calendar? And staffing. Staffing is really huge in my office right now.

We have I'm the chief prosecutor, and we have I have two assistant prosecutors. And traditionally, over time, as long as I've been here, I've had two other chief prosecutors ahead of me. And they did not carry caseloads because there's a lot to go on administratively. I carry a caseload, and I average around a hundred hundred cases right now because we have a lot of cases. Our prosecutors right now, they have anywhere between four hundred and five hundred active cases.

And that could be cases that are on warrant status, cases that are just actively moving through the system in negotiations, cases that are on a special kind of probation where we're still actively kind of working those cases. So at any time in their queue, they have 400 or 500 that are kind of going in and out of the system. And then consistent cases are probably around I think those ones are around about a 150 consistent cases a month that they're working through. So that's a a lot of cases. And so the staffing that it takes to not only, staff a court, a therapeutic court for the hour or two a week that it is, but it's also the prep work that goes into it.

And this transition has been really hefty, and it's a lot of a lot of work on the back end. So at this time, because we have so many cases and court calendars that we're working through, it is difficult for for the current staffing to know that we would be able to support, having a prosecutor in that system full time and and and working. It's not just the hour that you're in court. It's also the preparation. It's also screening the people that you're offering that court system to.

It's a lot. And so part of our challenge at this time will just be, the staffing that it would take to set up a court and then to actually staff that court, every week if that's what we chose to have. The interest in the program. So this is probably the most difficult part of it from my perspective. You know, in a municipality, you have we prosecute misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors.

Misdemeanors have a maximum of 90 in jail as your possibility. Gross misdemeanor maximum is a year in jail. And a lot of our stuff, that we have, you know, the criminal trespasses of downtown businesses, pedestrian interference, local theft crimes. Some of those are cases that can really go through the system pretty quickly. And if you are a defendant who's looking at maybe a couple of days in jail for a tresp ass.

Do you want to do that? Or do you want to do a therapeutic court system where you're going to be in the system for several months and you're going to have a lot of hoops to jump through, and we're going to be making sure that you're sober and you're going to get a lot of resources and we're going to help you get housing, and we're going to try to get you stability with your mental health. But it is a lot of work for someone to put through. And when you can do maybe a few hours of community service, a day in jail, and be done. Or you can commit to a program that has the potential to really change your life, but it is going to be work for you.

That's a hard decision for some people to make. And so getting an interest in the program is a really big deal. And it's also why a community court is a little bit different than a veterans court or mental health court. Those programs are one to two years long. And the community court idea is to be shorter in time.

Know, three months, six months, nine months. And those are to get them, again, to create that goal of getting them services really quickly, getting them help really quickly, and then moving them through the system quickly so that they're not just kind of stuck coming to court every week or every month for two years. And so getting the right cases and allowing the right kind of, crimes into community court is a really big or into a therapeutic court is a really big deal for me. One of the I always the cases that are gonna be the ones who the people have the most to lose, and so they want to go into a therapeutic court system that can really benefit them at the tail end of it are gonna be cases that are really victim based crimes, like domestic violence and DUIs. And I have not, up until this point, been ready to allow those kind of crimes into community court.

And that's for several reasons. As I said before, victims have a really big stake in a lot of these crimes, especially with domestic violence cases. And, a case, protection order is a really big deal to a DV victim. And if an offender on a DV case goes into a shorter court program. Maybe it's six month therapeutic court.

And at the end of it, their case is resolved, and it gets dismissed because they've successfully completed it. A no contact order can only live as long as a case can live. So if you have a DV defendant in a system for six months and then that they've successfully completed it and they graduate and their case gets dismissed, well, that no contact order gets dismissed as well. Where now a traditional court system, that no contact order is gonna last for at least two years for the most part. And so those are reasons why at this time we have not been ready to allow a victim based crime that has those kind of, you know, secondary consequences into a system like a therapeutic court, especially the community court model, because we need to take into account the safety of the victim and what's best for them as well.

And that's the same for, DUIs. You know, DUIs are structured where part of the, part of what the legislature has done is increase the punishment every time you get a DUI. And it's always, you know, within a certain amount of period, and it it's a little bit of a math problem. But that's part of the deterrent from getting a second DUI is that your first one is gonna count towards your second one. And if you put a DUI in a system where that DUI gets dismissed after a successful therapeutic court, then we lose one of those deterrents.

Because now if they were to get a GUI a second time, they don't have a prior. And in our world, priors matter. And that's what we also help people to stay out of trouble to stay sober because they've been to the system. They know that the next time they come around, they're looking at higher consequences. So those are just two examples of why we haven't been ready to add bigger crimes into a therapeutic court system like community court.

So those are things that we have to really take into consideration when we're building a new therapeutic court within Thurston County. You know, who does it benefit, and who does it hurt, and how do we help the most people that we wanna help, but also don't harm victims any further. So that's that's one of, I think, the biggest uphill battles that I've always experienced in community court was just getting the interest in the program so that people can be successful and feel like, they're not wasting their time, you know, when they think they can just be done with it and move on while getting them to commit to programs that provide things like housing. And and they want those things, but it but it's hard. It's a hard thing to commit to.

So that's one of the challenges. And then, like I said, Olympia's clientele. We have a little bit different, you know, I when I said I used to prosecute for Thurston County and coming to Olympia, we have a lot more mental health cases than I ever did working for Thurston County. We have a lot more drug issues than I ever saw before. And so our clientele is pretty specific, especially in the downtown core.

And so getting and having the resources for Olympia the Olympia community is really important because one size doesn't fit all. Right? So what maybe works for the city of Lacey might not work for the city of Olympia. And I think everyone is aware of that, and so it's just, coming to the table and starting to have those conversations about tailoring it specific to what the city of Olympia needs.

Brianna, we have a question or a comment from the city manager.

Thank you, miss Mayor. Just a comment just on the staffing piece. You know, one of the things that's really important to me, and I've been talking to Mark Barber a lot about this because the prosecution team works, upwards to Mark, is I don't want staffing to be the reason that delays our ability to continue to move towards a community court model that that extends the timelines. And so that's a conversation that we're gonna continue to have as I better understand what the staffing needs are. It's likely as we start thinking about 2027 budget and thinking out into the future that there's gonna come a point in time we might be talking about more resources as as Brianna's team learns more and works with the county more and we learn more about what's the model we wanna create at Thurston County.

There's more than likely gonna be some additional resources we're gonna need to be stand those programs up. And so I'm I'm gonna be tracking that. I'll be working with that team and then make bringing those requests to the council when the when the time comes. So I just wanted to add that.

Thanks, Jay. Councilmember Gillman. Brianna, I'm I

just wanted to ask if you could give me a little reassurance. So I so I'm the the Olympia clientele is different, but you're talking about misdemeanors going to district court. Right? That that there's is there less difference in clientele if you're looking at more violent, larger dollar volume, domestic violence, all all these cat I'm I'm just curious if if in the superior court, there's people from all walks of life. And if if if the the description of the downtown and the clientele was more specifically about the kinds of things that you might refer to community court.

Just just help me a little bit under I'm just reacting a little bit fat now. I wanna understand what you're what you're getting at there.

Sure. So I can only speak limitedly about what the superior court is offering some of those people. So I know they have drug court program. So when you're in superior court, you are facing felonies. And so a lot of the times we see, cases that they have really big hammers over their head. Right? If you're if you're being charged with a felony, you have a lot to lose potentially. You have longer time in potentially prison. You have longer fines and fees that you or bigger fines and fees you might have to pay. And so for those cases too, they have a lot more incentive to, go into a therapeutic court and to be and to try and to be successful.

Because if they don't, the other side of that can be really, a bigger hammer for them. I don't know what kinds of cases they have in drug court. I've never worked in the drug court program. But that's that's always what we're looking at when it come when we're looking at the interest in the program and the clientele. The clientele kind of coincides with the kinds of cases that we would put into a community court program.

They are gonna be most often their houseless individuals downtown committing kind of nuisance crimes like pedestrian interference or trespass of businesses. Those, have we just noticed, have less there's less of a hammer to say, we want you to cooperate. We wanna give you all of these resources. And if they don't, the the punishment on the other end of that or the risk at the other end of is not going to be as high as people that may have been committing larger crimes that ended up in superior court.

Good. And if if if I may just follow-up, I so what I'm wondering is in those felony cases, are is it is is it equally disproportionately unhoused people in mental health crisis, or do we have people from all walks of life housed full time jobs who just had a domestic violence or a DUI or a a financial crime? Whatever. I'm just I'm just I want I I just want us to be I don't want tomorrow's headline to be that Olympia's clientele across all kinds of crimes are, unhoused folks in mental health crisis, because I I suspect that's not true.

No. I wouldn't I wouldn't say that. I would say community court historically has aimed to help people with really needed services. One of the main services that we were providing people previously was trying to find housing and trying to find mental health and substance use disorder help. So the people that we catered to in community court were very low level crimes.

Those low level crimes in the downtown area are those trespasses, pedestrian interference, some theft. Certainly not all of the cases that we had were people that were unhoused, definitely not. But those were the people that needed the most services. So those are the people that we really tried to focus on getting into a community core program because they were able to, we wanted them to get access to those services faster. I can't speak a lot to what is in Superior Court simply because I haven't practiced up there.

But we are trying in community court, we focused on the ones that need the help the most. And that doesn't mean that the people in the regular court program weren't unhoused or didn't have issues. Maybe they did. But we're focused on the most vulnerable, the ones that need the most attention right now. And if we didn't intervene right now, what would that look like for them, and what would that look like for the community at large?

So we just focused on the people that needed it the most, essentially, is what when I say clientele, we wanna focus on the people that need it and need it quickly. How do we get services to them quickly to get them out of this system? And, that's what we focused on. So this is our timeline. And I hope that it's I hope that we can do this.

As I said, we're only a little over three months into this transition. We've started to do a little bit of the legwork talking to the people, just in really preparation for today. But this is a conversation that defense and the court and myself have had that we know it's an ongoing conversation. And we have this goal. We know we want to have a therapeutic court.

It just can't happen overnight and it can't happen at the beginning of this transition. It's just a lot going on. So my hope is that starting in July we'll be able to really start to look at the other courts, start to do the observations, start to talk to more of the players within the court system, the community members, and then working with counsel to find out what do we think the direction that we want to go with the city of Olympia is. So I really want to start that this summer after we have a little couple more months under us in this transition, start to have that those conversations. You know, speaking to the court, you know, because they already have a mental health court model and they're running two very successful mental health court programs right now, I do think it would be a shorter timeline to start an Olympian mental health court.

I think we could set that up a lot quicker because they already have a lot of that foundation. We just need to do it for Olympia. And so that, I could I could imagine that could start at the 2027 just because it it's not starting from the ground up. They already have really core things in place right now that are making them successful. So it's just about opening up the calendars and getting to decide what how does Olympia want their mental health court to work.

If we wanted to go in the traditional community court model, that would be a brand new court for, district court. And that's just something that we have to kinda start from the ground up now. You know, Diane has I guess I would say from from the ground up because Diane has a lot of that groundwork. But that's that's the knowledge base that she has that we'll need to extract from her. And so that if we wouldn't be starting from zero, which would be nice.

But it is essentially starting from the ground with a new court system, with a new bench, to find out how it works with District Court and Olympia coming together to create a community court. And so for that reason, I don't think that would be realistic until that could possibly launch in the 2027. Because it does take a lot. And Dan and I were talking about this, I think, last week about when she was originally starting the first community court. And how she had these hopes that, oh, yeah, we can do this.

We'll set it up in six, nine months. And it was the set up for a court of innovation who was like, it's gonna take longer than that. And so she's already been through that process, which is a really kind of a leg up for us if we want to start again. But it does still take a lot of time. And so in the meantime, we are leaning on the specialty probation programs, the resource hub, and while we're working our direction of which way do we wanna go and and how do we wanna start that in with the city of Olympia.

That's it?

Okay. Any other questions? I'm assuming you'll be using the data, from the interim to determine, like, what, the average, caseload will look like and, which will maybe help inform what kinds of resources we'll need to provide.

Yes. I would agree. And, you know, Diane has a lot of that data. And so those will be conversations that defense and I have together, when we're starting that process and bringing that information to the court and, also to to Jay to talk about this is what we used to have. This is what we think we can project going forward, and what does that look like for staffing and and timelines and everything. Yes.

Okay. Thank you. Council member Barron followed by council member Vanderpool.

Thank you. Thank you, mayor. I just to just to restate what I heard you say, it it sounded like that there are challenges in implementing this community court because the city's clientele are misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors, and it's just a lower

oh,

you have you have fewer tools to to manage the clientele that's coming to before the court in in in in in essence for the community community court. And so, anyway, I I thank you. I thought your presentation was very informative. One question I had actually had to do with the original presentation. There was a reference to friendship services, and I don't know what friendship services are. Could could someone explain what what what those are in in the court system?

Yeah. The the friendship is diversion services. That's a one way to to to resolve or dispose cases. They can they can continue without a finding. They're supervised by the friendship diversion program. If they comply with all their conditions, the the case will get dismissed at the end of that. For us in Thurston County, they also assist in pretrial supervision. If we put someone someone with a a DUI, for example, put them on, alcohol monitoring, they can report to the Friendship Diversion Services, and then they get a bracelet on their ankle to to monitor any alcohol consumption. And then they also do UAs for us predisposition as well.

Thank you. I I I I had just never heard that that term before, and I I wanted to understand what that was.

Yeah. We again, there's terms we've heard this already. There's things we take for granted. We hear words. We know what they mean. We take them for granted, and sometimes we get carried away with that. So sorry about that.

No. No problem. Thanks.

Councilmember Vanderpool.

Yeah. My question is about, I was looking at thinking about the timeline and thinking about, you said, ensuring that you have feedback from council and feedback from the public. You know, I've I'm gonna ask I am I'm sure you are going to consider talking to these folks like the Social Justice and Equity Commission and other groups. We have some folks from the Thurston NAACP back here and other groups like that, subject matter experts that really care about this and making sure it meets the community needs in the future. Do you do you know what other groups you're considering talking to?

I will ask I will ask Diane. She she was here at the inception of the first, creation of the community court. I came into it when it was already fairly well established. And so I think that I agree in talking to different community members and different groups that, have that different kind of knowledge to add is really important. Is there anything different than, the original inception of community court that, those people we spoke to?

Well, we we went through a really extensive process years ago, certainly, in trying to engage as many groups as we could within the community to give us feedback on the needs. But, I mean, we're years later now. So I think that one of the you know, from the inception, we need to create a new list. That's exactly what we need to do is to make sure that everyone is included so that we are thinking of every everyone having a say. And that is a huge principle guiding principle of community core is making sure that there is a community voice that is involved in order to lay out this process and make sure that everyone's input is there so that we're doing this right.

So that will in my opinion, we, you know, we put that as one of our primary goals and make interval goals in order to make sure that everyone's incorporated and then essentially assign a task to various people in order to go out and actually interview various groups and and get their input and then bring that back to the table and continue that communication process even throughout the inception of community court again.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem Nguyen.

Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate that answer. I think you're very smart not to start listing people because, inevitably, you'll miss someone group. And we have a very engaged community members in the city of Olympia. That is another thing that makes us, I think, unique as well. I'm curious about how folks can follow us or others as we go out and talk to various community members. How can people stay up to date on the progress of these goals. And I just really appreciate you sharing how things are going so far and then your your plan going forward. Yeah.

So this has been, hugely informational, and I really appreciate that. And so as, time slips away after after this meeting and we think, oh, whatever happened with that, is there a central place that folks can go to to see what the progress is or opportunities to get involved?

Well, I mean, as some of you recall from long ago, I mean, public defense sort of took on that original community court a lot of the groundwork for that. So the question will become for this round, more or less, who will will take the lead on that. And so I just think that's a discussion that we're just going to have to have as far as who will essentially take the lead and and create those outlines as far as who will be responsible for what at this point. Because that is all part of the process is identifying those, you know, key players, what their responsibility and role will be, have a goal as far as the timeline to meet, you know, what's been assigned as far as a task. So those discussions just need to take place at this juncture.

I don't personally know of a central place, but I would hope that in having further discussion with the court that we could come up with a way that that information would be disseminated and and as well with the executive branch as well.

Thanks so much. Yeah. I think about, some of the, bigger, even smaller scale projects that we've done, and, there's there's a place on our website for it. So I wonder, how we can help on the city of Olympia and as well. The and it's okay not to have everything done right now. So thank you.

City manager Bernie.

Yeah. Just on that last that last call, I I saw assistant city manager Ray taking notes on that as well. And one of the things that we'll do also is just work with the whole team around our communication strategy around all of this, particularly as we as we work into engagement and community engagement and looking for groups to talk to around this. We wanna make sure that we don't leave stones unturned in terms of that that those conversations. So we'll make sure that we engage with all these teams and and help all of them be successful in their communication around all this.

Great. Councilmember Gilman.

So I I'm super encouraged by by all all of this effort towards therapeutic and alternative courts in it. But I I wanted to circle back to the parking for just a moment to I because I because I just don't understand where it falls in your structure if somebody has, and I I don't know the the terms of art of infraction citation. But if you get a ticket that's a parking ticket or a or a driving ticket, do would would I appear before the court commissioner? Would there be a prosecutor or defender involved? What what does it mean when you contest a ticket?

I I can sort of frame that up for you. Any kind of a ticket, a ticket is a generic term. They fall in different categories. Some of them are infractions. Those are noncriminal. That's what you're talking about with parking. That's what you're generally talking about with things like speeding tickets or any sort of traffic rule of the road violations. Yes. You have the right to come before the court. That could be a commissioner or a judge, and you have the right to essentially present your case which would put the government on the burden of proof to prove that you committed the infraction before that could be found against you and before any kind of fine could be imposed.

On the the criminal side, that a criminal citation or a complaint filed by a prosecutor, that that's what starts the criminal process. And those that engages all the more familiar sort of due process rights that you you probably already know, like the right to counsel and so forth. None of that sort of applies on the on the the ticket side. Parking tickets are even a little bit different than that because as Frankie said earlier, those are issued against a vehicle and not against a person. I mean, obviously, right, the when the parking enforcement officer is next to a meter and the time has expired, there's a car there with a license plate on it, not a person.

So they're issuing that to the to the license plate, which then gets filed with the court. Those are some of the challenges that that Frankie was talking about. But even with that, the the person who gets that parking ticket, even a $28 City Olympia overtime parking ticket, they do have the right to come before the court and ask for that to be reduced or even to require, the parking enforcement officer to prove that they did it.

Thank you. I appreciate the clarification.

Let me just add on that a little bit. So, yes, there's contested, which means you didn't commit the infraction, mitigation, which means you committed the infraction, but you wanna reduce the fine, explain the circumstances. You also have the right to defer traffic tickets or traffic infractions, or if you stay at a $150 administrative costs, stay out of get no tickets for six months, the ticket gets dismissed, but you only get one of those once every seven years. Also in Thurston County, so which could be an eternity to some drivers, but, and also in Thurston County District Court here, people have a right to do that. We allow the opportunity to do that electronically.

So we have electronic. Some people can, you know, send an email stating their case, and then we review all those and decide whether or not they're committed or not. And then, of course, they have the right to do it in person as well. We have calendars dedicated to traffic infractions. Thank you. Get quite emotional as you might expect.

That's that's that's really helpful information. I'm glad you're running a special too. That's nice to hear. So

that's the statute. So I I didn't come up with that.

Alright. Any additional questions or comments? Alright. Seeing none. Well, thank you all very much.

As you can see, our council is very eager to get things, restored to what we're used to. But, you've done a lot in the last three months, so we will hold our horses a little longer and, and let you do your work. And we will obviously be in communication to figure out how we can continue to support that and then also, you know, work together with our community on how we can really stand up in alternative, or diversion programs, for our community members who we know certainly are need the services, but, also our residents that value, these services, and are in line with our values here at the city. And so we just really appreciate the work that you've done. I know it's a big lift.

I know you've taken on more, and I just wanna acknowledge that and and look forward to our partnership and and building this thing together. So thank you all so much. And with that, we are we're done for tonight. So, Paul, have a good night. Alright. Well, with no further business before the Olympia City Council, we're adjourned.