Appointments Committee - Regular Meeting

All right. We've got a whole house here. Okay. Calling to order the City of Tacoma Community Vitality and Safety Committee meeting for June 11, 2026. Ms. Mahalia, can you call the roll? Here. Here. Here. Council Member Walker, absent. Chair Rumpa. So this is the time for public comment. Do we have anyone here for public comment? Okay, so if you are here and you want to give public comment, please make sure to raise your hand. Do you want to read that?

To request to speak during public comment prior to the moment of agenda, please sign up in front of the room if you haven't already. If you're speaking virtually, please press the hearing hand button near the bottom of the screen window or turn on your phone. All right.

Anyone who's online, if you want to speak, make sure you raise your hand. I don't see anyone's raised their hand. Okay, great. So we will close public comment and we'll go on to our briefing items. And we have one item for briefing today. It's the results of the juvenile justice task force. And I've asked... There is a lot of people here today, and so I'm going to let the people in the room introduce themselves. But we're here to hear what the task force had to say about a new Raymond Hall and what that would look like, because they probably all don't call it the Juvenile Justice Center. They're calling it Raymond Hall. And if somebody could tell us why it's called Raymond Hall, that would be great. But I'm going to let you have the floor, and if you could introduce yourselves first all through the room, and then whoever's going to start talking, that would be great.

All right. Well, I'll go ahead and introduce myself first. I'm Carl Emlich, the Director of Facilities Management.

John Lane, Senior Counsel with the Executive Panelist Office. Chris Gattis, the Superior Juvenile Court Executive.

I'm Judge Joseph Evans, Judge of Superior Court. I was the previous presiding judge for Juvenile Court, and I will be the incoming presiding judge for Superior Court. Great. After that question, Raymond Hall is named after Judge Raymond, who was a judge, I think, in the 30s and 40s, and I believe the first judge to start the juvenile court in Pierce County.

Great. And I just want to recognize that Councilwoman Walker is here. She's also a part of Community Vitality and Safety. And if you could take one minute to explain why the court is here and why the executive's office is here. Sure.

So Pierce County Superior Court is responsible for managing the juvenile court system here in Pierce County. Juvenile court here is matters dealing with dependencies, dealing with juvenile delinquency, and then a variety of other matters that sometimes include things regarding whether or not the youth are attending school. And so as our responsibility of the court, we have to manage the the detention facility as well as the court facility and all of the probation offices for both . So we are the primary users of juvenile court facility.

Thank you for coming.

And then on the executive side, through our facilities department, we have oversight of all of the facilities throughout the county, which is really spring and all. Also, as the executive, we have administrative responsibilities for the county as well, so sign off on contracts and other kinds of things.

Great. All right. Are you going to read the presentation?

I'll just start off just saying real quick. Executive Mello, when he came to the office, had a real interest in looking at what are we doing on the juvenile justice side of the house. looking at Raymond Hall, which has really gone past its useful life period in many aspects. And we're looking at significant capital construction issues currently. And so I wanted to hear from the community. It was very intentional on wanting to put together a group of leaders to look not just at the building, but also the programs. sort of the forward together future regarding juvenile justice and Raymond Hall, what that looks like. And so we put the task force together. I think I'll stop there and answer questions as we go through because Carl has put together the presentation and give more background on the juvenile justice task force.

and assigned experts here that can talk about the day-to-day.

Thank you.

All right, I will take over. So first off, good afternoon, Chair Roomba and committee members. We really appreciate you giving us the time to share this great project with you. I know my name is Carl Emlig. I'm the Director of Facilities Management at Pierce County. I've been, or since August of last year, I had the privilege of supporting this task force in this journey along with the people of court to get us to this point. Today, all right, so I'll go through these points and just kind of from an agenda item, talk about the task force charge and scope, membership, the process we went through, the report summary, then I'll be turning it over to Judge Evans and Chris Gaddis. to see if there's any other items they want to add. Then we can get back to questions and see. So let's start first with a problem statement. So the original Raymond Hall is actually built or opened in 1948. It was then replaced in 1971 and then additional expansion and remodeling in 1995. That's kind of, as you look at that facility now, that is its current layout and how it's been for this whole time. So in 71, you had a big change and then an addition and some remodel in 95. As we've been studying this building, facilities director for me, working with juvenile court, all the different studies and research, the building is exactly the same. John was sharing his past and his useful life. And it's really not performing and not providing a facility worthy of the youth in Pierce County. And so one of the big questions was, well, how do we get to a facility that will be working? So we started with the Juvenile Justice Task Force to create a new vision. The charge in this film really focused on developing the recommendations for a new juvenile justice facility built around the modern approach to rehab, reflect the safety and programming needs, address purpose, function, and a path forward, and also provide recommendations that are directional, looking at outcomes and priorities. Of course, the facility should be safe, healthy, and welcoming for everyone who works and visits the site. And in the final report, was published on April 22nd and it's available on our website for anyone to review. Getting to the task force membership. On August 18th, 2025, the Executive Director of Facilities Management convened a task force of experts, community leaders, and people with personal and family experience in the juvenile justice system. This group was 15 members spent seven months providing their feedback and time to meet the scope of this task force. Pierce County Facilities led the project in partnership with Juvenile Court. We had our consultants. We used Burke to help facilitate. And we also had a lot of other departments coming in to provide expertise on the various topics that we have, such as... Actually, I'll get down to that later. So as we looked at our process, so we started off in August 2025, and he met seven times over the seven months, reviewing the research and data, they drew on their own expertise, their own lived experiences, and worked together to build this new vision. The examples, of course, are, they're actually listed below some of the meetings. You had location, you had depends, seeing courts, probation, conversion services, really spending some time to understand what is going on, what is working, and asking a lot of questions about it to our experts to see where are there areas for improvement or areas that they still need to focus on and grow. In addition to the meetings, we actually went and had an online open house in survey that ran from January 28th through March 4th, just to encourage very open, transparent process. All of the meetings were also posted online after the meeting so everyone could follow along if they had any interest. On March 4th, we had our juvenile justice community convening where we invited the public to come in, listen to the task force recommendations, provide feedback, and actually have a very interactive session understanding what we're trying to accomplish, and ask a bunch of different questions. And so after the meeting on the 4th, we also closed the online process. So then after, so then the task force took all the recommendations, feedback from the public, reviewed it and created their final recommendation, submitted that to the executive, which of course is the April 22nd. So getting to the report, So I do have a copy of the report. The whole thing's about 200 pages. We're not going to go through all 200 pages tonight. The summary is about 20 pages. I'm just going to touch the highlights. So it was broken up into 10 recommendations and kind of three categories. So the first one, plan for implementation and long-term success. They develop a new facility. One of the recommendations they're after is Let's come up with a new facility. Do not try to remodel the existing building, its layout and structure. They didn't think that would be worthy. So focus on getting a new facility. The next is advanced planning at the current location. The 14 acres that exist on the Raymond Hall site felt that that was the best location that we have. So continue to use that as the location of the future. Then design for flexibility and future needs. That was actually one of the tougher discussions they got into, was how do you design a facility that has a multi-year target, knowing that laws may change, practices may change, to keep it as flexible as possible to adapt to the ever-evolving, changing juvenile justice system. The next is align facility design with evidence-based practices. So prioritize safety and security as a foundational principle, Implement trauma-informed and evidence-based approaches to create restorative, welcoming, and dignified spaces. Finally, support collaboration and connection. Collaboration and connection really is about how do we get all the programs that are working in this facility to be able to be adjacent or have the nexuses. If they need to be close to each other, how will they better support from an operational and functional standpoint? The building supports all the needs of juvenile justice. It's going to be a challenge. Then finally, to serve Pierce County youth, communities, and justice stakeholders. So focus on youth and families. So this design of this building should communicate its rehabilitative and restorative focus is also invest in staff retention by creating a safe work environment. For those who work in that facility or those who visit the facility, you'll probably understand why that's on here. The site definitely has some things that need to be added. And finally, support justice systems and community partners. Again, understanding that this is a huge undertaking with lots of groups who are coming in and supporting juvenile justice. How do we build this facility to support that and encourage? And the other part about community partners is they're recommending that the sites also need to look at maintaining that community presence, that maybe there are places that we need to have more of a position out of the community or encouraging that so that we can have better results. So I already shared that the entire report is online and available. I'd like to turn it over to Judge Evans. I'll turn it over to Judge Evans.

So one of the things that The nature of how we like to think. Early on, if you go back to the history of children, it could be dropped off because their parents decided to just drop And you had those children kept with children that were facing very serious charges. As time went on, you had a facility that basically incarcerated kids for almost every crime. That is not the modern use of our facility. The modern use of our facility when it comes to the detention side is that you only have the most serious, the children charged with the most serious crimes that are actually counted. So you're generally dealing with children that are charged with violent crimes or crimes against other people when they hurt someone. That has been our general obligation. But the reality of that facility is that it's still not being handled right. One of the things that we know is that children are trying to, that is one of the goals of the general justice system. rehabilitation as opposed to just incarceration when it comes to the adult system. And so because of that, we realized that our facility does not have a lot of the modern things that the newer facilities have. We do not have some of the technology. We have hard concrete walls that are somewhat abrasive. We do not have outdoor facilities where the children can go outside and exercise and touch grass. We also don't have the therapeutic pieces that we would like to see in the facility. We don't have lower level rooms for kids that are maybe just fighting with their parents and are being charged with something but don't necessarily need to be incarcerated with someone facing a very serious adult level crime. So these are all the realities that we have in the facility while also understanding that we are facing huge maintenance issues. We have had issues where the facility has failures and issues where we've had too many youth because we had 30 youth and suddenly we can no longer accommodate them within our facility because some of the pods are just not usable. The reality of the situation is that that building is aging at such a rate that it really cannot accommodate a growing county like Pierce County. And because of that, we had to realistically talk about replacing the facility. It's a conversation that the bench has had with previous administrations, and it's one that we started very early on with Executive Mello. And to his credit, he immediately took this up as an issue that needed to be addressed, and it's something that we commended. And we've been working in partnership with him to do that over the last, I think it's almost a year now. One of those things was the task force. I was able to sit in on the majority of the meetings and sort of serve as a current subject matter expert. Obviously, we also had retired Judge Van Dornick, who shepherded that facility for quite a number of years. And so together, we sort of steered the conversation about what we could do in a new facility and how we could better serve the youth of Pierce County.

One of the things that I think gets lost a lot, just naturally, we've been talking a lot about the detention side, but there's a lot of a civil side that occurs there. gives your context to that, because I think that gets lost when people think of Raymond Hall, they think of just kind of the detention piece. That is certainly an important component, but it's by far not the only component.

Absolutely. The majority of the court hearings that actually occur at the clinic are at dependency sites. So that's children that are facing a crisis in their home and have either been removed from their parents' custody or something in that general nature. One of the things that we have in that facility are probation departments and guardians that are employed by the county. They work within that building that we know is very old and has a lot of struggles. The secondary piece to that is that the courtrooms are very old and outdated and are very small. That creates issues with being able to... adequately handle all of the hearings in a certain amount of time. It also creates issues of space and just sort of, you know, navigating where people are going to be and whether or not even the technology works. One of the things that we've all sort of faced with our aging infrastructure is that they weren't really designed for Wi-Fi. And so we have issues regarding technology because it's a concrete building that was built in the seventies, right? And so we do installations and we do upgrades and we try to make things work as best as possible, but it's simply a facility that can't fully accommodate that. So that dependency side is really a huge portion of the work. And anyone that has actually worked in the juvenile justice field for any amount of time knows that the sad truth of juvenile justice is oftentimes children that are brought into the dependency system because of the issues and and adverse childhood experiences that they're having, oftentimes become children that are then only the ones that are sometimes being charged. But they grow up, and the population doesn't occur. Oftentimes, it's in the adult system. Individuals in the adult system, oftentimes, their issues are still not addressed. Then they route right back into the dependent system. And you see a cycle, sometimes, of generations of families that have trauma, is passed down to the entire family, and it essentially keeps the entire family within the system because . So the modern approach is to try to address those issues as they come up. And a lot of times, the place that we can actually address the issue and try to stop the trauma and intervene is within the dependency system. So it's a very vital part of our general system.

Can you talk a little bit about what dependency means? Like, what kind of issues do they have where someone, like, where they were, like, there's an issue in the family?

Sure. Unfortunately, the majority of dependency cases right now involve drugs and alcohol. And I would say that right now, of the drugs and alcohol cases, I think the statistics are somewhere around 80% of them involve alcohol. or opioids. And so what you see is a family member that is struggling with addiction, and because of that, they're not properly able to care for the children. Sometimes, if it's an older child, maybe it's only right not to keep them in the food and the home anymore. They're not really present as much. But younger children have to worry about overdose, whether or not they are properly caring for the child, protecting them from ailments, all of those things. So a report might come in that says that this child is a behavior. CPS will intervene and go and assess the child, maybe ultimately remove the child. And then the court hearing process begins where the parents are represented by lawyers. The attorney general's office represents CPS in regards to those allegations. But then we also, in a more modern system, also have the guardian and light of the point. that is actually there to just look into the interest of the child and make sure the child's interests are being addressed, which can oftentimes be different than those of the parents. And the other additional thing that our legislator has done recently is that children that are older are actually appointed attorneys. So then you will have an attorney appointed that is representing just the child. What's important to know about that is that the courtrooms out there, because they are so small, which you oftentimes might have is as many as four or five attorneys, plus the two parties, plus social workers, all in a courtroom together. And when the courtroom is not our standard size courtroom, that is a lot of folks in a very small space. The additional issue that doesn't happen often is that sometimes people have very strong feelings about these situations. When you have a lot of people in very close quarters, that could actually create a security risk. And obviously with our law enforcement shortages statewide, we don't have enough law enforcement to have an individual law enforcement officer in every courtroom as these hearings are going on. We are lucky. And we have worked very hard to have one deputy for the entire building. And so he's responsible for the entire security in that building. But given the circumstances and our tight quarters within these courtrooms, that does create a security risk.

I mean, for context, I don't think your courtroom is much larger than this room.

Right.

How many kids do you have in detention usually?

I didn't get the... the number today, but we are under 20, closer to 15 or 13. Right.

And most of them, so if they're not there, then sometimes they're on an ankle bracelet or they're doing a diversionary.

Right. So what has changed over the last few years is that for less serious crimes, we oftentimes will utilize electronic home monitoring and send them home to their families and monitor them in the community. For the most serious crimes, we do keep them in the facility. We've been hovering, I think, in the mid-teens for about the last few months. At our worst, which was, I believe, about a year, 15 months ago, we did get over 30. Our facility really can't accommodate over 30. And that was at a time when we had a lot of kids charged with some pretty violent crimes. And unfortunately, we didn't have another solution other than them being in our facility.

So if I might just weigh in here a little bit. that Pierce County has been a real leader on juvenile diversion. And so we have diverted the bulk of the sort of lower level cases, right? So we have kind of in the juvenile detention component are serious crimes, you know, as the judge mentioned. And I think it would be helpful if you just kind of give a little context to It's hard when we say we have, you know, a population of 15 to 30, and we've got, you know, 40. But because of some of how those cases come in, you're kind of doing this jigsaw puzzle of where you can actually place different kids for different reasons, for security reasons and just legal reasons, and then you also, you know, we've got, you know, female and male and so why don't you talk a little bit about some of that because that creates you know i think we see that a lot you know in times like how many beds is available not always are all those beds available absolutely um just because there's only 13 people there doesn't mean that it's a cakewalk for the juvenile attention managers that are working absolutely and so we'll break this up i'll talk about some of that and i'll let um mr gaddis talk about some of the facility challenges with that um

So when we talk about diversion cases, the kid that steals his candy bar is not going to actually come to our court. What's going to happen is they're going to be immediately diverted to a program where they learn about the cost of retail theft and what that does to the community and what that does to the cost of goods. And they're not going to actually be in the criminal justice tradition. When I say that we have 13 to 15 kids in custody right now, they're generally kids that are charged with crimes involving guns. So they shot at somebody, they're charged with murder. We have, I think, one that was charged with rape. We have armed robberies. Those are the children that are in our facility. They are still children, and we still want to make sure we're addressing them in a holistic and therapeutic manner. But they are kids that are charged with crimes where we have a concern for community safety. But kids are very different because they tend to commit their crimes with other people. So they don't tend to come in in ones. They tend to come in as in twos and threes. Because of the rules of the court and what the prosecutors ask in regards to trying to preserve evidence, we oftentimes have to house those kids that committed a crime together in different units. So that means different units have to be open at all times, even if the population is low. Also, because of us trying to make sure that bad things don't happen, prison rape elimination act. Yes. We do not house females with males and we also make sure that we have a certain ratio of staff to youth at all times we also of course have video monitoring those sorts of things in the facility but all of those things are frankly aging and are not as up to date as we would like but i'm going to pass over to mr gaddis to talk about some of the challenges with that yeah you know facilities are tough staffing is tough as well so the the number of juvenile detention officers that we have at any one time

whether they're available or not available due to sick leave, vacation leave, just vacant positions, it is difficult to be able to staff just in general. When you get numbers up to the 30s, it gets almost impossible to be able to then manage, as John was mentioning, how these different housing systems requirements are, are managed by juvenile detention officers. And so it, it does get very difficult to, to try and keep the people separate that need to be separate, uh, the, you know, whether they're co-defendants, whether, you know, keeping male and female separated, keeping, uh, male juvenile detention officers from, uh, having access control over, uh, females that are housed, female youth that are housed in the facility. It's all problematic and then we Then you get into the fact that having to go on lockdown for certain aspects throughout the day as well. For example, if there is a transport that has to happen for a dentist appointment, that youth has to leave, and it has to leave with two juvenile detention officers, which means that our ratio numbers go down, which means we have to lock down the facility. which means youth cannot perform positive youth development programs, might not be able to go to school for a certain period of time. So there's just a lot of management that has to go on on a day to day. It's not just you have a housing pod of youth that are in detention and just manages itself. It's a constant shell game for our detention staff to be able to manage it. And then of course, there's transport to court hearings, visits with family. It is a lot.

I'm trying to highlight this because as we look forward to the future, I think sometimes there's this consideration like, oh, you're building this large facility, why you should have fewer beds or you would want to be deferring more. And I don't think a bed is not just a bed. I have to have a certain you know footprint and it doesn't mean you're going to fill all those means that you're going to have the adequate space opportunity to manage in the most appropriate manner that the youth are coming into the system because that's the challenge that we have right now And Judge Evans, you know, one of the situations that we had a year ago that caught some attention was we actually ended up having to transfer some of the adult status youth back down to the adult jail. That creates a whole other series of problems of sight-sound separation and other things that has to occur there. So that's kind of the push and pull.

Oh, I just, I want to make sure I get to open it up to the other council members to ask some questions and then I want to kind of.

Yeah, please do. I feel like we're in the Q&A part from our side.

And then I want to kind of have a conclusion of what our next steps will be as far as like, are we going to write a letter to support? We don't know what we're supporting yet. Are we going to share this? Have you come to study session and share with the rest of our council? And then really what is the ask for? of the city of Tacoma as part of this. So I'm gonna ask council members first if they, I'm gonna ask Council Member Walker, she's here in the room, if she has any questions.

That is actually my question. I think you very clearly laid out the need. I toured the space several years ago and I'm sure it didn't get better in time. This is something that's very important to this council, so I'm glad y'all are looking at it. But my question is, you know, what is the ask of the city of Tacoma or is there an ask coming I assume so, because we're all in this together. But yeah, that's my question. So if you want to hold on that till the very end, that's fine too.

Thank you. That's really great to hear. Let me see what Council Member Palmer or Council Member Scott might have as questions. Although understanding their own mind, which is always harder.

Oh, go ahead.

Thank you. I had a question about, because we didn't talk much about, you know, some of the abuse allegations.

Sorry, you cut out.

Sorry about that. Some of the issues with abuse, and I don't know the details about them, but design can be used in a way to maybe deter some of those issues. And so I don't know if anyone there can speak to how much consideration that was put into the design.

A ton. A couple of things have already happened. Most of these allegations that are currently going on predate the Prison Rape Elimination Act being instituted within the facility. And prior to JDAI, which is the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative. The other thing I can tell you is that since that time, we have also now are contracting for and should by next year be implementing body cameras on all juvenile detention officers while they're working in the facility. We do have cameras throughout the facility, but frankly, we are planning to design it in such a way that we are able to monitor and retain information regarding all things that are going on within the facility for quite some time. So in the design of a new facility, we are very conscious of the issues of abuse that are alleged to have occurred previously, and we are building for a facility that will be able to prevent any sort of abuses in the future.

And just when you look at the previous slide, number of youth that were detained, and it was up in the 160s, 160 youth in that facility at one time. And from just a supervision standpoint of juvenile detention officers supervising the youth that are detained, that's difficult enough. But to then, from a supervisory or a management level, to be able to monitor your juvenile detention officers to make sure that they weren't causing any harm to the youth that were detained. You can see how difficult that problem could be. And so now as you lower the number of youth that are in detention, you increase supervision and it helps our staff be able to supervise better. It gives them more time when there is a pre-investigation, a Prison Rape Elimination Act investigation, which does happen. I mean, when an investigation does need to happen, It happens swiftly, and that's reviewed by both HR and myself. And so we want to make sure that the investigations are thorough and the fact that there is fewer youth detained gives our managers more opportunities and more time to delve into those concerns. And then if there is issues, they're able to address them and then provide training and change policies and procedures to make sure that things like that happen again in the future.

Thanks for that information. Can you speak a little also to the difference in the training between a juvenile detention officer and a regular detention officer?

Sure. So a juvenile detention officer right now, within the first year of employment, must attend the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission's two-week academy. They receive a diploma for their attendance. And then they usually, we will put them through a three-week training program in-house before they go to the academy. And then when they go to the academy, then they come back and they're still on probation. They're just supervised a little bit heavier. A regular, what you might consider corrections deputy for Pierce County or anywhere in the state of Washington, they have a 10-week academy. Within the last four years, I believe, it was changed from a four-week academy to a 10-week, and they are also now certified. It didn't used to be that corrections deputies were certified, but just like peace officers in Washington State who are certified after an almost six-month academy, corrections deputies are also certified. All, not all, but... We do meet with the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission regularly as juvenile court administrators, juvenile court detention managers meet with the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission. They actually just did a site visit at our detention facility and we talk often about improving the the training academy for our juvenile detention officers. My goal as a former police officer is to create a certification process. Hand in hand with certification comes decertification. So if we have a tendency or a need to separate from a juvenile detention officer and it's to the point where they shouldn't be working anywhere else in the state, it would be nice to be able to put them through that decertification process so they aren't going to another jurisdiction and getting employed or they could do harm. So that's one of my personal goals is to improve the academy training for our JDOs. One thing that we are looking into doing is until the academy can increase the amount of training, what supplemental training can we provide to our JDOs so that when they get done with the academy, they might go to additional advanced training. We do training throughout the year, but in my opinion, the academy needs to be longer.

Is the training based on – is there a difference? Is there any training – And, uh, that pertains to youth.

Yes. Yes. Youth training that they participate in, uh, similar to our probation step probation counselor staff. Uh, they attend specific training on youth. There's what's called crisis intervention team training, uh, that talks about deescalation and, uh, there's, you know, uh, your normal, what they call, control defensive tactics training. And so, yeah, there is specific youth training involved in the academy.

Okay.

Thanks for sharing that information. That's all I have.

Thank you, Council Member Palmer. Council Member Scott?

Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to take a moment to thank you all for being here and for doing the work that you're doing. It's really, really important. And the questions that I had coming into the meeting were answered through your presentation as well as the last remaining one was just, you know, what can we do to support you all as you move through this? So I do not have any extra questions, but I did want to make sure that I shared my appreciation and my apologies that I wasn't able to make it in person today. It would have been nice to meet all of you. So thank you.

very welcome thank you so much um vice chair scott um i just uh just as i want to kind of focus on what council member walker had to say i think like one of the things that we would like to know is there going to be an opportunity for our council to have any like any say in what happens with the building i mean it sounds like you're sort of getting ready to plan for a building. And there are things that possibly our council might see as good ideas as we start talking about what's at the facility, just based on it's in Tacoma and thinking about this kind of conversation. Is there gonna be an opportunity to hear from our council?

Yeah, so I think on the list of folks, just hope you all saw like deputy, Alice was part of that. So hopefully she was providing, you know, information back. And if not, like, I'm sure she would be happy to provide, you know, she was at all the meetings. So in terms of, is there an opportunity to provide input? Absolutely. We're still sort keep progress and process forward. I would say this is, Carl can speak to this, we are sort of on this construction kind of pathway right now. This is one of several projects that looking at. So we're also looking at some renovations to what is referred to as the quote new jail, which means the 2002 facility. It is not meeting the county's needs. It's a sort of dormitory style that doesn't fit the classifications. We're just not utilizing that space efficiently. problems that need to be addressed as well. So we have gone out and done requests for qualifications or requests for proposals, I'm sorry, for our firm on both sort of renovating the minimum security or the new jail to what would be more useful. And we've also gone out on architecture and engineering for the juvenile justice facility. So those are both in process. I know that we're working through the county's procurement process on those And then a third thing that we've been doing is owner and advisor. It's looking for a consultant that could help the county look at what are the best methods in particular to deliver on the projects. So all of those RFPs have gone out and are in the process of being selected and interviews and those kinds of things. So that I'll let you talk. the third quarter of 2017. Correct.

Yeah. So once we get all the architect engineering firms off board, we can complete the critical design and schematic design. So we can understand what is this going to look like? What are some thoughts of how this is going to look? What is the cost? What's the schedule? And we can come back together in probably the third quarter of 27 to see, okay, what are our next steps? We'll at least have enough information now to go, okay, what is the real scope of this project? What is the costing? What is the timing? How would it work with the existing facility at Raymond Hall to build something like this?

So I think that's a long way of saying the ask will come around that time frame and not right now. We're not prepared to sort of say what we need from

And when it comes to consultation, I remember talking about this earlier.

Yeah, there's so many more people that use that facility than just juvenile court staff. I think we have around 150 staff, but then you have AG, the Attorney General's Office that's out there, Department of Science Council, Prosecutor's Office. You have hundreds of volunteers that call that place home. So it is widely used. And then you have the public that comes there on a daily basis that has to weigh in on what works for them and how these programs can be successful in that space. And so our intention, and we've worked with facility staff to come up with an idea of how do we involve people so if we get the input from probation, staff, the input from dependency staff, the input from the prosecutor's office as individual groups. But then we have to go and say, okay, now let's talk about the courtroom because as Judge mentioned, the courtroom that worked in 1995 or 1970 or whenever it was built does not work for today. The legislative changes, the case law changes have just impacted us so much. So we need all these groups to come in together and say, okay, Now we've heard your concerns about the building. Let's just drill down on just what you need for a courtroom because it's totally different. And again, as I think Carl mentioned, what does the future look like? King County wrestled with that. They have a beautiful facility, gorgeous facility. But even them in the process that they went through, it took so long to build it. What they were planning for, When it was completed, it's totally different. It's not totally different, but they have multiple items that they would rather have changed and improved to make their service providers better capable in that space.

So it sounds to me like, based on what you just said, it's that You're going through this process. I'm just trying to figure out what we're going to update our council on because I think this is something that they would want an update on because it doesn't sound like it's ready to go to study commission yet. That's what it sounds like. Because you still have to design the building. It looks like you're doing the RFP with the jail. Is that a way to kind of sell it? Better to the community.

They're separate.

They are separate. Yeah. That's what I just wanted to say. Like, there's multiples going on, but the owner operator is going to help people.

And so there is possibly going to be a bond in the future for this project. For the new juvenile justice, is that the plan?

It is one of the options.

No, I mean, I think the answer is we don't know.

It is one of the options, I think, more likely than not. in the ballpark of $200 million on the juvenile justice facility. And so, you know, candidly, one of the things that the county did, we did pass the justice fund and understand that these facilities were going to be, you know, needed and so that the language in that ordinance allows some flexibility on kind planning, a large portion of the current appropriation was set aside on the adult side. But, you know, we know that the one percent for public safety.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. So I think it's just a little premature to know specifically, but I do think that is, you know, candidly, that's probably the direction.

So if you could keep me on speed dial, I know you're ready to come back. I want Council Member Walker to be able to be a part. She's got next year, so you've got to come back before she's off council so she can have a chance to vote on this or to have some support. Because I think she, I believe, like we both do, and I think that our committee does, that this is really important.

Yeah, I mean, I think what I would say when I have this meeting with a lot of folks and this is, you know, there's a lot of deferred maintenance and I understand I'm working, you know, government for a long time and like, you just push it, push it until it breaks. And we've got a lot of things that are kind of like on the edge of like, yeah, they're breaking. Right.

That being said, um, it also takes a lot of time.

you can't just turn on a dime and start building stuff. And so, but we as administration, Carl can attest to this are moving forward with all deliberate speed. And we have, and part of the reason why I wanted to get the context of sort of what we're doing overall in three different areas is because we have three Well, one group right now, we're breaking into two to three groups here in the future to really like dig in on making sure that we're getting the permits and other things that need to happen to keep all of these projects moving forward. I'll let you fill in that.

I think you covered it very well.

Thanks.

But from a user court system, we are further advanced now than on a large scale project for the courts other than remodel that we've had recently completed at the county city building. We're farther along the line on a juvenile justice center than we've ever been before. This is my third county executive. And, you know, every county executive has been aware that there are problems out at Raymond Hall. Executive Mello is by far the furthest advanced at this stage in their tenure. I mean, he's, what, 17 months, and we are already going out for bid for schematic design. So, I mean, I'm not going to start measuring the office space out there for staff, but it's a – This is advanced, and so I'm really appreciative. I know the bench is really appreciative of the work that the county executive facilities management team have done to really move Absolutely necessary. It's necessary for the youth. It's necessary for the staff, the families involved out there. So Executive Mello and his team are all pulling in the same direction. So it's very good news for the community.

I would just also mention the task force members themselves. We intentionally tried to find a very diverse group of interests, including the business community, the school districts, public schools. defense, you know, prosecution, courts, lots of the program providers, folks, we had formerly been involved in the system, and we had a woman whose grandson had been involved to get all there was It is a passionate group. I can tell you that it's very invested and very interested to move as fast as possible through sort of saying we got to like do the steps to get the pieces going. So I would just say like we really appreciate your leadership and Tacoma's interest in partnering on this because we're going to need everyone's support as we move forward. And I think we do have a good group and a foundation and And I would encourage you or anybody else to go look at the website. I will say the facilities team, you know, Joey there and Carl and the Burke folks did a really great job on that virtual open house and the open house in person. All of that is captured there. I mean, I don't know if we had probably, 70 folks at least that showed up that night.

I went to the one in person. And they did breakout sessions after. It was really great. It was wonderful to see all the people so passionate about the thing I said. I said to the executive when we met for lunch, right when he got in office, I said, this needs to be a priority. And I'm just so, I just really appreciate him. and the team he has, and the courts that were moving forward on this. And I want to thank you for coming today, because I just didn't want to put it off too long, because you've just done all this great work. And I wanted everyone to know what's happening, because we care about youth violence in this, and about diversion, and about the courts. We care about all of these different parts, and they impact our city. And so I just really appreciate the time you took to come here, all of you. you have important jobs and thank you so much for coming today thank you yeah thank you very much so um i probably you're welcome to leave if you want because we're almost done um but thank you again and like i said if you have an update or a new relationship already it would be great to know where you are thank you have a good evening all right Hey. All right, honey. You're up. Topics for upcoming meetings.

Thank you, Chair. So a little different than what was printed in advance. We have had to make a change. The June 25th meeting will actually be canceled. The July 9th meeting will be a presentation on the unified regional approach to homelessness in Pierce County. And then we are looking at an upcoming date to reschedule what was on the June 25th agenda, which was the Rental Housing Code and Landlord Fairness Code. we should finalize the details of when that will be rescheduled this upcoming week. But on July 23rd, we will be having interviews for the Tacoma Area Commission on Disabilities.

I just want to apologize for having to cancel that. I'll be at the AWC conference in Spokane. And I think talking about the Rental Housing Code while I'm online would be just difficult. So I wanted to be in the room for any questions or conversations. All right. Thank you very much, Tony. Are there any other items of interest? We're having a motion for a minute. Oh, yeah. We need to do a motion for that. Sorry about that. I wonder why they're all here. I read through them. I'm like, okay. Okay, so. Yes, could you make the motion, please? I move to approve the minutes from the September 12, 2024 through January 23, 2025 minutes.

Second.

Okay, all those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye.

The motion is declared accepted. All right. I just love that I did this the opposite way, but that's okay. All right. So has anyone been to a committee, board, or commission since our last meeting? And I mean, we already had Vice Chair Scott kind of gave an update about last meeting about the stuff she did on the CPAC, but we're really looking forward to hearing more about that. So can I get the last question?

Second.

All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Sounds like that was unanimous. So the motion is declared adopted and we stand adjourned. Thank you, everyone.