Walla Walla Chosen For Sex Offender Facility Alternate Sites In Medical Lake, Airway Heights Not Out Of Woods

An empty meadow in Walla Walla is the state’s top choice for a double-wide mobile home full of dangerous sex offenders.

The announcement Friday by the state Department of Social and Health Services gave small relief to officials in Medical Lake and Airway Heights, who were in the running for the facility for offenders after their release from prison.

Those cities were named alternates to Walla Walla, and could be tapped in the future for a second halfway house.

The selection by DSHS Secretary Dennis Braddock came after a month of emergency town hall meetings on Spokane’s West Plains and widespread accusations of bureaucratic bungling.

Braddock picked a parcel of prison land at the Walla Walla Penitentiary after reviewing 11 suggested sites, five of them in Spokane County.

Braddock said he selected Walla Walla for its access to therapists and because it could be monitored by penitentiary guards as well as local police.

He expected continued protests, but hoped his department could strike an agreement with Walla Walla.

“Any local official that looks like they’re cooperating could likely be not well received by the community,” he said. “That puts a lot of pressure on them. Local officials are not inclined to subordinate parochial interests to the interests of the greater good of the state.”

Cooperation seemed doubtful Friday. Walla Walla Mayor Jerry Cummins was dismayed that the DSHS failed to tell the city until two weeks ago that it was being considered.

“We have a lot of citizens who are very concerned, people who live near the penitentiary, people with children,” he said. “They haven’t given us good information about this, and without good knowledge, they’re very concerned about the process.”

Sen. Jim West, R-Spokane, said Friday that he planned to fight the DSHS through his seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee on behalf of his constituents.

The DSHS began working to open a halfway house earlier this year, when a federal judge ordered it to find “less restrictive alternatives” for treating high-risk sex predators than a Puget Sound island treatment center.

The 128 patients - all but one are men - are committed there after serving their prison terms but being found very likely to reoffend.

The judge, William Dwyer of Seattle, found that the 10-year-old law that created the Special Commitment Center violated the patients’ rights against unlawful incarceration because there appeared no likelihood of release.

The DSHS adopted the idea of neighborhood treatment facilities to avoid having Dwyer overturn the entire sex predator law, which includes lifelong registry and public notification of the release of sex offenders.

“People will need to recognize that if we can’t successfully develop these programs, there’s the threat that the entire program will be nullified,” said Braddock. “The object here is to assure the judge that we’re taking his direction seriously. It’s not our secret mission” to anger communities.

But the DSHS has managed to do so. “If you wonder why people are down on government, this is a good reason,” said Medical Lake Mayor Jim Hill.

The department hopes to open one three-patient halfway house in Walla Walla by March and another by May. There are also plans to open a 30-bed release center in the future, if the Legislature funds the idea.

As alternate sites, Airway Heights and Medical Lake will be considered for the future facilities, the DSHS said, in addition to undisclosed private land.

Hill said he wasn’t surprised that his town is still an alternate, despite the fact police have said they could not respond within five minutes to incidents at the halfway house. The DSHS’s siting criteria required that response time for safety reasons.

“These guys knew where they want to go, and where they want to put it,” he said. “The process has been flawed from the beginning.”

Medical Lake will now battle any future halfway house proposal through city zoning laws, Hill said. The City Council - along with the Airway Heights council and the Spokane County commissioners - unanimously passed a six-month moratorium on building permits for halfway houses.

Medical Lake will use the time to study impacts of a halfway house and put restrictions on siting and use, Hill said.

John Reynolds, the DSHS’s chief real estate agent, said the moratoriums were not a factor in site selection. Staff attorneys are studying the legality of moratoriums, and Reynolds said the department may challenge them in court if the department chose a Spokane County site for later halfway houses.

He said the department now wants to develop a good relationship with any town selected, including getting a building permit.

“The issue we’ll need to overcome will be fear of this facility,” he said. “We’ll just have to work with people in such a way that we answer their questions as directly and candidly as possible to allay their fears.”

But the DSHS is now likely to face resistance elsewhere.

West, the ranking Republican on the Senate budget-writing committee, said his staff was studying a variety of ways to scuttle the halfway house plan, including blocking funding.

“I’m going to do what I can to make sure these things don’t end up in neighborhoods, in neighborhoods where they can find easy prey,” he said.

Stephen Jordan, president of Eastern Washington University, also said he was concerned about the prospect of a group of high-risk sex offenders near campus.

Neither the university nor he has taken an official position, but Jordan said the recent abductions of EWU and Mukogawa students made him more aware of student safety.

“I certainly would be concerned” if Medical Lake were eventually selected, he said. “The safety of our students is of paramount importance to me.”

The perceived danger of the halfway house tenants is probably exaggerated, said Mark Seling, superintendent of the Special Commitment Center at McNeil Island.

Twenty percent of people who commit sex offenses are likely to reoffend, according to the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers.

That figure, Seling said, doesn’t account for offenders who have gone through treatment, like those released from McNeil Island. It takes at least four years to complete the center’s treatment program.

He believes offenders released from his facility are less dangerous than those released from prison with a high-risk Level III status, although he doesn’t have the data to prove it.

Offenders who live in the halfway houses, he noted, will be under much stricter supervision and therapy, be required to submit to random drug testing and will be barred from the Internet.

“We’re far safer because we have this risk management approach,” he said.

Seling, however, has no guarantee that those released will have gone through treatment. Five patients have been released from McNeil Island in the facility’s history against their doctor’s wishes. In each case, judges found the patients were safe enough to be released.

Seling said none of the five have been caught reoffending.