‘Falling through the cracks can be fatal’: Spokane mayor proposes $730,000 investment in opioid treatment plans

Mayor Lisa Brown on Tuesday announced a proposal to invest $730,000 in additional opioid settlement funds into a variety of opioid-related services in the City of Spokane.

The funding comes from settlements between the state of Washington and opioid distributors and the pharmacies that sold the addictive pills.

Over the course of 17 years, the city will receive around $13.3 million from these settlements, while Spokane County will receive roughly $24 million.

During Tuesday’s Gabriel’s Challenge meeting at Spokane City Hall, Brown took to the stage to explain her proposal and the reasonings behind it.

“At the end of the day, it’s not enough just to do outreach and to find people and to get them into treatment and recovery. It’s also got to be about what happens after that,” Brown said during Tuesday’s meeting. “There’s too many places where people fall through the cracks, and that falling through the cracks can be fatal.”

Gabriel’s Challenge is a community-led response spanning Mother’s Day to Father’s Day aimed to inspire community action addressing the fentanyl crisis. It is led by Spokane mother Kitara Johnson Jones, who lost her son Gabriel Fensler in March to a fentanyl overdose.

The proposal would allocate $300,000 to Maddie’s Place, a nonprofit recovery nursery for babies experiencing withdrawal from prenatal substance exposure; $30,000 for capital investments supporting mobile treatment and outreach; as well as $400,000 to establish an outdoor navigation program.

Shaun Cross, the president and CEO of Maddie’s Place, said they’ve been working with the city for at least a year to secure this funding.

The money given to Maddie’s Place would go toward a month of expenses at the nursery, which comes out to roughly $320,000 a month.

Opioid settlement funding accounts for over half of the $15 million Maddie’s Place raised over the past 2½ years. Cross said they would not have been able to operate without these settlement funds.

“It’s really great to have the state and the county and the city all agreeing that maintaining the services that Maddie’s Place is providing to the most vulnerable population of infants and moms and dads is a huge priority of these funds,” Cross said.

The mobile treatment aspect would continue the city’s initiative to bring health care directly to people struggling with opioid addiction. The proposed outdoor navigation program is newer than the other two established programs and is still in development.

“When you meet someone on the street who’s ready for treatment, you have to be able to provide that treatment immediately,” Spokane Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates said. “Right now, we just don’t have the capacity to meet all of that.”

The navigation program would allow the city to create a location for individuals who need immediate treatment and a temporary place to stay while they are navigated to the next service.

Previously, the City of Spokane allocated over $2.4 million in opioid settlement money to a variety of opioid-related services. These include increasing capacity within the Spokane Fire Department’s CARES team, supporting a city grant for culturally specific behavioral health treatment and expanding sobering bed capacity at Spokane Treatment and Recovery Services.