Detention service bill to Spokane increases by $3 million amid medical, staff cost increases

Every year, the city of Spokane gets a bill from Spokane County Detention Services. According to the city, the bill for 2025 was $3 million more than anticipated.

The significant increase led the city to conduct an independent audit and a review of the city’s jail contract and costs to determine if finances could be improved, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown wrote in a letter Feb. 27. The audit analyzed the jail’s records from 2016 to 2024, according to deputy city administrator Maggie Yates.

In 2024, the city was charged $7.42 million in jail costs, which was expected, according to Spokane spokeswoman Erin Hut. The 2025 bill was more than $10 million, according to city documents obtained by The Spokesman-Review.

“Undoubtedly those costs have risen faster than anticipated, and we want to get to the bottom of that,” Brown said in an interview with The Spokesman-Review.

The audit by Spokane city staff was presented to the City Council during a finance and administration committee meeting last week.

Mike Sparber, the Spokane County director of law and justice, said the increase is due to the jail’s transition to a new medical provider after NaphCare severed a 10-year-old contract to provide medical care to county inmates in June. A Virginia-based company called Mediko took over the contract in February.

“For a while there, we had to keep both medical providers in the transition,” Sparber said.

Mediko will receive nearly $15.8 million for providing medical, dental and pharmaceutical care in Spokane County detention facilities for the first year, which will grow by 3% annually to $16.7 million in 2027, $17.2 million in 2028 and $17.75 million in 2029. Those totals are less than what NaphCare was set to receive. NaphCare was asking the county for a 35% payment bump that would have cost the county $22.6 million in 2026 and more than $23 million in 2027.

Spokane seemingly anticipated the increase in medical costs, since Brown wrote a letter to the county commissioners inquiring about treatment for people with serious mental illness or substance use. The letter notes that roughly 60% of the county jail population had previously been treated for behavioral health issues.

Brown wrote that the county jail was eligible to receive long-acting injectable anti-psychotic medication at no cost, but that NaphCare needed to secure and administer the medication at a larger scale to meet the needs within the jail. Spokane County and the County Commissioners never responded to Brown’s letter.

Labor costs for the county have also gone up, contributing to the larger 2025 bill, Sparber said.

The contract between Spokane and Spokane County for detention services, the 2011 Interlocal Agreement, is 15 years old and is the most recent agreement between the county jail and the city.

The audit confirmed that there is no fraud, waste or abuse between the jail and the city, the city’s internal audit manager Danielle Arnold said during a meeting on Monday. The audit did reveal several areas that can reduce risk and improve transparency – which Sparber takes issue with.

“A portion of the audit said we haven’t been very forthcoming with some of the numbers,” Sparber said. “We have a data dashboard that is open to the public and we want to make sure that they understand that’s available to them, as well as the city, to use to look up cases.”

Brown disagrees.

“We’ve been calling out for about a year that one of the significant issues is having the health care provider bill Medicaid for health care costs so the federal government is also helping to participate in the funding. One of the conclusions in this audit is that we should have a seat on that committee, we haven’t had much transparency into it,” Brown said.

Following the audit, the city has plans to formally request a seat on the Request for Proposal committees related to the jail, a seat on the Medication Transformation Project team and access to the city’s misdemeanant population on JailTracker, the county’s jail population management tool.

Brown recommends the city start a committee to oversee the jail, which would review the existing contract and find provisions in which the city would be interested, review the County Detention Service’s quarterly reports, evaluate the county cost schedule and develop a draft of reporting objectives to send to the County Jail Advisory Committee. The committee would be made up of the deputy city administrator, chief financial officer, a Spokane Police Department liaison, municipal court administrator, prosecutor and public defender.

Brown said the Safe and Healthy Spokane Task Force, which was created in September 2025, has brought progress in communication between the city and the county.

“Having regular meetings and discussing things is preferable to emails and unanswered emails,” Brown said. “So I feel progress right now, and communication is happening way better than it was before.”

It’s unclear what the resolution between the two municipalities will be, Sparber said, adding it is clear, however, that a discussion needs to take place.

“We’re willing to work with (Spokane) on a contractual basis to identify some of their needs and their wants,” Sparber said. “We’re very interested in sitting down with the city and having conversations with them.”