The City of Spokane receives a bill from the Spokane County Detention Center each year. The city said the 2025 bill was $3 million more than expected.
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said in a Feb. 27 letter that in response to the large increase, the city conducted an independent audit to review the city’s jail contracts and costs to see if fiscal improvements could be made. Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates said the audit analyzed jail records from 2016 to 2024.
Spokane spokeswoman Erin Hutt said the city was billed $7.42 million in anticipated jail costs in 2024. The 2025 bill was more than $10 million, according to city documents obtained by The Spokesman-Review.
“There’s no question that these costs are rising faster than expected, and we want to get to the bottom of that,” Brown said in an interview with The Spokesman-Review.
The results of the audit by Spokane city staff were presented to the City Council at last week’s Finance and Control Committee meeting.
Spokane County Law and Justice Director Mike Sperber said the increase is due to NafCare ending its 10-year contract to provide health care to county inmates in June and the jail transitioning to a new health care provider. A Virginia-based company called Medico took over the contract in February.
“For some time, we had to keep both providers in transition,” Sperber said.
Medico will receive approximately $15.8 million in the first year for providing medical, dental and pharmaceutical care at the Spokane County Detention Center, with increases of 3% each year to $16.7 million in 2027, $17.2 million in 2028, and $17.75 million in 2029. These total amounts are less than what Nafcare was scheduled to receive. Nafcare had asked the county for a 35% increase in payments, costing the county $22.6 million in 2026 and more than $23 million in 2027.
Spokane likely expected an increase in health care costs, as Brown had written a letter to county commissioners asking about treatment for people with severe mental illnesses and drug users. The letter notes that about 60% of the county jail’s population had previously been treated for behavioral health issues.
Brown wrote that county jails are eligible to receive long-acting, injectable antipsychotic drugs free of charge, but Nafcare must secure and administer the drugs at scale to meet the needs of the jails. Spokane County and the county commission did not respond to Brown’s letter.
The county’s payroll costs have also increased, contributing to the higher bill in 2025, Sperber said.
The 2011 Interlocal Agreement, a contract between Spokane and Spokane County for detention services, is 15 years old and is the most recent agreement signed between the county jail and the city.
Daniel Arnold, the city’s internal audit manager, said at Monday’s meeting that the audit confirmed there was no fraud, waste or abuse between the jail and the city. The audit revealed several areas where risk could be reduced and transparency improved, but Sperber takes issue with this.
“Some of the audits pointed out that we weren’t being very upfront about some of the numbers,” Sperber said. “We have a data dashboard that is publicly available and we want people to understand that they can use it to search for cases as well as the city.”
Mr. Brown disagrees.
“We’ve been saying for about a year now that one of the key issues is getting health care providers to bill Medicaid for health care, and that the federal government also supports participation in funding. One of the conclusions of this audit is that we should be on that committee, but we haven’t been very transparent about it,” Brown said.
After the audit, the city plans to formally request participation on jail-related request-for-proposals committees, participation on pharmaceutical transformation project teams, and access to the city’s misdemeanor population on JailTracker, the county’s jail population management tool.
Brown recommends the city form a commission to oversee the jail. The committee will review existing contracts to find provisions of interest to the city, review county jail quarterly reports, evaluate the county’s cost schedule and draft reporting goals to send to the county jail advisory committee. The committee is comprised of the deputy city administrator, chief financial officer, Spokane Police Department liaison, city court administrator, prosecutor, and public defender.
Brown said progress has been made in communication between the city and county thanks to the Spokane Safety and Health Task Force, which was created in September 2025.
“Having regular meetings and discussing things is preferable to emails and unanswered emails,” Brown said. “So I feel like I’m making progress now, and my communication is much better than before.”
Mr. Sperber added that it was unclear what a solution between the two municipalities would be, but it was clear that talks were needed.
“We’re going to work with (Spokane) on a contractual basis to identify some of their needs and desires,” Sperber said. “We are very interested in having a long discussion with the city.”
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