Developer shares plans for new behavioral health campus envisioned for Tacoma

A new behavioral health facility is now in permitting with the city of Tacoma, part of a lengthy process to get such a site up and running.

The sites are part of Gov. Jay Inslee’s multi-year plan to reconfigure behavioral health care access, with an emphasis on smaller, more targeted settings away from the state’s larger psychiatric hospitals, including Western State Hospital in Lakewood and Eastern State near Spokane.

Intensive behavioral health treatment facilities and enhanced services facilities are part of that plan. Both are seen as step-down facilities from higher-level, acute-care hospital settings, offering different types of continuing care.

In April, The News Tribune reported on the initial stages of new behavioral health site development in Pierce County, including the work of Emerald City Enhanced Services.

Emerald City’s operations are led by Claudia Johnson, a former VA critical-care nurse who also briefly worked at Western State Hospital in 2021.

Emerald City currently operates Pierce County’s only functioning ESF so far, in Lakewood, with plans for a new intensive behavioral health site on South Hosmer Street.

Another one of Emerald City’s family of sites includes a proposed Tacoma campus now in permitting. A two-building office campus at South 37th Street and Pacific Avenue sold in November to Reliance Senior Housing Fund LLC, affiliated with Destry Witt, who splits his time between Tacoma and Vancouver, Washington.

While Johnson focuses on the details of operations, Witt has joined forces with her to focus on finding locations, applying for Department of Commerce grants and providing overall help to create Emerald City’s sites in the area.

He recently spoke to The News Tribune about Emerald City’s new developments.

Tacoma, other areas

Witt explained the real estate side of the operation, which he oversees. The Pacific Avenue campus has for now two buildings that are future Emerald City sites.

“Reliance Senior Housing owns buildings A and B and is remodeling them for Emerald City Health to manage,” he explained. “Internally, we refer to them as Emerald 1 in Lakewood, Emerald 2 and 3 at what we’re going to be calling the Pacific Crest Behavioral Health Campus operated by Emerald City Health.”

“Emerald 4 is the Hosmer location,” he added. A future Puyallup site, still in planning stages, would be Emerald 5 and 6, he added.

All are planned as 16-bed facilities.

What’s labeled as “Building C” in Witt’s outline of the Tacoma Pacific Avenue campus was built as a retail center, which Witt hopes at some point to add to the campus. For that site, he hopes to create a commercial kitchen to lease to another organization to provide meal services at Emerald City’s sites.

“We’ll also want to help incubate other social enterprises in that building eventually, and have our own office staff in there,” he added.

For now, the campus’ two buildings face interior demolition. Building A would serve as an intensive behavioral health treatment site, and Building B as an enhanced services facility, like the Lakewood site now.

Building A, 3701 Pacific Ave., still has space leased to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, with the department set to move in about a year.

Because of that, work on Building B is set to begin first. For now, that process is going through sewer permitting.

“Otherwise, we would have started the demolition inside Building B,” Witt said. “The timeline was to start the demolition in May, but we’re going to be off a little bit now.”

Another challenge is finding locations, he noted, with some rural areas not yet offering established rules or guidelines for placement, particularly for enhanced service facilities.

For some, “they haven’t had time to do the planning to determine what their responsibility is going to be in this,” he said.

Pierce County Council adopted an ordinance in fall 2020 updating the county code to introduce ESF development in the county’s urban growth area, establish permitting rules focused on mixed use districts, high density residential districts and community centers zones.

“We’d love to have (facilities) in every community,” Witt said. “I don’t think we can manage that ourselves. We put them where we can and the communities also are monitoring.”

Describing the multi-building campus as “right on the edge” of the Lincoln District, he added, “the location couldn’t be better.”

“The 911 call center, the Health Department, the needle exchange” are all nearby on the other side of Pacific Avenue, he noted. “So, you know, that’s the kind of places where our sellers sold because they didn’t see a way forward in an office space. So I’d love to find more 9,000-square-feet office buildings, where we can remodel and and make the neighborhood a lot nicer.”

Witt said future expansion for Emerald City could ultimately extend as far north as Des Moines and as far south as Cowlitz County.

“We have to keep in mind an exit strategy, because this is for both of us, probably our last career,” he said of himself and Johnson. “And we want to build big, beautiful buildings that at some point, an institution would be happy to take over.”