Criminal justice contracts in works
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 15, 2026
PORT ANGELES — Clallam County is making progress on reaching a new criminal justice contract with the cities of Port Angeles and Sequim.
County Administrator Todd Mielke provided an update Monday to the county commissioners on the process to get the contracts finalized. The county had a 10-year agreement with each city which expired Dec. 31. County staff is now working with the cities through a six-month extension period to update the contracts.
“State law clearly provides two statutes that I think are important in all of this,” Mielke said. “One is that the county is responsible for prosecution, for jail services, for court services, for any felony crime plus any gross misdemeanor and misdemeanor that occurs in the unincorporated areas.”
When cities incorporate, they take on those responsibilities within city boundaries, he said.
“The second statute that’s important to note is one that says one governmental entity should not subsidize another one in providing those services,” Mielke said. “In short, what I say is the person that’s contracting for services shouldn’t pay more than the actual costs and the one providing the services shouldn’t receive less for those services than what the actual costs are.”
The county has gone through the numbers for each area of service with the city representatives and has been answering questions on what those services look like, he said.
Using numbers from 2024, Port Angeles constituted 42.18 percent of referrals to the county prosecutor’s office to pursue.
“These are working notes, but essentially we did a couple of things,” Mielke said. “The most substantive change you will see is in the jail costs, and other than that, the other things that would be reflected in the revised numbers that didn’t quite make it there is we decided to adjust our indirect cost for district court and prosecution.”
The county doesn’t charge the cities for indirect costs for public defense and jail.
The contracts will include an increase in jail costs because the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office needs an updated jail management system. One problem the current system has is that, for example, if a person is arrested at the end of the year and is still in jail over New Year’s Eve, the system is not consistent on whether that costs as an incarcerated person for last year or for the current year.
“It’s a little quirky thing in the software that we hope an upgrade will fix, but we had to go back through and manually adjust a number of these, and in some cases, from the city’s perspective, sometimes it helped them, sometimes it didn’t help them,” Mielke said.
There was a decrease in prosecution referrals from 42 percent to 36 percent. In public defense, the overall cases went down from 52.5 percent to a little over 46 percent. Downward trends continued with Port Angeles utilizing district court cases from 47 percent of the workload to 41 percent. When comparing 2024 numbers to 2025, there was an increase in jail costs because of higher utilization.
The county has updated all of the 2025 numbers and has until the end of April to update the numbers from the first quarter of 2026.
One issue they’re working through is whether the county wants to continue being the pass-through for public defense between cities and Clallam Public Defender, or if the county wants cities to contract directly for that.
With Sequim, some numbers have gone up when comparing 2024 to 2025, Mielke said.
To meet the June 30 deadline for the new contracts, Mielke said the county should have draft contracts ready to go out by the end of May, but “the earlier the better.”
________
Reporter Emily Hanson can be reached by email at emily.hanson@peninsuladailynews.com.
