For decades, the City of Chehalis has hosted the Green Hill School, a juvenile detention facility run by the Washington State Department of Children, Youth & Families. What was once envisioned as a place for youthful rehabilitation has now become a revolving door for violent offenders, adult criminals masquerading as "youth" and unchecked chaos — placing an unsustainable burden on our community.
Our police officers and firefighters respond to calls from Green Hill constantly. Drugs are flowing through the facility. Assaults — on staff and on other detainees — are disturbingly common. This is not a low-level facility for misguided teens. Green Hill now houses some of the most dangerous offenders in the state, many of them adults in everything but the legal classification the state created to justify housing violent adult men, with children.
The reality on the ground is that we have 24-year-old men being warehoused in what is supposed to be a juvenile facility — creating a toxic and violent environment.
Even worse, there have been confirmed reports of state employees smuggling contraband into the facility. From cellphones to narcotics, these breaches have directly contributed to the growing violence and instability inside Green Hill. When the people hired to maintain order and discipline are instead funneling in tools for chaos, it’s no surprise the situation has spiraled out of control.
While the city bears the brunt of responding to these incidents, the state’s reimbursement rate for our services doesn’t come close to covering the actual cost. Chehalis taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the operational failures of the state. That’s not just unfair — it’s unsustainable.
Sen. John Braun and Rep. Peter Abbarno have both worked in good faith to increase the reimbursement rates and give our city the tools to deal with this crisis. So how did the radical liberals who control Olympia respond? They changed the law — not to protect staff or the community — but to remove rioting charges for those held in maximum-security juvenile facilities like Green Hill.
Let that sink in. Instead of holding violent offenders accountable, the Legislature chose to decriminalize rioting inside youth lockups. Imagine a teacher being told that if their students riot and destroy the classroom, there’s nothing that can be done. That’s the message Olympia has sent to our city, our police and the people who work at Green Hill.
This is no longer a juvenile facility. It is a maximum-security facility for violent offenders — housed in the middle of a small city, with insufficient support and dangerous consequences for our community.
The State of Washington needs to decide: either reform Green Hill and reimburse us fairly or relocate it to somewhere better equipped to handle what it has become.
Chehalis has carried this burden for too long. It's time the state did its part — or took its problem elsewhere.
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Kevin Carns is a member of the Chehalis City Council and a longtime resident of Lewis County.
