Supes get an earful on ADMHS budget

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Mental health advocates from across the county strongly urged the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors to reconsider millions in proposed cuts to the Department of Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Services (ADMHS) as the board wrapped up the first of three days of budget hearings yesterday.
Dozens of residents voiced their opposition to the cuts during public comment as a standing-room only crowd looked on.
Roger Thompson, who has protested the cuts for months, said if the funds are slashed, he and dozens of others will engage in acts of civil disobedience.


“We’ll pick a bright Saturday afternoon, work our way to State Street, and take a nap in the middle of a busy intersection,” Thompson said. “And then, with cameras rolling, the police — with fewer officers and greater salaries — will drag us to overcrowded jails where, with great irony, we’ll receive food, clothing and shelter.
“Then you might listen.”
While county officials had predicted an $8.4 million deficit for adult mental health services earlier this year, much was said at the hearing about the county’s budget booklet not reflecting this level of cuts. Instead, the amount of cuts to adult mental health, according to the budget book, is $5.6 million.
Mike Foley, executive director of the Casa Esperanza homeless shelter, who joined other local nonprofit leaders last week in asking the county to postpone the budget hearing until accurate numbers could be presented, said it’s impossible to clearly appeal to the board for additional funding without accurate information.
“The Department of Mental Health does not belong to the staff and it does not belong to the board. It belongs to the people,” he said. “And the people deserve the right to open up their computers, or open up the budget booklet to find a budget that makes sense to them, that they can read, that they can honestly see and understand. They don’t have that in front of the them right now.”
As a result of Foley’s and many other’s inquiries about the accuracy of the budget, County CEO Mike Brown will address all of these questions at the conclusion of Wednesday’s budget hearing.
County Communications Director William Boyer told the Daily Sound last week that the budget numbers don’t add up to $8.4 million because adult mental health services are distributed through other areas of the budget. For example, Boyer said some of the money is tied up in jail services and would be cut from there.
Board Chair and First District Supervisor Salud Carbajal asked Foley to provide Brown a list of discrepancies and questions sometime today.
Mental health advocates have vehemently protested the proposed $8.4 million in cuts, more than $5 million of which is expected to come from the contracts of community based organizations (CBOs). These organizations provide services to hundreds of residents. Some say this level of cuts could purge as many as 800 mentally ill people from vital services, such as supportive housing.
While leaders of nonprofit CBOs and other mental health advocates have levied extreme scrutiny on the county over the last few months, Carbajal said he would like to see what the CBOs are doing to improve the fiscal situation.
“It pains us just as much as a CBO,” Carbajal said of the proposed cuts. “We in county government have that burden and that pain but it’s also time for CBOs in that partnership to demonstrate their cuts and how many staff they’re going to lay off if we can’t fund the full deficit that we’re facing.”
Carbajal pointed out that the county shored up a $6.9 million deficit in the department of mental health last year for the purpose of preserving the status quo until this budget session.
Now that crunch time has arrived, Carbajal’s request for more information from the CBOs is just what Foley hoped to see all along. In fact Foley said a directive from the board last November for CBOs to meet with county leaders and discuss a restructuring of the department fell apart nearly before it began.
As a result, Foley said Carbajal’s request for more information about what CBOs are doing to cut costs marks the first time the county has asked for such information.
“We’ve never been asked the question we were asked today,” Foley said, adding that one can turn it into a CBO issue, or a county issue, but it’s really about protecting the mentally ill. “This has always been and will always be about preventing the mentally ill from losing services.”
Third District Supervisor Brooks Firestone said the notion that the county does little to help the mentally ill is a misconception. He too pointed to the $6.9 million bailout as an example, and said this is in large part why the county’s strategic reserve dropped from $34 million to $24 million last year.
“The largest user of that was mental health,” Firestone said. “To say that we’re not trying to fill the gap is simply not true.”
Firestone said the budget crisis at the state, which has largely contributed to the fiscal mess at the county level, could get worse next year, adding, “There’s simply not enough money,” to continue bail outs.
Foley said he and other nonprofit leaders realize the mental health department needs to change and become more efficient, but those changes haven’t occurred yet and won’t by simply making broad cuts.
He told the board that nonprofit leaders support conducting a forensic audit of the department and forming a blue ribbon commission to redesign the department. But until these two things occur, he said no budget cuts should be made and not one person should be thrust from the system.
“We know and everyone knows that the department of mental health needs to change,” he said. “We are going to have less money and we are going to have to have smarter and better operating programs. But first we need to know where we’ve been and we have to have a smart plan for where we’re going.”
The board isn’t expected to vote on budget proposals until Friday. Wednesday’s budget hearing begins at 9 a.m. at the County Administration Building at 105 E. Anapamu St.