Properly sensing that some members of the public (and the AVA) are skeptical about spending tens of thousands of dollars for a professional “needs assessment,” (as discussed by the Board of Supervisors last month), Sheriff Allman called recently to explain why he agrees that the County and the Measure B oversight committee really need one before they consider spending the Measure B money for mental health facilities and training.
The Sheriff thinks the County should hire a consultant like Kemper Consulting. Kemper, some of us recall, did the analysis of the privatized Ortner contract, which some say lead to Ortner’s unchallenged, un-audited three-year sweetheart deal not being renewed and handed over to Camille Schrader’s locally privatized Redwood Quality Management Company for a total of something like $26 million a year.
In fact, Kemper Consulting simply confirmed what the Sheriff himself and the County's emergency room doctors had been saying — they were the prime movers in ousting Ortner after three years of invisible but wildly expensive "services."
Allman said he doesn't want someone from the County or Redwood Quality Management Co. to make the decision on what is needed for a psychiatric health facility. Allman favors hiring a consultant to “tell us what we need right now and look into the future maybe 15 years for how many beds we will need as population increases.”
The Sheriff said he does not want “the usual bureaucratic bring in my brother-in-law and prepare a white paper” approach to advice, although we haven’t seen anything that blatant, but bringing in former Ortner Exec Tom Pinizzotto and then hiring Ortner came close to Allman's fear.
According to the Sheriff, a consultant would “tell us what we're spending right now, how we're spending it, how many beds we need now and how many we will need in 15 or 20 years” — i.e., “a roadmap of how we are going to spend our money.”
We disagreed with the Sheriff. “You mean all these people we pay top dollar for in the “Mental Health” department don't know things like how many beds we need and what the trends are? They don't know how much they’re spending? They don't know what they’re spending it on? They don't know how many clients they serve and what kind of service they provide? They don’t have that information on hand already? What does that say about our County Health and Human Services staff?”
We also pointed out that back in 2004 Proposition 63 was supposed to fund “new and innovative” services. Yet what new services did it create here in fanciful Mendo?
Back in 2005 the Mental Health staff held several meetings and a number of interesting ideas were proposed, but none of them went anywhere, even though the County’s been getting more than $1 million a year in Prop 63 funds ever since. Where did that money go? What new services are being provided?
And speaking of Kemper, what happened to all those Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) that Kemper said were so important to round out Mendo’s alleged "continuum of care"? For a couple of months they kept track and made some progress but last we heard the MOUs had stalled because of disagreements over certain provisions, leaving a key piece of Kemper’s big recommendations in limbo.
The Sheriff confirmed that the MOU with his office is one of those unfinalized MOUs.
Why does Mendo always turn to professionals to tell us what we need? We don't know? Why does Mendo want to pay some outsider hundreds of dollars an hour to collect its own info and regurgitate it to us for tens of thousands of dollars? Why doesn’t the oversight committee do a “needs assessment” on the needs assessment, and decide for themselves if they want to spend that kind of money — AFTER asking staff for it?
Also, what kinds of facilities do we already have now? Why didn’t the local community development agency follow up with the cities on where a facility could be established? How will the new Measure B facilities fit in with the other programs and facilities we have now and the new ones in the pipeline, such as the jail expansion and the grant application for a big new crisis facility on Dora Street?
We told the Sheriff that history clearly shows that Mendo will go through all these motions and spend all this money and there will be no visible improvement in services rendered. And no attempt to measure the improvement other than money was spent.
The Sheriff conceded that that will be a challenge.
Mendo should already know how many people are in what categories and how many are being held for how long and where; how many people have not relapsed after being seen by our local helpers, how many drug-related cases are going to be eligible for the new facilities? And how many people — as Supervisor McCowen pointed out recently —were turned down for a facility because they were either a problem and the-out-of-county facility simply rejected them, or there wasn't space, or they were released back to the streets because they didn't have insurance coverage, etc.?
What does it say about our mental health system’s managers if we don't already know the answers to these questions?
The Sheriff insists that he intends to stay on top of the Measure B oversight committee's work. And we believe him. But Mendo’s top helping officials are past masters at absorbing new money with nothing to show for it. It gets absorbed by the local bureaucracy — pound a pillow all you want and it’s still a pillow — and even with the Sheriff trying to ride herd, this early talk about an expensive “needs assessment” — without first asking staff for information they should already have — is an indication that they’re going to do it again.
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