(Dec. 3) The St. Tammany Parish Council should delay cuts in funding for the Safe Haven mental health campus until it fully understands all the ramifications.
Someone need not be an expert in the parish’s finances, but just be familiar with how public budgets work and cognizant of the importance of mental health care, in order to see that a potential “major shutdown” of the campus could be a disaster in both fiscal and human terms.
Worse, this is part of an apparently larger problem statewide, with mental health services often getting short shrift.
As reported by this newspaper’s Willie Swett, the council seems poised to cut $620,000 from Safe Haven. Yet nobody seems sure what that will mean for the campus’ three tenants — the St. Tammany Parish Public Schools, the Florida Parishes Human Services Authority and the National Alliance on Mental Illness Southeast Louisiana (NAMI SELA).
Council member Cheryl Tanner said she thinks the campus can use about $800,000 in leftover funds to keep operating for an unspecified time period. Parish spokesman Michael Vinsanau said the administration of Parish President Mike Cooper is unsure how soon cuts in maintenance would occur or whether the proposed budget cuts would result in “a partial, moderate, major or complete shutdown.”
Common sense says answers should come before decisions.
Meanwhile, if Safe Haven closes, Vinsanau said the parish probably will need to return grant money it already has received and stop pursuing grants it expects to receive, including a total of $14.3 million (combined) for veterans’ housing, for a new cafeteria and for drainage improvements.
If just over $600,000 is, essentially, leveraging more than 20 times that much in grant money, then that’s reason enough to scrape up the money in just about any way possible…. [Moreover,] Law enforcement and the criminal justice system often feel the brunt when mental health services are curtailed, and of course, untreated mental health problems and crises can necessitate medical care down the line that is far more expensive than preventive programs are. Mental health care providers cite copious studies, quite believably, that say future savings can range from twofold all the way to tenfold compared to the costs of early intervention…. [The full column is at this link.]
