San Diego County organizations have collectively made a big play to receive millions in grants to be awarded in the first $3.3 billion round of mental health care funding approved with the passage of Proposition 1 nearly one year ago.
Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer highlighted 30 project proposals created by local organizations — including two from the county — said to collectively represent $580 million in construction costs that would create 4,000 additional beds for mental health care and substance use treatment. While it is unlikely that every proposal will receive funding under the state’s competitive grantmaking process, the sheer variety of ideas drew praise.
“If we succeed in securing this Proposition 1 funding, these beds and services will save lives, provide critical care and tackle the … causes of the crisis we see in our neighborhoods every day,” Lawson-Remer said.
While it is not immediately clear whether all 30 of the applications were actually submitted by the state’s Dec. 13 deadline, the slate of local proposals still represents an astounding range of big ideas for improving mental health and substance abuse care across San Diego County following voters’ narrow passage of Proposition 1 last March.
Assuming that all 30 proposals were submitted, San Diego County organizations made roughly nine applications per million residents, somewhat more than the seven per million residents filed statewide but slightly behind Los Angeles County, which had 103 applications for a rate of 10.7 per million, according to application statistics provided by the California Department of Health Care Services, which is overseeing the Proposition 1 grantmaking process.
Award announcements are expected in May. Proposition 1 leverages more than $6 billion for residential treatment and supportive housing statewide.
In the first round, applications from Southern California-based organizations and local government agencies will receive at least $287 million from the first $3.3 billion Proposition 1 bond sale, with another $342 million set aside in a “discretionary” category for high-scoring projects regardless of location. A second $1.1 billion bond sale allocates an additional $161 million to Southern California counties with another $209 million in discretionary funding. For both funding rounds, Los Angeles County has its own set aside considered separately from other Southern California counties and is allotted $479 million in round one and $292 million in round two, according to DHCS documentation.
Projects that survive the Proposition 1 competitive application process and win a grant, Lawson-Remer cautioned, will often still need to obtain the local approvals necessary to make their plans real.
“The fact is that securing this funding is just one step; we also need our local cities and our mayors to partner with us on this work to clear hurdles, to improve permits and to make sure that these projects actually get built and move forward without delay,” Lawson-Remer said.
County endorsement letters, required for each submission, show that the possibility of receiving millions in grant funding has local organizations, especially those with long track records of serving the disadvantaged, dreaming big.
Episcopal Community Services, already a stalwart provider of many recovery and counseling services in the community, proposes the development of a campus on Imperial Avenue in San Diego housing two residential substance use disorder programs, one with 15 beds for transition-aged youth and a second with room to serve 50 adults. Family Health Centers of San Diego, the region’s largest federally qualified community clinic, proposes a behavioral health urgent care center on South 21st Street — a former Wal-Mart store — in San Diego with 42 “treatment slots” capable of serving nearly 11,000 low-income residents annually.
Interfaith Community Services, another large and well-known nonprofit serving unhoused residents, proposes a “Recovery and Wellness Campus” on West Mission Road in San Marcos, including a substance use disorder treatment facility “with a planned capacity for 90 residential treatment beds, a 35-bed withdrawal management program, and 25 short-term post-hospitalization beds.” McAlister Institute, the local leader in substance use treatment, proposes a “San Diego Recovery Campus” on 54th Place in San Diego with “a minimum of 50 new residential beds, inclusive of withdrawal management and incidental medical services, as well as 1,500 new treatment slots via a sobering center.”
San Diego Center for Children proposes a two-story structure on its 12-acre Linda Vista campus with the capacity to serve 500 children per year who experience serious mental and emotional disturbances.
Cheryl Rode, the center’s president and chief executive officer, was among executives who spoke at Thursday’s event, acknowledging that the coming increase in treatment programs and facilities will require a simultaneous increase in the number of workers able to provide care.
“This new clinic also envisions a very advanced training center to help grow our behavioral health workforce,” Rode said. “We know that we have a crisis of adequate workforce, and everybody in our community needs to partner to help us to build out that workforce and to sustain that workforce into the future.”
Most of the proposals listed focus on building space for drug and alcohol or behavioral health treatment programs, but there are none listed for additional “board and care” beds, locations where those who have received treatment can stay after they are discharged and continue to receive the services, from medication to counseling, necessary to sustain gains made while enrolled in treatment programs.
Board and care facilities, as Luke Bergman, director of behavioral health services for the county, has explained in the past, are not included in the list of allowable grant types for the first round of Proposition 1 funding. For that reason, the county’s property on Third Avenue in Hillcrest, currently envisioned to be a board-and-care hub, is not among the county’s two Proposition 1 grant requests for residential substance use disorder treatment and children’s crisis residential projects in San Diego.
The director said the wide range of organizations making proposals points up the nature of the challenge in meeting the need for treatment.
“Diversity is a bedrock requirement for our system of care,” Bergmann said. “There is no single uniform pathway to behavioral health; recovery is always a journey shaped by individual needs and community identities.
“Everyone needs individualized treatment that is responsive to their particular histories, traumas and symptoms.”
