Homeless Aid Underlines Problem : State’s $992,000 Points Up Lack of Beds for Mentally Ill

To the volunteers in the room accustomed to scrounging a dollar here and five dollars there to provide shelter for Orange County’s homeless, the amount mentioned during a meeting Tuesday was other-worldly: $992,000 a year.

But with the money that will come to Orange County as its share of $20 million in new state money comes an equally noteworthy problem--finding more beds to provide shelter for homeless people who are also mentally ill.

“The state Department of Mental Health is under tremendous pressure to spend out this $20 million,” Douglas Barton of the county Health Care Agency told more than two dozen representatives of volunteer agencies at the Hall of Administration.

The state agency notified the county of its $992,000 allocation only two weeks ago, Barton said, and gave officials until Nov. 22 to come up with a proposal to spend the money provided by the Legislature earlier this year.

Community Imput

Barton, the agency’s deputy assistant director of mental health services, said the Board of Supervisors would have to approve the proposal before it is sent to the state. To get community viewpoints, Barton invited officials of the volunteer agencies to the meeting.

He said preliminary plans call for spending $232,000 for beds and an evening meal program for the mentally ill; $450,000 for two “drop-in centers,” where people would get lunch and a place to spend the day, and $310,000 for a “centralized case management system” that would refer the homeless to providers of medical and legal help.

“Our hope is that clients will at some point engage with the formal mental health system,” Barton said.

Orange County volunteers, happy to hear of additional money to help the bag ladies and the men and women who wander the streets muttering to themselves, sleeping in parks or on sidewalks, compared the allocation to their usual shoestring budgets.

Jean Forbath of Share Our Selves, which provides emergency food, shelter and health care, said her group has to “scrounge” for money simply to continue operations.

Mike Elias of Christian Temporary Housing Facilities Inc. added that “we haven’t had $232,000 to start a shelter. We start with nothing, literally nothing.”

Possible Headaches

However, the new allocations could wind up creating new headaches for county officials and volunteer workers.

Barton said the $232,000 allotment, for example, worked out to providing 53 beds a day which, he conceded, “may be optimistic.” Volunteer officials agreed, especially since Barton stressed that the plan was to provide new beds--not to deny aid to people who are mentally sound in order to provide room for those who are not.

Scott Mather of the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter said his organization gets an average of 30 calls a day asking for space. “We’re already booked to capacity” at the shelter’s nine-room facility in Costa Mesa, he said. “I think the critical need right now is new beds.”

LaDale Dunbar of the Santa-Ana based Feedback Foundation, whose projects include providing assistance to senior citizens, agreed that all voluntary organizations are “overburdened with the problem of the homeless as it is, the mentally ill and the non-mentally ill.”

Stan Kaye of the Health Care Agency said: “Sacramento is asking what beds do you have now,” not what will be available in the future, to get the program started quickly. He encouraged volunteers to “be creative” in finding new beds, although many responded that the county should use buildings it owns or that are owned by cities to provide extra space.

However, county officials said the county usually requires a long time to acquire property or convert it for the type of use envisioned by the state.

There are also problems finding locations for new facilities because most residents do not want a home for the mentally ill in their neighborhoods, officials and volunteers said. As a result, county officials asked volunteers to see if they could expand their operations to include more beds for the mentally ill, at least temporarily.

Barton said the county would keep volunteers’ concerns in mind in drawing up the proposal to be sent to the state, and will set up a working group of volunteers to help establish the program.