End Finally Arrives for West Valley Mental Clinic

It’s been a roller-coaster existence for patients and staff of the West Valley Mental Health Center the past year as budget constraints forced county officials to issue and withdraw threats that it would be closed. But the ride ends Friday.

Faced with a $2.9-million deficit, county administrators announced Tuesday that they will close the West Valley clinic in Canoga Park and the Hubert H. Humphrey clinic in South-Central Los Angeles at the end of this week. Six other facilities will suffer a reduction in services.

Altogether, between 3,000 and 4,000 patients will be forced to seek treatment elsewhere or go without care, county mental health officials said.

Although the board allocated $4.7 million Tuesday to preserve several programs, $2.9 million more was needed to keep the two clinics open and prevent cuts at other centers.

About 600 West Valley patients will be referred to the Crisis Management Center in Van Nuys, which absorbed about 500 patients from the East Valley Mental Health Center in North Hollywood when it closed in June, said Francis Dowling, chief deputy director for the county Department of Mental Health.

Some West Valley employees will also move to the Crisis Management Center to help handle the additional caseload. The remaining staff members will be transferred to other facilities.

Ron Klein, district chief of the Van Nuys center, said the newest round of closures will add to an already high patient load that occasionally forces patients to wait in the parking lot for lack of space in the waiting room.

Klein said he has already requested, and been promised, a second security guard to deal with the larger number of patients expected.

Frantic West Valley patients were already beginning to call the clinic Tuesday as word of the county’s action spread. “They’re a little hysterical about where they’re going,” said assistant director Frances Keefe, who helped close the East Valley clinic earlier this summer. “They’re worried.”

The East Valley center, the Coastal Community Mental Health Center in Carson and the Wilmington Mental Health Center shut their doors in June after a court battle, mounted by legal aid groups, failed to prevent the closures.

Five other clinics, including the West Valley center, were also targeted for closure in the summer of 1988 and have been operating on borrowed time ever since, with help from a $3.25-million county bailout in March. The result of the cutbacks has been a deteriorating system that is able to serve only the most severely mentally ill, Dowling said.

But county officials say that mental health funding is a state responsibility that the governor and Legislature have neglected.

“The network is diminishing and not only in the Valley,” Dowling said. “It’s throughout the county of Los Angeles and across the state. This is a state program. Unless the governor comes up with more money,” he said, the system could be faced with even more curtailments in mental health services next year.

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