Parents of Mentally Ill Take Plea for Facility to County : Housing: The supervisors’ approval is needed before work can begin on a low-cost residential project.

Art Chapman’s son had been an Eagle Scout and such a brilliant math student that he was allowed to skip freshman classes at the California Institute of Technology and start college as a sophomore.

“Now he throws rocks at police cars because he wants to tell people he’s alive,” said Chapman in a plea to the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. “I’m here to tell you he is alive.”

But Duane Chapman, 29, is not well. He is a patient at the Camarillo State Hospital. And in a few months, when his schizophrenia abates, he will be released with nowhere to go when the voices that tell him he is a Nobel laureate physicist begin to return.

“The greatest fear of a parent of a schizophrenic child is that when he is dismissed he will start another cycle” of homelessness, despair and trouble with the police, said Chapman, whose dehydrated son was found near death in a Fresno field last summer.

Duane Chapman has been in and out of mental facilities 12 times in a decade, his father said.

Chapman and a dozen other parents of mentally ill children attended the board meeting to lobby for $600,000 that would be the county’s share of a proposed $4.5-million low-cost housing project near the Camarillo hospital.

The Lewis Road project would have 50 three-bedroom condominiums that could accommodate 150 people, who could live there indefinitely. A 12-person team of mental health workers would have offices in the development’s community center.

Jim Shinn of Camarillo, who stood at a microphone before the supervisors with his arm around his 29-year-old stepson, Jeffrey Strom, told the board that a group of parents of Camarillo patients had worked three years to gain state land and federal money for the project.

“This is a miracle happening,” Shinn said in an interview. But without the county funding, he said, “all of our work will have been for nothing.”

Construction must begin by January or $3.9 million in federal money will be lost. Construction bids must be requested at least by August to meet that deadline, county officials have said.

The supervisors, in a rebuke that has angered Supervisor John H. Flynn, refused on a 2-to-2 vote last week to earmark the money. Supervisors Madge L. Schaefer and Maggie Erickson argued that the $600,000 should not be awarded until after the project is balanced against others at budget hearings in six weeks.

“We are considering the funding of this project along with a number of other projects,” Schaefer said Tuesday after the parents’ presentation. The need for a new jail is particularly pressing, Schaefer said.

Erickson said: “It isn’t that I don’t care about these people. It’s just that I want to follow proper procedures.”

Flynn said he will press the issue with Supervisor James R. Dougherty, the swing vote on the project. Dougherty was sick last week when Flynn’s motion was blocked.

“I wrote a note to Jim this morning,” Flynn said. “He wrote back that he needs the details. So I’m going out to his office on Thursday.”

Flynn said the county’s delay in committing to the project might affect the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s view of it.

“I just feel we’ve got to give a signal that we’re behind this 100%,” Flynn said. “If we don’t, I’m afraid the federal money will go someplace else.”

County officials who are working with HUD said that the federal agency’s commitment is solid and that delaying the vote until after budget hearings in early August will not affect funding.

“I don’t believe there is a real threat,” Mental Health Director Randall Feltman said. “In fact, it gives us time to prepare information for the supervisors. So far, the information to the board has been verbal.”

Feltman, whose department has worked with Flynn and the Camarillo parents for a year, said he will emphasize to the supervisors that the county has no long-term obligation to the development, which will be maintained by HUD.

“It’s a housing project,” he said. “The security, the landscaping, the maintenance will all be handled by HUD.”

Tenants would pay about one-third of their $676 monthly state disability stipend for rent, Feltman said. The team of mental health workers, whose $1-million-a-year cost would be paid by the state, would be on call 24 hours a day, he said.