COUNTYWIDE : Funds for Mental Patient Home Urged

Supervisor John K. Flynn has recommended that the Ventura County Board of Supervisors allocate $783,700 of federal housing construction funds to build a 30-room residence in Camarillo for mentally ill adults.

The funding request for the project--a group home for Ventura County patients in need of supervised living conditions--is slated for county-owned property on Lewis Road, said Randy Feltman, director of the county’s mental health services division.

If approved by supervisors Tuesday, the $1.2-million project would be the first residential-care home for the mentally ill built in 20 years, Feltman said. “This facility will enable these adults to get better care than they now receive.”

The facility would provide “a closely supervised program for very impaired adults,” Feltman said. Many county residents in need of this type of service are now housed in Los Angeles or other counties, he said.

“The county has a liability for all these people, so it’s not as though we don’t have to serve them already. It would be better for some of them to be at this level of care here rather than living in a locked facility elsewhere,” Feltman said.

Flynn agreed. “This project is desperately needed,” he said. “It has been in the planning stages for some time . . . and we need to make a commitment now or we’ll lose the land.”

Along with the land, water and sewage rights have also been secured, Flynn said. “Those are the three hardest items to get, and we have them all, so we need the money to get the group home built, and we need to do it now.”

Two other low-income housing projects--one in Piru and the other in Camarillo--are eligible for the federal housing funds. “They are all important,” Flynn said, “but this one has been in the planning stages for so long and is desperately needed for the client population.”