Social Services, Behavioral Health Offices Merge

Looking for new ways to aid society’s less fortunate in an era of welfare reform, a divided Ventura County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday decided to merge the Public Social Services Agency with the Behavioral Health Department.

The Human Services Agency, as it will be known, is intended to improve teamwork among county employees to better serve the mentally ill, homeless and needy children and families. The new agency will receive funding starting in the 1999-2000 fiscal year.

The board narrowly approved the combined agency, advocated by Supervisors Susan Lacey and John K. Flynn, on a 3-2 vote rather than a more moderate restructuring plan recommended by Chief Administrative Officer Lin Koester. Koester recommended keeping the agencies separate, but fostering increased partnerships to help the mentally ill.

“I think we need to create a new culture,” Lacey said, adding that the new agency will have a stronger emphasis on placing the mentally ill back in society--and at work--instead of institutionalizing them.

Supervisors Frank Schillo and Judy Mikels dissented, citing a lack of sufficient information to make such an important decision.

“This has been an extremely divisive, personal situation,” Mikels said, referring to the apparent intense politicking by county employees that preceded the vote. “I believe it has had more to do with the personalities involved than the people we serve.

“Our mental patients needs to be treated as mental patients and not social problems,” Mikels added, citing the death of her sister, who was homeless and mentally ill, in Arizona as a reason she felt strongly about the need for better government assistance.

After last year’s budget hearings, the board directed the chief administrator to review merging the Public Social Services Agency--about to undergo a major transformation because of federally mandated welfare-to-work programs--with the Behavioral Health Department. The Behavioral Health Department is now under the county’s Health Care Agency.

The highly politicized issue, which pitted physicians who favored the existing “medical model” for treating patients against those who advocated the “social model” of combining the mental health and social service agencies, was supposed to come back to the board within 90 days.

But it took months of study--and extensive lobbying by county workers--before the issue returned to the board Tuesday.

Supervisor Kathy Long, who supported the merger, acknowledged the process leading to the vote had been a “challenging, difficult, emotional” one for her. Ultimately, she said she decided a better approach was needed to serve the mentally ill.

Dennis O’Connell, a supervisor of adult residential services with the Behavioral Health Department, said the task at hand is for physicians--many of whom had supported a different restructuring plan--and other employees to mend fences.

He was among a group of county employees that left Tuesday’s meeting emotionally spent: several workers hugged outside the board room, and a few shed tears of joy.

“Now it’s time for the healing to begin,” O’Connell said. “This has been the most divisive issue in my 16 years in the county. Now we can start working together as a team again.”