Time to Pull Together

We’d like to believe that Ventura County is indeed “now on a solution path, rather than a crisis path,” as Supervisor John Flynn put it, regarding the fiscal fallout from creative bookkeeping in the county’s mental health department.

Clearly, the path we need to be on leads as directly as possible toward rebuilding a once-exemplary program for helping the mentally ill while protecting the county’s financial health.

Yet plenty of potholes remain in the way.

The Board of Supervisors last week signed off on a deal to repay $15.3 million of improperly obtained Medicare reimbursements over the next three years. Yet to be determined are the additional costs from three other investigations, which could total millions more.

As these unexpected debts siphon cash from the reserve fund, the county’s credit rating could slip in a way that threatens to delay or inflate the price of several major public projects. In at least temporary jeopardy are:

* A $15-million upgrade of the Ventura County Medical Center kitchen and a nearby laboratory.

* A $5-million social services and employment center planned for Santa Paula.

* At least part of the long-awaited juvenile justice facility. Recently awarded a $40.5-million state and federal grant for that project, the county must finance the remaining $23 million.

It would be a mistake for supervisors to take the easy way out and cut worthy projects such as these because of poor decisions in unrelated branches of the county bureaucracy. The belts to be tightened should be those of the managers who engineered this mess.

And while county officials shuffle their budgets to minimize the financial damage, the mentally ill and their families continue to need coordinated and cost-effective services. Efforts in this area continue to be hampered by backbiting and finger-pointing.

The “solution path” promises to be a long and rocky one. To reach our destination, all of our elected and appointed officials need to be pulling in the same direction. And they’ll need to leave behind the power struggles and factional feuds that got us so far off track to begin with.