Supervisor Kathy Long

* Supervisor Kathy Long follows the lead of Susan Lacey and deserves to be swept out of office.

The merger of mental health services with the welfare department was spawned by Lacey and her cohort Randy Feltman to benefit disgruntled top-level employees in the Mental Health Department who did not want to work for Health Care Agency director Pierre Durand.

Durand is an administrator whose aim is to use tax dollars efficiently to provide maximum services to the poor, not to build a bureaucracy of support. Under the Lacey-Feltman regime, placement options for the seriously impaired mentally ill drastically diminished while salaries and employee benefits doubled and tripled.

The union that supported Lacey now supports Long. Employees vote; the mentally ill often don’t and they often don’t demand services. They shuffle into the shadows of homelessness and untimely death, if they are not fortunate enough to end up in jail.

Long says she continues to think the merger was a good idea, despite its multimillion-dollar cost to taxpayers and the mentally ill. A successful merger would have continued the Lacey-Feltman regime of questionable billing practices, “blended funding” and a high level of bureaucracy for often marginal services to seriously disabled people.

The decision to take $1 million from the mental health budget to pay accounting coasts for the failed merger was unconscionable. But of those who spoke, only Long insisted “we have no choice.” This further reveals her indifference to, if not outright contempt for, the needs of the mentally ill.

Kathy Long’s constituency of many dedicated, hard-working, hands-on mental health workers must realize that a balanced system of care for the mentally ill provides greater job security than the Lacey-Feltman legacy.

LOU MATTHEWS

Past President

Ventura County

Alliance for

the Mentally Ill