Mendo and Humboldt Counties Granted Millions for Housing and Services Slated for People Experiencing Severe Mental Illness and Substance Abuse
Press release from the Office of Governor Gavin Newsom:
The nation is experiencing a mental health crisis. Today, California announced $518.5 million in grants to help provide services and housing options to those with severe mental illness or substance abuse problems, including for those who are living on the streets. The latest funding will help Governor Newsom’s CARE Court proposal, taking a new approach to homelessness and taking stronger action to get people off the streets and into a place where they can get the care they need.
The funding will provide treatment beds for more than 1,000 people at a time, plus behavioral health services for many more. It is part of a $2.2 billion effort to expand mental health housing and services across California, especially for people experiencing homelessness.
The Governor announced the latest grants during a meeting with families who have loved ones dealing with serious mental illness, many of whom have been homeless.
“The crisis on our streets is at a breaking point. Too many Californians are struggling with mental illness and substance abuse, and many of them end up on our streets. We need to change the way we deliver help to those who need it, and these grants are an important step in changing our approach to homelessness and serious mental illness,” Governor Newsom said. “California won’t look away any longer; we’re helping our fellow Californians now. That’s the California Way.”
The Governor’s meeting in Sacramento with members of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) included families who are caring for loved ones struggling with behavioral or mental health disorders and could be helped by CARE Court. The Governor heard their stories and talked about the historic actions that California is taking to address this crisis.
CARE Court will provide Californians suffering from untreated schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders with community-based treatment, services, and housing, and is intended to serve as an upstream intervention for the most severely impaired Californians.
Governor Newsom meets with NAMI CA“Governor Newsom has NAMI’s full support in getting CARE Court across the finish line,” said Jessica Cruz, NAMI CA CEO. “We’re here today to show our commitment to providing help, hope and health for those affected by serious mental illness by supporting initiatives like CARE Court which will provide much-needed help to Californians who need it most.”
“CARE Court has the potential to change the lives of thousands of families across the state,” said Harold Turner, Executive Director of NAMI Urban Los Angeles. “Organizations like NAMI urgently need this support so we can quickly begin helping our loved ones who are struggling with untreated mental and behavioral issues.”
Governor Newsom meets with NAMI CAThe awards announced today are delivered through the Department of Health Care Services’ (DHCS) Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program (BHCIP) Round 3: Launch Ready grants. In all, $2.2 billion was provided by the Legislature and the Governor to construct, acquire, and expand behavioral health facilities and community- based care options while investing in mobile crisis infrastructure.
Grants were awarded in the following counties:
- Alameda County – $18,405,122
- El Dorado County – $2,852,182
- Humboldt County – $4,170,560
- Kern County – $3,138,065
- Los Angeles County – $155,172,811
- Madera County – $2,035,512
- Mendocino County – $7,711,800
- Monterey County – $3,558,670
- Nevada County – $4,458,799
- Orange County – $10,000,000
- Placer County – $6,519,015
- Riverside County – $103,181,728
- Sacramento County – $30,553,889
- San Diego County – $30,874,411
- San Francisco County – $6,750,000
- Santa Barbara County – $2,914,224
- Santa Clara County – $54,074,660
- Solano County – $14,332,411
- Sonoma County – $9,751,915
- Stanislaus County – $33,369,900
- Yolo County – $12,500,000
Recipients of BHCIP Launch Ready grants include cities, counties, Tribal entities, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations statewide that serve target populations. Additional information on BHCIP Round: 3 Launch Ready awardees is available at BHCIP Grant Award Information.
The next round of funding will include more than $480 million focused on Children and Youth behavioral health issues. Awards will be made this fall. For more information about these grants, as well as other BHCIP rounds of funding, please visit the Improving California’s Infrastructure BHCIP grant information.
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I find it interesting that Mendocino got almost double the funding that Humboldt got. Anybody know the reason? From the streets view Humboldt sure seems to need more…
A plan with a great opportunity to spend even more on another unwinnable war…
If you feed a feral cat, pretty soon you will have over 20 feral cats, and the bird population will decrease, as the cats destroy bird eggs…
If you upset the balance of nature, the price will be to pay the price when nature comes for you…
Services to this population will cost far more per beneficiary than the average Californian earns, and a program of this nature will raise the cost of living, in California, even higher, as the State tries to comfort the doomed with drugs and small apartments, MFT’s and County Services.
Humboldt and Mendocino can easily waste another $12 Million, and basically, it’s a nice gesture, but the $12 million will cause another $12 Million in added associated costs.
Give them a large campground, out in Northern Nevada or East of Fort Bidwell, somewhere, so that the homeless can hike over to Nevada, Idaho, or Oregon, for services and support.
Give the holeless a large pile of lumber, some nails and tools, some beans and rice and USDA cheese, some cheap beer and lots of cigarettes, and pretty soon they will have their own city, a system of government, and their own police force… Guard them, and bus in more every week… Don’t allow them to leave towards CA.
“Services to this population will cost far more per beneficiary than the average Californian earns,”
Can you please cite this claim?
Do you have any idea how County Governments operate?
It will probably cost $10 billion in associated administrative costs, retirement, health insurance, vacation time and copiers, file systems, software and Facebook Advertising, but, really, it is just conjecture, and I am not required to cite references on news blog commentary…
You just think about it, for awhile, and you will see that they should just light the money on fire, because it would be cheaper, in the end…
Put those homeless people in handcuffs, search them, book them for warrants and drugs, and then release them into the wild. Tell them not to come back, or things may get really unpleasant… Or deliver them to Salt Lake City, where they have a decent program already in place…
If you choose to spend your life doing drugs, take some responsibility and pay for your own care. Oh thats right ,you can’t cause your lazy and someone else should pay your way since you fried your brain and now your mentally ill. Drugs do the body good.
Well stated!
Feral cat analogy is not true, by acting responsibly by spaying, neutering, feeding and rehoming feral cats, ive seen out of control homeless cat populations drop to just a few in a relatively short period of time.
Bleeding heart cat-feeders make me sick.
We don’t have veterinarians, county animal control services that operate, or SPCA available…
Spaying costs $85, where I live, and someone has to be responsible for feeding, buying food, travel to and from the feral cat colony, and on and on.
Better to drown the kittens, and spare the birds.
We will bring the unwanted cats to you, just publish your address and we will drop them off, right out of our trap.
And I am willing to feed the homeless, as long as they are spayed and neutered…
Uhm…Oregon already has it’s own homeless population. Las Vegas, too. Even Boise is having their own problems with rising homelessness. Hell, where my mother lives in the reddest part of Missouri, there are people living under bridges.
Does Mendo getting nearly twice the money as Humboldt mean they’ve got twice the population of off-the-rails homeless? Unimaginable anywhere could have more crazy homeless percapita than Eureka
Have you ever been to Santa Rosa? Bakersfield?
The restricting of Medical Access to painkillers, and the rise of shit-quality Fentanyl (and analogs) will eventually reduce the size of this population… I wonder if this was part of the plan?
Ukiah actually looks cleaner, these days, but as the cost of fuel rises, the price of cannabis plummets, and the cost of insuring your city and county skyrockets, the homeless are being hassled more, and maybe, moving on…
Even SF, whose Mayor has a brother in prison for robbery, murder and car-jacking, has succeeded in cleaning up some of the private garbage dumps established by permanent campers…
Lakeport is pretty cleaned up, but Clearlake Safeway is full of beggars…
Even if you give them a place to stay, mental health services, medical care and detox/rehab, which $12 million will never even come close to covering in Humboldt/Mendocino, the homeless will propagate, and hang on, and exist to spite you!
Homeless, Indigent, Bums, they have always been and ever shall be, so don’t give them support, just move then near the border of another state, another country, take their fingerprints, DNA samples, and photos and point North for Oregon/South for Mexico/East for Nevada and tell them not to return or they will be beaten with baseball bats and the instructions will be repeated…
Tough love, not wasted resources…
Plus Mendo pisses off huge amounts and diverts for other “wants”.
google the streets of philidelphia and fentanyl, we aint got a problem.Its insane1
How much of that will actually go towards housing the homeless and not siphoned off by bureaucrats lining their pockets…
A very good and important question my friend!
County Governments depend on this kind of largesse, to support the Administrators and to create pools of resources, which will then be stolen…
I bet the big guy will get more than the homeless
10% plus political perks
My impression is that most of the money goes for studies and then studies of studies, and then lawsuits to block the conclusions and advancement of the studies.
I also recall the AVA reporting for years about trying to find adequate health care administrators without success.
Kinda like the hi speed rail scam. Billions allocated and vanish. But no train??? Good ole gavin newskum. Following the crooked path of jerry brown
When are the people that get up every morning and go to work, raise a family, try to save a couple nickels for old age, going to say enough already. We didn’t choose to do dope, they did. Why should the tax payers pay out the ass for this stuff ? Remember come election time.
The question you should ask, is: Who overpaid their taxes and created this 100 Billion Dollar Surplus?
Where’s my $400/car for “Relief from Gas Prices?”
It’s not who “overpaid” their taxes, I think it’s the result of the wealthy actually paying their share of state taxes. Just imagine if they did so at the federal level too.
Gavin looks to be the only one in the room without a mask. Also, whilst they give the homeless money for housing, code enforcement is busy making landowners/tax payers tear down their unpermitted homes.
I don’t think that this is funding for people that are just strictly homeless…
This is earmarked for those that are homeless, and already experiencing drug addiction and/or mental illness…
Apparently, just being homeless isn’t needy enough, or deserving of this kind of funding consideration…
In order to qualify, being homeless has got to drive you crazy, if you aren’t already or drive you to addiction, if you aren’t already addicted, before you’ll get this kind of help…
When it comes to folks like Newsom, the prime directive is always going to be…
The, “What’s in it for me”, mentality…
He’s milking the system, and lives good on “skimmed milk”…
“High on the hog”, actually…
(“Loin”, that is, not “trotters”…)
(While he’s licking his “chops”, the rest of us get the “shanks”)
Will Gavin run for POTUS? Using this as a foot in the door??
Another way to buy votes with taxpayer money??
Can’t house be brought up to code and permitted after the fact?
Yes this is true in some cases, and in many cases the cost of bringing it up to code and permitting is more than the value of the structure. However, if they determine that the home was ever used for cannabis, then it must be torn down.
When i was a kid California had no homeless problem at all. Then Regan closed mental hospitals and drastically reduced mental health services, and by the 80’s homelessness had soared and has been growing ever since. Rent was also affordable. The country works better when people have roofs over their heads and access to mental health services.
Seriously, did you never read “The Grapes of Wrath” in school? While it was fiction, the story was based on real conditions.
Reagan did make things worse at both the state and federal level during his administrations but homelessness isn’t a new problem by any stretch.
That said, I agree that providing housing helps solve some of the problems — that’s been shown in nearly every place that approached the problem by providing housing first.
I beg to differ, as growing up in Yuba City, there were bums all around… Of course, there was the “Traveler’s Hotel and the Marysville Hotel, where rooms were cheap and a working person could stay cheaply.
I once rented a 1 bedroom cabin for $60/month, and later a 2 bedroom apartment for $75/month, in Davis…
There used to be cheap places and they were not hard to find.
Wages sucked, of course, but as a college grad, my first job paid $6/hour… And I found an Apartment above a store for $75/month… this was in 1978.
Life is hard, so make plans and work hard, save and persevere.
I have never been given anything by the government, until I was 66 and now receive $2560/month in “Social Security”, which is a very comical contradiction in terms, and which makes me uncomfortable to this day…
There were bums during the depression, and anyone who thinks history does not repeat, is poorly informed, and delusional.
Feeding bums is fine, mollycoddling them, is just wrong.
Ive known lots of people who turned their lives around getting off drugs and alcohol, but they needed help and support from the community to do it. In the long run it saves money and improves the quality of life for the community by helping people, and by helping those in need to feel like they are part of the community
Plus, lots of people have severe psychological problems or cognitive limitations that make it impossible to live a normal life. Those people need help.
BTW, we are in fire season, every fire that a homeless person uses to survive is a potential forest fire starter.
I agree that the addicted and mentally ill need help.
Without help there’s no way back to sanity.
Yet the government always finds a way to help themselves the most, and that causes a big dilemma.
How to stop the politicians from grafting on the misery of the people they’re supposed to help.
What housing are all the new illegal immigrants going to be living in?
Will they also become the homeless?
Especially when the recession implodes and the job layoffs take hold?
Teens are using emoji and secret lingo to find illegal drugs.
Teens are buying drugs via popular social media platforms and text messaging, often right under their parents’ noses. Experts are decoding the secret terms and emojis used in deals that can be deadly.
Biden has 2 addicted adult children, and no plan.
And not a single reporter asking him for one.
Lol, your hilarious. Pretty sure we all had code names for drugs when we were teenagers. Biden may have children with addiction issues but I am pretty sure they are sober now. It’s a pretty common scenario in American families, but if both are in recovery that is bucking the statistics.
Does that mean they can finally clear out the community center parking lot of all the open air drug dealing and sexual predators living there? It’s crazy how bad it has gotten… probably not all the funds will get eaten up by all the inspectors and red tape leaving peanuts for the actual housing part.
Less than a half mil for Humboldt. Not much can be accomplished with that. Only a handful of folks can be sent to indefinite rehab for that. Low income housing won’t be built with that pittance. Maybe wages for a few counselors over a one year contract. But right off hand it’s too little for the real situation at large.
Mendocino County let’s see if they can do something with it besides cover “administrative costs.” A while back they made it big fanfare about cleaning up the homeless population down by the airport. Recently. they had to do the same thing again just off of Brush Street. They scraped it down to nothing. Threw a fence around the entire area. Difference being this time nobody heard about it until after the event. Really still haven’t seen it mentioned much in the paper or anywhere else.
Not to worry. The Mendo Board of Stupes will pass the bucks through the consent calendar to the Schraders, as always. Just like they did with the money that was supposed to go to the fire districts. And don’t be surprised if the Stupes try for a tax increase to make up the wastage, just as they have done for the volunteer firefighters. That’s their pattern.