Santa Cruz has most homeless people in California per capita and insufficient county staff to help with mental health, GJR says
SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, Calif. (KION-TV)- A Grand Jury Report released Monday said that the Santa Cruz County Behavioral Health Division of the Health Services Agency is understaffed, underfunded and overworked.
BHD was understaffed by as much as 30%- including management, clinicians and support staff. The report also found that there was inadequate crisis stabilization capacity, a lack of step-down capability, and insufficient outreach to the Latino community, but this cannot be fixed without more staff.
Staff interviewed cited the limited pools of applicants for licensed mental health clinicians. BHD is also suffering from a lack of an analyst that would help track data more efficiently, and evaluate contracts and financial plans.
"In our investigation, multiple interviewees also pointed to Santa Cruz County’s hiring practices and lower salaries as a barrier to their ability to be competitive in the job market," said the report. "Some noted that it takes as long as two months between the interview and the final hire. These practices are outdated and out of alignment with current hiring practices."
In this same Grand Jury Report it was stated that Santa Cruz "has more homeless people per capita than anywhere else in California; some 2300 of our residents are without housing. An estimated 37% of the BHD’s clients are homeless. About 67% of homeless residents experience chronic substance abuse, and 43% of BHD’s substance use disorder clients are involved with the criminal justice system."
"I was homeless for about 10 years in Santa Cruz," said Maria Chavez, a now resident of Santa Cruz who was able to find affordable housing after years of looking.
Maria says often time homeless people are suffering from some sort of mental illness and they need someone to talk to and would benefit from more mental health services being made available.
"I'll just say, how are you doing and they just snap out of it. They need someone to hold their hand," said Chavez. "I think that it's vital, a lot of people on the streets do have mental health issues but they don't have guidance."
The Grand Jury recommends that BHD increases staffing to meet the "overwhelming" demand for mental health services in the county, increase the capacity of the crisis stabilization program and make the Mobile Emergency Response Teams for adults and youth 24/7 and improve service to marginalized populations, especially homeless people, individuals in the criminal justice system and the Latino community.
"I want to stress this housing is the backbone of a lot of this. If you lose housing and you're on the streets, it's very hard to provide treatment. It's very hard to provide substance use treatment," said Santa Cruz Public Information Officer Jason Hoppin.
The county currently makes up 34% of mental health services and the rest is made up of private contractors, states the grand jury report.
"The housing crisis here is playing a role. It is hard to find and recruit people to this community because of the cost of living, so we are doing whatever we can to try to fill those roles and we invested a lot in mental health services in this Community and so we, we believe we have good programs and we're always expanding them," said Hoppin
But even then they are still competing with a neighboring county with more recourses and more affordable housing options.
"We lose employees to Santa Clara County, often quite frankly," said Hoppin.
When asked what the county is doing right now to resolve the issue they responded by saying "We have the two clinics we just applied for a grant and again this is a lot of this comes back to housing," said Hoppin. "But we applied for a grant to provide new housing opportunities for people who are experiencing homeless and have mental health issues."
BHD oversees the following with an annual budget of $100 million:
● Two county mental health clinics, one in North and one in South County
● A Crisis Stabilization Program for adults and children
● A 16-bed Psychiatric Health Facility for adults
● Crisis response teams: Mobile Emergency Response Teams for Adults and Youth
in North and South County, known as MERT and MERTY
● A mental health liaison program for local law enforcement
● Homeless support programs such as the Downtown Outreach Team
● A locally staffed 988 Suicide Crisis Line
● A 24-hour line for referrals to local mental health services
● Jail mental health program
● Residential step-down programs - sub-acute and residential
● Case management services for severely mentally ill persons
Hoppin also added that the county is building a crisis stabilization center and will have a number of permanent supportive housing projects underway.
You can read the full report here:
