When the Metro Council earlier this year shot down Mayor Kip Holden’s $335 million bond issue—which would have funded the construction of several public safety facilities, including a $16.5 million mental health assessment center—among the criticisms levied by council members was that too little thought and too few details were contained in the plan.
Advocates of the mental health assessment center aren’t making that mistake again. As they continue to move forward with efforts to develop a facility, they are making the case that while developing such a center is the right thing to do for the less fortunate in the community, it also makes economic sense.
A lot of economic sense. According to an analysis commissioned by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, which is spearheading the effort to develop the center, the city-parish could expect to save $3 million in the first year of operating such a facility, $8 million annually in subsequent years, and nearly $55 million over a 10-year period. Incarcerating the mentally ill for minor offenses costs way more than getting them the help they need, the analysis says.
“Society is better off when people with mental health get treatment,” says Ray Perryman, the Waco, Texas-based consultant who prepared the analysis. “But the numbers themselves make a compelling case. It makes sense to support something like this from an economic standpoint.”
Now that BRAF has laid out the economic justification for the center, what comes next?
The Rev. Raymond Jetson, who also is working on the project, says community leaders are trying to determine their next step, as well as figuring out what can be accomplished and how much it will all cost. Noticeably absent from the economic analysis of estimated savings was a price tag for the project. Neither BRAF nor Perryman said they could provide that information.
In the Holden bond package earlier this year, construction costs for the mental health center were pegged at $16.5 million, which would have been funded by a sales tax increase. Additionally, a small property tax increase was proposed to generate $1.8 million a year to partially fund operations. Presumably, the cost of the center would still be somewhere in that ballpark. However, advocates of the project now say a tax increase may not be necessary after all. Metro Councilman John Delgado notes that projected savings alone might be enough to offset the cost of startup and operations.
With respect to cost, a lot depends on the location for the facility. Originally, plans called for constructing a new mental health center. In recent weeks, however, discussions have centered on several existing locations, Jetson says.
Two possibilities that have been quietly floated in downtown circles are Baton Rouge General Medical Center’s Mid City campus, which shuttered its emergency room in March, and the former Woman’s Hospital campus on Airline Highway, which is now the city’s “public safety complex” and Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters. The Airline Highway facility has two vacant physicians’ office buildings that already belong to the city-parish, which means it wouldn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to make a deal happen.
Whether that site makes the most logistical sense is another question. What is increasingly clear at this point is that the project is moving forward and has growing momentum behind it. With respect to the justification for such a facility, now there is hard data to back up what, before, were merely assertions.
—Stephanie Riegel
