Graham City Council to budget for county mobile mental health team
Olney Police Chief Dan Birbeck met with the Graham City Council last week to get buyin and answer questions about the mobile mental health team he wants to implement throughout Young County, a little over a year after three Olney residents died from lack of access to mental health services.
Graham Mayor Alex Heartfield invited Chief Birbeck to speak about the program at the Graham Council’s July 6 budget workshop, with the goal of funding the shared mental health team in Graham’s fiscal year 2024 budget.
The $1.35-million, two-year program includes three teams consisting of a mental health peace officer, a licensed professional counselor, an emergency medical technician or nurse, and a peer counselor that would provide 24-hour crisis response and home visits to head off jail stays for people dealing with mental illness. The team also would assist on crisis calls involving mentally ill people.
“The idea is to proactively start visiting with our mental health population, and these visits would include, ‘How are you doing [and] are there barriers to care?’” Chief Birbeck told the Graham Council. “For instance, were they not able to get their prescriptions filled? Did they stop taking their prescriptions because they are feeling better? We can start removing these barriers to care.”
In mental health crises, Chief Birbeck said, “we have a licensed clinical social worker and a certified mental health peace officer [who] can articulate the need for detention- type care until that person can be stabilized, get their baseline back where they can function in society without having an issue and then back into the community without anybody getting hurt and without a negative outcome.”
The Olney City Council discussed funding the program at its June 26 meeting, and County Commissioners are set to discuss it at a future budget workshop to alleviate long-term strain on the Young County Jail from a large population of mentally ill inmates, and to reverse what Chief Birbeck described as “the criminalization of mental health.”
Only about seven people in the City of Olney are receiving care through Helen Farabee Centers, the regional mental health authority, according to statistics provided by Helen Farabee. That number should be a lot higher, meaning that Young County residents are not able to access resources, Chief Birbeck said.
“It’s usually between 8-10 percent of your population that is receiving mental health treatment in some form or fashion,” he said. “And this includes drug arrests because a lot of times our mental health community is self-medicating with illegal narcotics and that just continues to cascade into worse problems. We are trying to head that off as well.”
“Suppose this program is implemented and it’s widely successful … will everybody get a shot at this service?” Councilmember Jeff Dickinson asked.
“Hopefully what we will see is people will stabilize and that will reduce the burden on the team,” Chief Birbeck said. “It’s hard to calculate what the true number [of mental health consumers] is going to be and if it turns out to be a bigger project than this [program] can handle then we would obviously ask for more funding.”
Mayor Heartfield described the region’s mental health resources as “a broken system.”
“Getting a referral to the proper care center is difficult and so it does make a difference having a consistent group of people - a consistent police officer that the mental health patient is used to interacting with – that type of consistency is critical,” he said.
Chief Birbeck’s appearance in Graham follows a lobbying trip to Austin in February to convince state lawmakers to provide state funding for his CARRE team, which stands for Critical Access Rapid Response and Evaluation. That effort by Chief Birbeck and Mona Bernhardt, a licensed professional social worker in Olney, helped shape Senate Bill 26, a mental health funding bill for children and families that also includes grant funding for programs like the CARRE team as a form of “continuing care.”
The bill states that grantees must come up with 10 percent of the funding – meaning that Young County would be on the hook for $135,000 for its share of the two-year program, which includes salaries for three four-person teams, two specially equipped vehicles, an administrative worker, six laptops, soft uniforms, tracking software and other supplies.
Young County Judge Win Graham met last month with Olney Mayor Rue Rogers and Mayor Heartfield about how to divide financial responsibility for the matching funds, with the three leaders agreeing to split it by population.
“From my point of view, this is a critical initiative for our city for our county for our surrounding communities,” Mayor Heartfield said. “In discussions with the County Judge, we feel like our initial two years worst-case investment in this is about $74,000 to fund the first two years. That is … if it’s only the City of Olney, the City of Graham, and Young County funding this program. There are other taxing entities that I think would benefit from this initiative that we could ask to have skin in the game that would reduce our burden.”
Both mayors and Judge Graham have expressed strong support for the program and have pledged to find room in their fiscal year 2024 budgets and support among the councils and commissioners. Judge Graham and Chief Birbeck said they also plan to speak with the Olney Hamilton Hospital and county school districts for help in funding the program.
The County would apply for the grant, most likely through the state Department of Health and Human Services or the Nortex Regional Planning Commission, state officials said. If the grant is approved, funds would be released early next year and the team set up as quickly as possible after funding is released, Chief Birbeck told the Graham Council.
“I think this is something that will end up getting replicated across the state if this does what I think it will do,” he said. “This is getting out in front of it and trying to reduce these people’s burdens and problems and save lives.”