County demands state funding for mental health, jails

Young County Commissioners joined other Texas counties in demanding that lawmakers use some of the state’s $27 billion sales tax surplus to pay for state-mandated mental health and criminal justice programs that threaten to crush county budgets.

The commissioners voted 4-0 at their Sept. 26 meeting to sign on to a resolution adopted by other rural counties facing the effects of decades of defunding of mental health and criminal justice budgets by the Texas Legislature.

“State government-mandated services threaten to overwhelm county resources with an escalating backlog of state felony inmates, mentally ill defendants, and felony juvenile offenders,” the resolution said Texas ranks last in the nation in access to mental health care, according to a 2022 study by the nonprofit Mental Health America.

The commissioners noted that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has been closing jail facilities and using the jail budget for other programs, while the backlog of county inmates rose 137 percent in one year. Those inmates cost counties almost $69 million each year, the resolution said.

The commissioners also pointed out that North Texas State Hospital’s Vernon campus, which is the only hospital available for restoration of competency for defendants who have been found incompetent to stand trial. They are put on a waiting list from six to 18 months, which is longer than the allowed sentences for most class A and B misdemeanors, County Judge John Bullock said. Those inmates and others like them are now in county jails, costing Texas counties’ taxpayers about $89 million per year, and deprived of mental health services, the resolution said.

“NTSH stopped admitting, from all 19 counties in the Helen Farabee Centers’ service area except Wichita Falls, all warrantless and magistrate’s emergency orders (EDOs) for civil commitment evaluations in late January of 2022,” Judge Bullock said. “To my knowledge, there has been only one admittance from Young County since that time, which came through the Helen Farabee MHMR system.”

The Texas Juvenile Justice Department, which is supposed to house and rehabilitate felony juvenile offenders, announced in September that it would also refuse new admissions. The cost for counties to hold each serious juvenile offender in facilities designed for nonviolent offenders is about $250 per day or $91,250 per year, the commissioners said.

The Texas Association of Counties describes the county jail system as “the largest mental health system in the state of Texas” because the state is shifting to local governments the costs of mental health, crisis, and transitional services that divert the mentally ill from courts, emergency rooms, and jails.