The Santa Barbara County Grand Jury recently identified mental health care as a serious issue; they wanted the city of Lompoc to “negotiate with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office and the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors on behalf of the Department of Behavioral Wellness to add a (mental health) co-response team dedicated to the Lompoc Valley.”
While well-intentioned, maybe their focus should have been to recommend the County Health Department and Board of Supervisors request funding be provided for a comprehensive mental health program from the governor’s office in this coming budget.
Treatment for the mentally ill hasn’t been adequately addressed by the political establishment ever since mental health “hospitals” in California were closed in the mid 1960s. These so-called hospitals were judged to be more like a jail than a treatment facility; clearly there had to be a better way.
At the time politicians who closed these facilities promised to provide the “best possible treatment options” for those who were suddenly tossed out onto the streets with nowhere to go. Well, it’s almost 60 years later and the mentally ill still roam the streets and/or create problems for their families and neighbors while we wait on politicians to fix the mess, their predecessors created so many years ago.
Lompoc like many other cities and towns in California including Santa Barbara has a problem finding competent care for the mentally ill. Funding is in short supply to provide adequate regional care facilities and staff.
The state of California currently has an enviable budget “problem;” it has a $21 billion surplus, and the governor intends to spend it. With all that extra cash laying around, he could have expressed some interest in solving the mental health treatment problem. But will any of it go to providing care for the mentally ill — no.
Instead, the governor intends to appease his liberal constituency by providing free health care for illegal aliens; providing billions more for our substandard public education system; and supporting even more environmental restrictions, which only raise the cost of everything we buy, including so-called affordable housing.
As these programs mature, your taxes will increase dramatically to pay for the sustained effort.
Why the state continues to funnel huge volumes of cash into a public school system that has no accountability for the quality of education our kids and grandkids receive is only known to the politicians who curry favor with teachers’ unions. And why would they exacerbate the “housing crisis” by inviting even more illegal aliens into the state with free medical care while ignoring the mentally ill?
And as inflation takes hold, government employee unions will be demanding increased compensation just to make up for their loss of purchasing power. So, what’s now a surplus will vanish quickly as the cost of everything from those COVID-19 masks to Caltrans dump trucks and staffing for delivering government services increases dramatically.
In the meantime, citizens of the United States who are suffering from mental health issues are again tossed aside as they have been for the last six decades. When will politicians assign a priority to our own homegrown people who are unable to care for themselves?
Meanwhile the city of Lompoc, lacking the resources to address the issue, will have to respond to the Grand Jury recommendations, and the mentally ill will continue to be ignored.
— Ron Fink, a Lompoc resident since 1975, is retired from the aerospace industry. He has been following Lompoc politics since 1992, and after serving for 23 years appointed to various Lompoc commissions, retired from public service. The opinions expressed are his own.