Miami-Dade County commissioners are fond of heaping praise on the Miami Center for Mental Health and Rehabilitation, calling it a groundbreaking facility that will save lives and likely save the county millions of dollars. But they have also refused to move forward with allowing the center to open.
Several commissioners have raised questions about how the center would be funded in future years, but no one has been more outspoken in throwing up roadblocks designed to keep the center from opening than Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins.
Earlier this month, Cohen Higgins made a motion at the Intergovernmental and Economic Impact Committee requiring the mayor to come up with a plan explaining how the county was going to pay for the center for the next ten years. And she called on the mayor to “specifically identify what you are not going to fund in order to fund this building.”
It wasn’t on the agenda. The public wasn’t informed in advance. And it passed without any discussion.
On its face, what she proposed may seem reasonable, but that’s really not how the budgeting process works.
Commissioners don’t require the mayor to announce today what programs she’s going to cut in four years to pay for the senior meals program in 2030, or ask her how many people will she lay off in 2035 to fund the parks department in nine years?
In response to Cohen Higgins’ maneuver, the venerable downtown publication Miami Today, accused her of offering false praise for the center while trying to bury the project in red tape. The paper argued the commissioner, who is up for reelection this year, was attempting to put “nails in the coffin of a center that has wide support” by creating “an insurmountable barrier that no other county project has ever faced.”
In an interview on Sunday’s Facing South Florida, Cohen Higgins defended her actions saying she was trying to be fiscally responsible.
“I understand the urgency, I understand the need, and I understand what the voters voted for way back when in 2004,” she told CBS Miami’s Jim DeFede. “I believe that the center needs to be opened. Frankly I’m extremely disappointed that this project has been worked on for the better part of twenty years and it was initially presented to us in committee review with only two years funding. That is of great concern for all of the committee members. And so we want the hard work to be done on the front end, to identify where this money is going to come from in order to fund this important project. And I think we can get there. We just don’t want to leave it up to chance.”
The program is fully funded for at least the first two years. Proponents of the center say they wanted to start with a two-year pilot program to prove that it works before asking the county to make a longer commitment. That prudence by supporters of the center, including County Commissioner Raquel Regalado and Judge Steve Leifman, is now being used against them to keep the center in limbo.
“As I said this at the committee hearing, I think you’re telling us to just trust you that you’ll figure it out,” Cohen Higgins said. “We don’t feel comfortable with that. Again, we’re talking about lives here. We’re talking mentally ill patients. Can you imagine, if one of your loved ones is sitting in that center on treatment and two years in, or at whatever point the funding runs out, you get the information that your loved one is going back to our correctional facility. That is a tragedy we are trying to avoid.”
Cohen Higgins was referring to a statement made by Commissioner Regalado in December during an appropriations committee hearing on the center.
When Cohen Higgins kept asking officials what would happen to the folks in the center if the money ran out in two years, and Regalado snapped, “they go back to jail.”
Regalado admits she was wrong to say what she said and the reason she misspoke was out of frustration Cohen Higgins kept asking questions that had already been answered.
Essentially what Regalado was trying to say was that if the program ends after two years, the jail goes back to doing what it is doing right now – warehousing mentally ill people.
But where Cohen Higgins appears to be somewhat disingenuous, is that despite Regalado’s mistake, she was then given the correct answer a moment later by the county staff, who explained that no one would be sent back to jail.
They explained that if the county decided to end the program after two years, they would wind it down and stop diverting new people into the facility.
And yet, more than four months after that meeting, she continues to make this false argument that if the program abruptly ends, a building full of vulnerable mentally ill people will be cruelly tossed back into jail cells.
She makes it seem like this building will be some sort of permanent condo for paranoid schizophrenics and once they go in they don’t come out.
The program is designed for small groups of individuals to enter the building, get the treatment they need for up to 90 days, and then they are transferred to other programs who help them with their transition back into the community by finding them housing and making sure they get the follow up care they need. Once that happens, the county’s responsibility for them ends.
Cohen Higgins knows that. Or at least she should.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say this program financially can only last for two years. Judge Leifman and others believe the program will not only save lives but will also save the county money.
But let’s say he’s wrong. And let’s say, in the future, county commissioners decide that instead of prioritizing helping people with mental illnesses they would rather spend money on rodeos and parades and all the other things they find funding for.
In those two years, this program will likely help between 500 and 600 people with mental illnesses get the treatment they need – treatment that has been denied to them up till now.
So while some commissioners are worrying about where the money will come from in the future – people who are struggling today aren’t getting any help.
Cohen Higgins, however, continues to say she fully supports the project, she just wants the funding lined up first.
“We can’t argue that we spent $50 million and we have to respect the vote of our residents from 2004 and then at the time say it’s just a pilot program and we’re only going to fund it for two years,” she said. “We’re either going to pull this trigger and we are going to adopt this method in Miami-Dade County or we are not. We’re going to honor the will of the voters back in 2004, and respect the $50 million investment that we made, buckle down and fund this thing into the future, or we’re just going to treat it like a pilot program. Since I’ve been in office, we have not done pilot programs regarding people’s lives and their mental health. It’s far too delicate of an issue.”
Next month, the county commission will hold a workshop – it’s at least the second or third they have had on the mental health center – where they will continue to talk about how important this center is.
It’s unclear if that talk turns into action.