Henderson County grant program keeps mandated mental health funds at home

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By Jason King
Information and Communications Specialist

While the state’s mental health reform plan will take years to fully implement, the effects of a reduction in beds at state institutions has already hit home within county lines. Psychiatric patients who might have previously been admitted to such facilities are now ending up in county jails and emergency rooms, and tying up Sheriff’s Department and Emergency Medical Services resources.

Henderson County is attempting to in part combat this alarming trend with its “maintenance of effort funds,” or money the state mandates counties spend in order to maintain the previous fiscal year’s level of funding for human services – in this case mental health.

The county’s dues to the eight-county Western Highlands Local Management Entity (LME) were less than what was spent in previous years, in which the county funded a local mental health service provider. Finding itself almost $530,000 short of meeting its state “maintenance of effort” mandate, the county began brainstorming on how to best put the money to use for its citizens.

When a state mental health representative suggested that the eight county governments that made up the Western Highlands network give their maintenance of effort funds to the LME, County Manager David Nicholson had other ideas.

“I told him, ‘You’ll get it when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands,’” he said with a laugh. The advice wasn’t going to work for Henderson, which has a smaller population but a larger maintenance of effort obligation than Buncombe, a fellow Western Highlands member.

“We wanted to make sure that money was being spent to serve our citizens,” Nicholson said.

Henderson instead implemented a grant program using maintenance of effort funds and solicited applications from mental health service providers. In accord with the county board of commissioners’ stated desire to have the money spent on crisis services, the county solicited project proposals and awarded $528,342 in grants to three providers/programs to train public school staff in crisis response, establish a therapy/jail diversion program for delinquent or undisciplined adolescent girls, and to develop programs that will increase access to the mental health system.

Assistant Manager Justin Hembree said accountability is built into the system by way of comprehensive performance agreements with providers.

“We get periodic, informal updates from the agencies,” he said. “We made it very clear up front to these agencies that this is not recurring money.”

Although there has been an increase in the frequency of psychiatric patient cases in emergency rooms and detention facilities, county leaders hope the grant program will help reverse that trend once the change in mental health service provisions takes a firmer hold in the state.

For more information on the program, contact County Manager David Nicholson at (828) 697-4809 or davidn@hendersoncountync.org.