Mayor’s booze money will help dry out drunks

Thursday, Dec. 19, 2002 | 9:32 a.m.

Some of Mayor Oscar Goodman's liquor endorsement money was designated Wednesday to help the city of Las Vegas fund a proposed community triage center that aims to help chronic drunks.

In October, after Goodman received a $100,000 contract to endorse Bombay Sapphire gin, he gave half the money to the Meadows School, which is run by his wife, and offered the other $50,000 to the city for a homeless project.

But before Wednesday a specific recipient of the money had not been named. It will go toward the city's portion of funding for the regional crisis triage center at WestCare, a local nonprofit provider of substance abuse treatment, that will address the medical needs of drunks and the mentally ill -- many of whom are homeless.

The triage center is a top priority of the Chronic Public Inebriate Task Force, which conducted a study that found that drunks and mentally ill patients were overcrowding hospital emergency rooms.

The City Council voted unanimously to approve the city's share, $433,895, of $1.27 million in local government entity allocations to fund the triage center. On Tuesday, the Clark County Commission approved its share, $544,356.

The cities of Henderson, North Las Vegas and Boulder City have yet to approve their shares -- $169,682, $110,284 and $12,727, respectively.

The state of Nevada is being asked to provide $1.27 million for the project and Southern Nevada hospitals are being asked to pool their recourses to come up with another $1.27 million.

Las Vegas' Deputy City Manager Betsy Fretwell said the balance of Las Vegas' allocation, $383,895, will come from the general fund.

Councilwoman Lynette Boggs McDonald complained that the city's allocation is yet another example of the municipalities doing the state's job.

"This is a really good illustration that services under the state of Nevada have trickled down to the local level," Boggs McDonald said. "We have had to pick up the slack of the cutbacks at the state level for many years."

The task force study calls for the state to add more hospital beds and change admitting laws so that mentally ill patients do not have to first be examined by a hospital emergency room doctor before being sent to Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health on West Charleston Boulevard for crisis treatment.

The triage center would allow police and paramedics to drop off drunks and the mentally ill, then return to service. Currently, police spend up to eight hours waiting with such patients until they can be seen by an emergency room doctor, the study says.

The task force study says 13,000 chronic drunks and seriously mentally ill people used emergency rooms in 2001 at a cost of more than $16 million.

The three-year-old task force says the cost of a triage facility would be far less than the millions of dollars wasted under the current system.

The 2002 Mental Health Development Services need-assessment study estimates that more than 83,000 people in Nevada suffer from serious mental illness, with 69 percent of them -- 57,270 people -- residing in the Las Vegas area.