Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2004 | 11:27 a.m.
A proposed $32 million state mental hospital is drawing fire from neighbors who say that while they agree a new hospital is needed, they say the hospital should be larger and be built on the outskirts of the city.
The Las Vegas Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the proposed 190-bed hospital for the northwest corner of Oakey and Jones boulevards on Thursday. The City Council is expected to vote on the proposal on March 17.
Opponents say they plan to be at both meetings expressing their belief that an expansion of the Community College of Southern Nevada would be a better use of the land and that moving the hospital out of the neighborhood would improve the image of the area that has been home to an existing state mental hospital for about 30 years.
They also argue that the proposed replacement hospital won't fulfill the needs of the region, and instead the state should build a larger hospital on the edge of the metropolitan area.
Las Vegas City Councilwoman Janet Moncrief said Monday she hasn't decided whether she will support the new hospital, which would be in her ward. But Moncrief said she hopes state officials ultimately decide to build a new and larger mental hospital on Bureau of Land Management property.
Moncrief said that according to a state report, Nevada will need another 511 inpatient psychiatric beds.
"But we're going to spend $32 million for 40 more beds? It looks like a Band-Aid on a very large wound," Moncrief said. "My concern is looking at the big picture."
Jonna Triggs, director of Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services, which oversees the psychiatric hospital, said the proposed hospital will be big enough to address the shortage of inpatient beds now.
Triggs said the estimate of 511 beds is what Nevada would need to match the national average of 33 beds for the mentally ill per 100,000 population. Nevada now has 4.5 beds per 100,000 population, but many of the beds in other states lie empty as the trend in treating the mentally ill moves away from institutions, she said.
"What we're concentrating on doing is integrating people back into the community," she said. "The days of building those huge, antiquated, 500-bed hospitals are gone. What we need is enough capacity to quickly stabilize that population and quickly discharge them into other services."
Most of the treatment of the mentally ill now is done in outpatient settings, Triggs said. The average length of stay in the current hospital is 17 days, she said.
"We don't want a huge hospital on the edge of town that no family members can visit," Triggs said.
The current hospital, which would be replaced, has 103 beds, and the proposed hospital is projected to open in January 2006 with 150 beds, and then add another 40 beds later.
"We believe 190 beds combined with our outpatient services is going to be sufficient," Triggs said.
"If we have a hospital of 190 beds and expanded community services, we should be fine," she said. "This is just one piece of the service."
She said typically 35 to 40 people are waiting in area emergency rooms for a bed to open up at the mental hospital on West Charleston Boulevard.
The waiting list reached 71 last Sept. 1 and 70 people on Jan. 26, she said.
Some neighbors opposed to the proposed hospital echoed Moncrief's concerns.
Sue Brna, a board member with the Desert Inn Homeowners Association, said the new hospital appears to be a waste of money.
"They need 511 beds and they're spending all that money on 40 more beds," Brna said. "It's our money as taxpayers and we need to make sure it's done right."
The Desert Inn Homeowners Association is one of six neighborhood groups around the hospital site that have joined to try to defeat the proposed hospital.
Combined, the groups, which are acting under the name Sensible Citizens Against Local Prison, have garnered about 400 signatures on a petition opposing the new hospital, Brna said.
Some opponents are calling it a prison because the hospital would be a locked facility where patients would not be free to leave, like the existing state psychiatric hospital just a few hundred yards from the site of the proposed hospital.
The group also hopes to have a strong presence at the upcoming city meetings.
The hospital treats patients who either voluntarily commit themselves or who are involuntarily committed because authorities or doctors believe they pose a danger to either themselves or others. People involuntarily committed are first brought to an emergency room to make sure a medical condition, such as low blood sugar, is not the cause of their unusual behavior.
The hospital does not house the criminally insane, and neither would the new hospital, Triggs said.
"The criminally insane have never come here and won't," she said.
Triggs said a decision has not been made regarding the future use of the existing hospital once the new hospital opens, although it could become an inpatient clinic for those with Alzheimer's disease.
State Sen. Barbara Cegavske, R-Las Vegas, whose district includes the hospital, worked to have the new hospital built near Alta Drive and Martin Luther King Boulevard, which she said would put it closer to the highway and other hospitals. However, Cegavske wasn't able to achieve that goal.
Cegavske said that she expects the state will ultimately get its way in this case, despite objections from her and neighbors.
Moncrief said there's a question about whether the state could move forward with its plans even if the City Council objects, because it is state-owned land.
Triggs said that if the council voted down the hospital, the state would appeal that decision in court.
archive
