New funding plan on tap for triage center

Wednesday, July 21, 2004 | 9:52 a.m.

The Southern Nevada Regional Planning Coalition could authorize on Thursday a new funding formula for the embattled WestCare Community Triage Center, which serves mentally disabled and drug- and alcohol-addicted people.

Clark County Manager Thom Reilly said he has met with representatives from the cities of Las Vegas and Henderson and received oral support for a formula that would include increased contributions from the hospitals, which paid a third of the center's $3.81 million budget. Local governments paid another third.

Last year's plan produced by the planning coalition would have had the state paying the last third, but the state did not approve the funding, leaving the center nearly $700,000 short. A crisis in which dozens of mentally ill people, most of them homeless or indigent, took up hospital beds earlier this month has reenergized the local push for state funding to get the patients out of the area's emergency rooms.

Henderson officials had balked at contributing another $170,000 to the triage center as they did last year. They argued that the problem was concentrated in urban Las Vegas and Clark County, so Henderson should have to contribute less to the triage center.

Reilly said the final formula and amounts for all entities has not been decided. The planning coalition board could endorse the funding formula to be worked out by staff for the hospitals and local governments, then the local government boards could agree -- or not -- to the formula through an inter-local agreement that they would receive in August, he said.

"We'd continue to work on the formula," he said. "I was very optimistic after talking with Henderson."

Henderson and other local governments could receive some relief on the funding side because two new hospitals have opened since the last interlocal government agreement set the old funding formula. Those hospitals, Reilly said, could contribute to the effort. The planning coalition meeting is scheduled for 3 p.m. Thursday in training room No. 3 of the Clark County Government Center, 500 Grand Central Parkway.