Funds for juvenile facility are lost

Molly Ball

Monday, July 25, 2005 | 1:19 a.m.

In the chaos of the last days of the legislative session, $1.4 million for Clark County Juvenile Justice Services vanished.

The allocation for the Spring Mountain Youth Camp, the county-run juvenile correctional facility near Mount Charleston, had passed the Senate and seemed to have Assembly support, officials said.

A similar outlay for other counties was funded, but Clark County's request wasn't in the final budget.

And no one knows why.

The county's lobbyist, Dan Musgrove, said he didn't discover that the youth camp appropriation didn't pass until the session -- which ended with a marathon 29-hour push -- was over.

"We seemed to have some good support," he said.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, had testified in favor of the money, he noted.

"Perhaps with all that was happening, I wasn't putting enough of a bug in people's ears about it to make sure it stayed on the list."

Without that money, the county is left paying a far larger share of Spring Mountain's budget than the other counties combined contribute to its Northern Nevada counterpart, China Springs.

And one official, Juvenile Judge William Voy, has mentioned retaliating with his own "nuclear option": sentencing more juvenile delinquents to state facilities, which would be overwhelmed, to take the pressure off Spring Mountain.

"We may just have to do something dramatic to get the state's attention," he said. "I hope it doesn't get to that point."

Voy and county representatives are conferring with the state Health and Human Services Department about other possible sources of funding. Department Director Mike Willden said he will try to find money, but can't promise anything.

"I certainly agree with the judge that the county is providing a service by keeping kids out of state placements," he said. "We're committed to try to see if we can't come up with a funding mechanism that could help them, but we haven't yet determined what that mechanism is."

The county's Juvenile Justice Services Department takes the burden off the state in two ways, Voy said.

The first is the existence of the youth camp. A rehabilitation-based center with a wide variety of programs -- including sports, drug treatment and forestry work -- the camp allows the judge to sentence young offenders to a facility closer to home and less restrictive than the state's juvenile detention centers in Elko and Caliente. Seventy percent of the youths at Spring Mountain are eligible to be sentenced to state programs, Voy said.

Second, the county houses youths who have already been sentenced to Elko or Caliente but are waiting for placement there. The two state facilities are running at capacity; the county routinely holds as many as 30 juveniles until a state bed opens up. The youths also get county-funded psychological assessments while they wait for the state to take them.

"Right now, they (the state facilities) tell us when they're ready to accept the kid," Voy said. "If I'm looking out for the taxpayers of Clark County, it should be us telling the state when we're ready for them to come and get the kids."

As a last resort, Voy said, he could issue a judicial order "saying the state has to pick them up immediately and assess them on their dime."

The state does give some money to the Spring Mountain camp, a former Air Force facility that the county took over in 1971. The state's contribution, unchanged since the last fiscal cycle, is about $342,000 per year.

The state contributes much more to the Douglas County youth camps that take juveniles from the other 16 counties -- China Springs and its sister facility, Aurora Pines. With the new boost from the Legislature, those camps get $870,000 of their $2.4 million annual budgets, or 37 percent, from the state.

The county's budget for Spring Mountain is about $6 million per year, said county Juvenile Justice Director Kirby Burgess. That means the state's contribution is less than 6 percent.

And that doesn't count capital improvements for Spring Mountain recently approved by the county, including $5 million for a new kitchen and $2 million for miscellaneous infrastructure upgrades.

The camp is showing its age, Burgess said. In addition to the kitchen's need for expansion, which it is being partly run out of outdoor storage units, the half-basketball-court-sized gymnasium's walls are separating from the floor and "we've had trouble with the roof blowing off."

Burgess said he is negotiating with a private donor to refurbish the gym.

The county had asked the state for $1.4 million more over the biennium, or $700,000 per year, as far back as September, but Gov. Kenny Guinn didn't include the funds in his proposed budget because it was a low priority relative to urgent needs such as mental health, Willden said.

The county then sent a letter to legislators asking for the money, and things looked promising, especially after Raggio -- a conservative from Northern Nevada and an unlikely supporter -- spoke in favor of it.

"I thought it was a slam dunk," Burgess said. "But in the 11th hour, when everything was chaos, somehow we fell off the list, and we didn't find out until the Legislature had already adjourned."

The money would have gone toward additional services at the camp, chiefly substance abuse and psychiatric counseling, Burgess said.

Willden said his office is reviewing possible other sources of money to give to the county, an idea he supports. Possibilities include transferring money left over in other budgets at the end of the fiscal year, appealing to the Legislature's Interim Finance Committee or seeking federal grant dollars.

Voy has proposed moving the state-sentenced youths waiting for placement to empty beds at the state's Summit View Youth Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility in North Las Vegas that is currently only about half full. But Willden said the state won't do that because it's not what Summit View was designed for.

"If there's resources somewhere, we'll try to help," Willden said. "(The county has) a good argument. If they didn't take those kids, the state would be overwhelmed."