Rehab center starts taking psychiatric patients

Dan Kulin

Monday, Nov. 7, 2005 | 8:14 a.m.

WestCare began taking psychiatric patients Thursday after Las Vegas officials figured out how to jump a bureaucratic hurdle that had stalled the plan to remove mental health patients from local emergency rooms.

Moving those patients is expected to ease the strain on hospital emergency rooms, which have been holding between 70 and 100 mental health patients each night for about 16 months.

WestCare, an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center on Martin Luther King Boulevard just north of Alta Drive, will have room for 38 new patients at first, and as many as 50 in about a month, WestCare President Richard Steinberg said.

WestCare was supposed to have started taking those new patients on Oct. 1. The center hired 72 additional staff, and the state has funded it at a rate of about $13,000-a-day since then.

But city officials stopped the center from accepting the new patients, saying WestCare didn't have the proper zoning.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and Councilman Lawrence Weekly expressed some concern about the expanded services' effect, even temporarily, on the neighborhood.

A change to the zoning definitions could have taken months and would have been permanent. WestCare, seeking a faster solution, appealed. But instead of following through with the appeal at Wednesday's council meeting, WestCare and city officials presented a new solution.

As long as WestCare can convince Planning and Development Director Margo Wheeler that it is similar to a hospital, she has the authority to issue a temporary permit, City Attorney Brad Jerbic said.

During the next 11 months, possibly as early as April, a new state mental hospital is expected to open near Oakey and Jones boulevards. Once that facility is open, WestCare would not be called on to accept psychiatric patients.