The botched promise of Proposition 63

It was almost 20 years ago that Californians voted overwhelmingly for a tax measure that promised to cure a heartbreaking societal ill.

“No one who is mentally ill and now on the street will be on the street in five years,” promised the late Rusty Selix, a co-author of the measure, back in 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported this month in a deep and indeed heartbreaking analysis of where things went so badly wrong.

Selix was executive director of the Mental Health Association of California and the main backer of the ballot initiative, Proposition 63.

“That doesn’t mean there won’t be homeless,” he promised at the time. “But you will see a measurable decline.”

Here in 2022, have we seen that measurable decline?

Everyone with his eyes open knows that the answer is a hard no.

Prop. 63 was a tax on “millionaires” — 1% on those making over a million dollars a year — and it has indeed “generated an escalating gusher of money — $29 billion in total, half of which has come in just the last five years,” as Jessica Garrison, Melody Gutierrez and Jackeline Luna report.

And it’s not as if the revenues from the tax have gone missing, or ended up in some Sacramento pols’ pockets, as such.

Backers say the money has basically gone where it was supposed to and supports early intervention programs in cities and schools to help the mentally ill and has created new services for severely mentally disabled homeless people.

Just because it obviously hasn’t ended homelessness for the mentally ill in the past two decades, as we’ve seen their problems on the whole grow far worse, backers of the proposition’s spending still say the money has greatly improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Californians.

Since this wasn’t a case of embezzlement or other malfeasance, here’s what happened, the reporters found.

Though the money was supposed to go for new programs, not to bolster old spending on mental health, when the Great Recession hit in 2008, existing county and state mental health agencies saw huge hits to their budgets. Rightly or wrongly — and you can understand their desperation — agency directors faced with severely mentally ill clients whose services were simply going to be cut off gamed the system by using a loophole that allowed counties to use Prop. 63 monies to redesign their existing programs.

“I was faced with harsh realities,” a former Alameda County manager explained. “Do I cut? Or do I ‘quote’ redesign and rebrand (existing programs) to fund them” and avoid mass layoffs” of mental health case workers?

He did the latter. Leaders in most of California’s 58 counties did the same.

It’s hard to blame them. But therein lies the main reason that a people’s proposition that was supposed to be a game changer instead left our state with essentially the status quo all these years in our ability to take care of our unhoused population suffering from mental illness. Because in 2011, the state simply shifted $900 million in Prop. 63 spending to cover mental health programs that had been paid for out of the general fund.

Now in these coronavirus days, counties say they have been hit extremely hard by mass resignations of mental health workers scared of catching COVID-19 in their work. “Our workforce was decimated,” Dr. Veronica Kelley, of Orange County’s Health Care Agency told the reporters. At one Los Angeles County clinic, the wait time to see a therapist is now six months.

Clearly, Prop. 63 hasn’t quite lived up to its promises. That should be a reminder to always be skeptical of the claims of those who promoting tax increases.

But it’s also a reminder that more must be done in California to find ways to expand access to mental health treatment and find the money to make it happen.