Tri-County closure a ‘mess,’ but patients are top priority

When Tri-County Community Services announced Aug. 9 it would permanently close its doors by the end of the month, the news sent shock waves through Taos, especially as people realized the organization’s demise was even more imminent and top behavioral health leaders were still grasping for a plan that wouldn’t leave the most vulnerable patients in Northern New Mexico stranded.

The dust is finally beginning to settle.

While Tri-County is all but dissolved, another behavioral healthcare provider, Valle del Sol of New Mexico, is stepping into the void and hoping to have all of Tri-County’s patients and its major services transferred by the end of the month.

In a typical transition, people would have three months to work out the details. The deadline for this transition, for nearly 1,000 patients and over 30 employees, is merely days away.

Getting the most critical tasks done by then is an ambitious goal that has pushed employees to work without pay and caused near universal stress for everyone involved in the mental health and substance abuse network in Taos and Colfax counties.

But those therapists, pharmacists and other professionals all point back

‘It’s hard to watch, (but there’s) so many good and dedicated employees over here going above and beyond. We still have people walking in and asking for help.’

— John Hutchinson

to a single goal: taking care of the patients.

As John Hutchinson, the site manager for the in-house pharmacy Genoa at Tri-County told The Taos News, his goal is to make sure “no one walks away” without getting the medication and services they so desperately need.

A quick demise

Because Tri-County was a decades-old organization that had become the foremost local provider of mental and behavioral healthcare services and substance abuse treatment, its closure is a communitywide example of a crisis situation many of the organization’s patients find themselves in.

“We’re all scrambling,” said Lawrence Medina, director of Río Grande Alcohol Treatment Program, a substance abuse organization in Taos.

Information has been scarce, but as Taos County Manager Leandro Cordova said during a Tuesday (Aug. 21) commission meeting, Tri-County is “essentially done.”

Rodney Gross resigned as the Tri-County CEO Monday (Aug. 20). Gross has not returned phone calls or emails from The Taos News seeking information on the reason for his departure or the current leadership of the organization.

Employees at the Colfax County office of Tri-County had to leave Monday when the utilities were shut off, and the phones seemed turned off at the Union County office.

The closure finally became inevitable due to insurmountable debt. The organization may be filing for bankruptcy though board president Paul Sands did not respond to additional questions as of press time.

Cordova said there was roughly $700,000 in liens against the building (including one from The Taos News for unpaid advertising bills).

Gross said during a Aug. 13 meeting that Tri-County had operated with no official financial reports or budgets for years, hadn’t submitted for Medicaid reimbursements and that, at one time, billing was so bad the organization didn’t know if it was getting paid for its services. Tri-County was “basically living paycheck to

paycheck,” he said.

The financial stress on Tri-County trickled to the employees. They were told in a staff meeting Monday they wouldn’t be getting their last paycheck. Even the board president didn’t know when or if they’d be paid.

A skeleton crew of staff members, such as certified peer support worker Cindy Collyer, have kept working even without a paycheck, so their patients don’t feel abandoned like the employees do.

“Why did (the leaders) all let us sit here and hang on knowing damn well you didn’t have the funds for the next pay period?” she said. “It’s a jumbled up mess.”

“It’s heavy over here,” said Hutchinson, the pharmacist. “It’s hard to watch, (but there’s) so many good and dedicated employees over here going above and beyond. We still have people walking in and asking for help.”

Human impact

Even though Collyer doesn’t have the money to replace her furnace ahead of the cold months, she is far more concerned about her clients, people with some of the most complex mental healthcare needs in the community.

Collyer helps run the assertive community treatment program for Tri-County. Her clients, all on Medicaid, get not only counseling, medication and group therapy, but also transportation to doctor appointments, the grocery store and the laundromat. They also get help filling out paperwork for getting social security or a birth certificate and finding a place to live when they are homeless.

For her clients, even the slightest instability in the network of care can be devastating.

Collyer said some of her clients have been seeing the same counselor for 10 to 20 years. “They’re afraid they might have to see another therapist,” she said. “You have this kind of disruption... this has caused people to have a crisis.

“One client really has it in his head he’s going to be abandoned,” she said. So when they all got together for a group session, she talked with him and others about managing the stress and finding a sense of calm. They made a list of things they were grateful for. He was grateful for his cat.

“I told him that was a good start,” she said.

East of Taos

The impacts of the Tri-County closure have reached further than its headquarters in Taos.

Sterling Desmare heads the Union County DWI office. He didn’t even know the organization was shuttering until “one of my clients came in and said, ‘Hey, I can’t go to my (court-ordered) counseling anymore.’ “

Many of Desmare’s 77 clients relied on Tri-County for services for things he could never offer in-house because of a shortage of funding. “Tri-County closing really affected me,” he said.

Annabelle Sillas-Graves, who runs a small clinic in Cimarron, said she refers a lot of her patients to Tri-County for “the range” of services, especially since she cannot prescribe psychiatric medication. Like other providers, she’s been calling and networking to find out what other organizations can offer in the chaos.

Roughly 375 clients in Colfax County rely on Tri-County services, said county manager Mary Lou Kern.

Even though “we were really blindsided,” the county has been able to help facilitate the transition from Tri-County to Valle del Sol of New Mexico because the county leases both buildings. When Tri-County in Raton had to shut its doors this week because of the utility shut-off, a sign posted on the front door told people to go to the other office down the street.

Valle del Sol, a ray of hope

Valle del Sol of New Mexico plans to have most of the patients and employees transferred to its organization by Aug. 31.

While “nothing is really ideal about this situation,” said Valle del Sol Executive Director Renee Edwards, she said her team has been working to “get staff and clients back in their respective seats” as soon as possible, so there is no major interruption in their employment or care.

“They’re not our employees yet, but we’re trying to guide them as safely as possible,” she said.

“It’s a really shortened the timeline” that only gets “shorter and shorter every day,” Edwards said. She called it an

“immediate transition.”

This isn’t the first time Valle del Sol stepped in to fill a behavioral health gap in Taos County. The company took over Agave clients in 2016; it announced a few months later it was leaving the state, but then struck a deal with Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration to stay.

Valle del Sol also was one of the Arizona companies chosen by the state to take over services for Teambuilders Counseling and Easter Seals/El Mirador, which were accused of fraud in 2013 along with 13 other behavioral health providers by Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration. All 15 were later cleared of fraud-related allegations.

Valle del Sol of New Mexico became a stand-alone spinoff of the Arizona-based parent company in November 2017, Edwards said. It has eight offices throughout New Mexico, including Taos and Raton.

Though Valle del Sol mostly handled children cases, the state designed it as the “major service transition provider,” meaning it is the entity with the closest match to the suite of services Tri-County was providing, Edwards explained.

For the time being, Valle del Sol will use its own space at 314 Don Fernando Street in Taos rather than the old Tri-County building.

It appears most of the efforts to transition services have come from Valle del Sol and various state agencies, including the Behavioral Health Services Division headed by Wayne Lindstrom, as well as the Attorney General’s office. Edwards told The Taos News, “I’ve had zero communication from (Tri-County) leadership.”

It is possible some of the outpatient services once performed by Tri-County will be farmed out to other providers in the Taos area, such as Golden Willow Counseling and Rio Grande ATP. However, Edwards said those details are still being discussed as they deal with more immediate priorities, such as scheduling appointments for the most at-risk clients, ensuring medications don’t run out and transferring data between the Tri-County and Valle del Sol systems.

The Genoa pharmacy Hutchinson runs within the Tri-County building is an independent entity. He said they’ll “remain here and keep our doors open,” so clients have a “lifeline for medication and their records.”