Legislation governing boarding homes overdue

More than five years after the New Mexico Department of Health quit overseeing boarding homes that cater to mentally ill clients, state Rep. Deborah Armstrong — who once headed the state Department of Aging and Long-Term Services — says she plans to introduce legislation during the upcoming 60-day session to bring such facilities back under Health Department jurisdiction to ensure “some basic safety and quality care standards.”

It’s legislation that has been sorely needed, but avoided, for too long.

In October, Journal investigative reporter Thomas J. Cole wrote a three-part series that laid out a troubling picture of mental health patients living in squalid boarding houses. Because Las Vegas is home to the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute — the state’s only public mental health hospital — the problem of unregulated boarding homes is particularly acute there.

Many of the discharged patients don’t have anywhere else to go, no family to take them in or any other support system besides government benefits. Some unscrupulous boarding homes are more than willing to tap those benefits to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month while providing nearly unlivable accommodations. Their clientele, fearful or incapable of blowing the whistle, have little choice but to suffer in silence, up to and including death from unsafe conditions.

In Cole’s series, some patients reported going hungry because their boarding house operators provided inadequate meals. Others lived in cramped quarters lacking adequate heating or cooling. Some reported verbal and physical abuse, financial exploitation and violence and drug abuse — sometimes by other residents.

To be sure some boarding houses do their best to provide clean, safe residences that serve decent meals and ensure their clients receive their prescribed medications — but they’re not the problem. Currently, the state Department of Health, Adult Protective Services and the state Office of the Long-Term Care Ombudsman say they have no legal authority over boarding homes, so the abuses continue.

Armstrong, an Albuquerque Democrat, is well aware that the state is facing an estimated $69 million budget deficit this fiscal year, and a likely larger one for the next. That makes it financially impossible to facilitate much needed reforms in the way the state assists the mentally ill. But she said her proposed legislation will at least compel the Health Department to notify boarding home operators of the basic safety precautions and health standards required of them.

“That gives the Department of Health jurisdiction that, if they have reports of a bad actor, they can intervene and they can shut them down or make them respond,” Armstrong says.

It’s encouraging, too, that Las Vegas Mayor Tonita Gurule-Giron, who declined to be interviewed for Cole’s series, has acknowledged the problem and asked Gov. Susana Martinez to “re-establish the regulation, licensing and inspection of mental health boarding homes.”

For the roughly 200 mental health patients released annually from the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute, Armstrong’s legislation might not improve their lot immediately, but it’s an important start.

While legislators will be focused on closing the state’s sizable fiscal gap when they convene next month, they shouldn’t overlook our mentally ill residents. The safety and well-being of those depending on boarding homes to provide basic needs have been ignored long enough.