Newsom eyes vote on housing mentally ill
SACRAMENTO — Californians would vote on a plan to fund housing for people with mental illness under a proposal Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled Sunday.
Newsom is calling on lawmakers to place a measure on the 2024 ballot to authorize new bond funding and existing tax revenue to fund new residential centers where people with mental illness could live and receive treatment. The measure is directed at people with severe mental illness who are homeless, or who need intensive treatment but are falling through the cracks in the state’s overburdened system.
“It’s not acceptable what we’re dealing with in California, not only in terms of what’s happening on the streets and sidewalks, but those that are suffering alone … in homes, mobile home parks, on the streets, obviously, as well as in isolation,” Newsom said. “We have to address and come to grips with the reality of mental health in this state.”
The measure would authorize billions of dollars in bond funding to construct residential mental health treatment centers that would create beds for thousands of people. Newsom said he hasn’t settled on the final number, but is looking at requesting between $3 billion and $5 billion.
The initiative would also change the state’s Mental Health Services Act, a measure voters passed in 2004 that charges a 1% tax on income over $1 million to fund mental health services. State leaders have tried to use the funding for housing in the past, but were stymied in court. Newsom’s proposal would earmark $1 billion in revenue from the tax for housing and residential services each year. It would also expand the uses of the tax revenue to include treatment for people with drug addiction.
Newsom said that when the initial act was passed, it did not account for the role California’s housing shortage and problems with drug addiction would play in the challenge of mental illness. This ballot measure would address those problems, he said.
Mental illness, Newsom said, affects the whole community. He noted that he lost his high school prom date to suicide a few weeks ago, and his grandfather to suicide decades earlier.
Newsom’s office estimates the state needs 6,000 more treatment beds to address the mental illness crisis on its streets. His proposal would fund construction of new “campus-style” facilities where people can live and be treated, as well as smaller “cottage”-like settings and individual homes, according to his office.
The bond funding would also be used to house the more than 10,000 homeless veterans living in California, according to Newsom’s office.
State Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, said she will introduce the measure. Newsom needs a lawmaker to sponsor the measure for the Legislature to consider it and potentially place it on the ballot. Two-thirds of lawmakers would need to vote for the measure to bring it to voters, who could enact it with a majority vote.
Eggman has worked for years on changing the state’s laws to make it easier to get people into treatment for mental illness. Last year, she was a co-author of the bill to create Care Court, a program that provides a new avenue for families and community members to get mentally ill people into treatment. This year, she has a bill that would make it easier for people with severe mental illness to be placed under conservatorships, something she tried unsuccessfully to do last year.
The funding plan is an important next step to fix a broken system, she told The Chronicle.
“This is one of the last big pieces that needs to be tackled, which is construction of facilities and then to be able to operate those facilities,” she said.
Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher said he supports the government providing more funding to address mental illness on California streets, though he said he wants to see more details about exactly what Newsom is proposing.
“Certainly this is an issue that we need to deal with,” said Gallagher, who supports Eggman’s bill to make it easier to place people into conservatorships.
The Yuba City Assembly member said he thinks it would have been better for Newsom to have used more of last year’s $100 billion budget surplus to address the issue, rather than asking taxpayers to pass a bond.
Bond funding provides the government with an influx of cash in the short term that must be paid back over time with interest.
“It’s tough because we have a lot of bonds, we already have a lot of debt,” Gallagher told The Chronicle. “It’s going to be tough to go to people and ask them to pay more through a bond.”