Breed has plan to add mental health beds
Mayor London Breed on Tuesday was set to unveil a plan to cut through the city’s bureaucratic red tape to reduce wait times and bring new mental health and substance abuse treatment beds online faster.
“People are in crisis, and we can’t allow delays and bureaucracy to get in the way of getting people help,” Breed said in a statement. “Our goal is to be able to deliver services as quickly as possible, and by removing these barriers, we can be ready when there are opportunities available to add beds to our system.”
Breed and San Francisco Department of Public Health officials say they’re often forced to compete with other counties and health care systems for a limited number of available privately owned and nonprofit-run beds across the Bay Area. The city’s onerous bidding process puts the city at a disadvantage, they say, causing San Francisco to lose out on much-needed beds.
Breed’s proposed legislation would improve San Francisco’s chances of claiming more beds by waiving the city’s lengthy procurement process when contracting with third-party facilities and new beds open up. The legislation lands as Breed faces a challenging re-election campaign this year when voters will be looking for progress on the city’s visible homelessness, drug epidemic and mental health crisis.
“There’s a high demand for these beds,” said Greg Wagner, chief operating officer at the Department of Public Health. “We really want to have the flexibility to be able to adapt to whatever situation is in front of us.”
In July 2021, Breed and the health department started an initiative to add 400 new treatment beds for San Franciscans in need. Two and a half years later, the city has added 350, bringing San Francisco’s total number of behavioral health treatment and care beds to approximately 2,550.
Increasing the city’s stock of treatment beds is critical to Breed’s March ballot measure tying general assistance payments to participation in drug treatment. Passage of the measure is expected to add hundreds of people to the city’s drug treatment program waitlists.
The proposed legislation would waive the competitive bidding process to procure mental health beds for five years in a range of settings — from locked psychiatric facilities to residential treatment programs.
A majority of the Board of Supervisors must support the measure to pass it. Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Hillary Ronen are co-sponsoring the legislation.