Oct. 19--Six weeks after opening a mental health crisis center that patients and families had sought for years, county officials have announced that the building must be demolished to make way for an upgrade of Ventura County Medical Center.
The Ventura County Board of Supervisors authorized construction of a $250 million hospital wing to meet the state's seismic safety standards in January. The decision came nine months after the board agreed to convert a care facility on the hospital campus in Ventura into a crisis center for recovering mental health patients.
But in the months after they unveiled the site plan for the hospital wing, Ventura County Health Care Agency managers decided it would be too difficult and costly to make the hospital's design work with the crisis center in the way.
Now they are proposing to keep the 15-bed crisis center running until a new center can be built and opened on the hospital campus in 12 to 16 months. Then crews would tear down the structure that the county just spent $10,000 renovating.
Hospital Administrator Paul Lorenz said the footprint for the hospital wing must expand westward to address neighbors' concerns over the height of the original design. With three floors reduced to two in much of the complex, the structure must take up more space on the ground, he said.
He said the design also was retooled to provide for efficiency in operations that were not fully fleshed out in the original design.
In remarks to the county Mental Health Board on Monday, Lorenz said the county plans to build a crisis center in a different location on the hospital campus in Ventura. The center will be north of the remodeled hospital in a relatively secluded section away from the entrance and a loading dock.
"This is a plan which they support," he said in an interview Tuesday. "We will be moving forward."
Lorenz said he wishes the change had not been needed, but he would not call the original plan a mistake. He expects the new building will cost $2 million to $3 million, less than the $5 million price to minimize the effects of the five-year hospital construction project on the crisis center.
The structure housing the 15-bed crisis center has been renovated twice over the past six years. The county spent $1.4 million to convert it into an intermediate-care facility for the mentally ill that opened in 2005, then $10,000 for the conversion this year into the crisis center.
Behavioral Health Director Meloney Roy said Tuesday she did not know the age of the building, but that she believed it was quite old.
Irene Mellick, chairwoman of the Mental Health Board, said the board was pleased that the current crisis center would remain open until the new one is ready and that the board would have input into the design. But board members don't want to lose the building, she said.
"A driveway is going to replace it," she said. "We would rather have those things used for clients."
Advocates have suggested that the building could be converted into a locked, long-term facility. The crisis center is unlocked and designed for short-term stays, usually less than two weeks.
Carol Luppino, a board member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said she hated to see the center torn down.
"A lot of money has been put in that building and it's in great shape," she said. It's just a sin to tear it down. ... As a taxpayer, I think that would bother people."
Roy said she approves of the new plan. Had she known in hindsight that the structure needed to be torn down, she still would have opted to open the crisis center there temporarily because it provides care that many mentally ill people need, Roy said.
The Board of Supervisors OK'd using the site for the crisis center only after efforts to find a site elsewhere in Ventura County failed.
Roy said the new crisis center will have to be relicensed. She said it took three months to get the current facility licensed. She doubted the new center would take more time than that.
Groundbreaking on the new hospital wing is planned in 12 to 16 months.
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