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I am the executive director of Public Defender Services of Lane County. Every day, the attorneys in our office see the consequences of an inadequate behavioral healthcare system in our community.
When people are unable to access the care they need, they do not simply get better on their own. Their crisis deepens and moves elsewhere — to emergency rooms, sidewalks, courtrooms and, too often, to jail and prison cells.
Yet, the Springfield City Council seems poised to block the development of a desperately needed Lane County behavioral health project. This decision deserves some historical perspective.
Twenty years ago, Springfield decided it needed a new justice center downtown. Voters approved a $28.65 million bond to support the project. The city selected a downtown site for its justice center even though the proposed facility was not an allowed use on much of the property. The city did not throw up its hands and walk away. It pursued a zone change and worked through the land-use process. In response to other challenges, the city amended its development code.
In other words, when faced with land-use problems, Springfield did not simply stop the project. It concluded that the facility was important and did the difficult work necessary to build it. Among other things, the justice center included a municipal jail with a nearly 100-bed capacity.
That history matters today.
Lane County and PeaceHealth are proposing a behavioral health campus that would include a 24-hour crisis stabilization center and a 96-bed psychiatric hospital, including beds for children.
Those beds represent an opportunity to provide desperately needed healthcare to our children, friends and neighbors. They also represent opportunities to intervene before a behavioral health crisis becomes a criminal matter.
Public defenders understand this connection intimately. Many of our clients find themselves in the criminal legal system after a long history of untreated or undertreated mental illnesses. By the time they enter the system, society is already paying for the consequences of systems that failed much earlier.
And those consequences are expensive. We pay police officers to respond. We pay prosecutors and public defenders to litigate. We pay judges and court staff to process cases. We pay corrections officers to work in jails and prisons. We also pay a human cost.
Our community members should not be relegated to a jail cell in an acute mental health crisis simply because we have failed to provide adequate resources for humane medical treatment. Lane County jail staff work hard to meet the significant mental health needs they encounter every day, but when a jail cell becomes our only answer to a mental health crisis, we should recognize how deeply our system is broken.
Springfield understood 20 years ago that an important public need could justify confronting complicated land-use questions. It found a way to put almost 100 jail beds in the middle of its downtown core.
Today, our community is asking Springfield to demonstrate the same determination for treatment beds as it did for those jail cells. There may be legitimate planning questions about the proposed behavioral health campus, but they should be treated as problems to solve, not excuses to abandon a project our community desperately needs.
Especially when considered in historical context, a lack of willingness to consider solutions should make the community wonder whether its leaders really want to address our mental health crisis. Or whether they would prefer to fill their jail beds instead.
We cannot continue lamenting the intersection of mental illness, homelessness and the criminal legal system while rejecting the infrastructure that could change it. Springfield found a path through its land-use rules when it wanted to build a jail. Surely it can work just as hard to find a path towards keeping people out of one.
