Multiple health agencies across the Central Coast could be impacted if Proposition 1 were to pass in the upcoming California Primary election.
The proposition authorizes $6.38 billion in bonds to build mental health treatment facilities for those with mental health and substance use challenges and provides housing for the homeless.
Proposition 1 also changes the Mental Health Services Act that was passed by voters in 2004, with a focus on how the money from the act can be used.
The state’s counties receive roughly $10 billion to $13 billion per year in statewide taxes and federal money to provide mental health care and drug or alcohol treatment.
Proposition 1 would create supportive housing for more than 11,000 Californians, helping those with severe mental health needs recover. But if the proposition passes, it would also restructure the services that our local counties currently offer.
“There's other parts to the proposition which would include a major reform of what's called the Mental Health Services Act,” said Frank Warren, County of San Luis Obispo Behavioral Health Department Deputy Director. “That would probably have the biggest impact on the county, which would mean reallocating the funds we currently receive for services to allocating about a third of those resources now for providing more housing but less services.”
About one-third of the money counties receive to provide mental health services comes from a tax on people with high incomes.
“It is not any new money coming into the system,” said Toni Navarro, Santa Barbara County Department of Behavioral Wellness Director. “It is the same pot of money. It is the annual income tax revenue for $1 over every million dollars earned. One percent of that goes to mental health or what will now be behavioral health services should Prop. 1 pass.”
Warren says the county of San Luis Obispo receives an average of $20 million a year that funds prevention, early intervention, and treatment services.
He says the changes in funding allocation would affect local programs.
“If we had to cut anywhere between a third or two-thirds of that fund that we currently receive, about 2,000 people would immediately lose direct treatment services potentially, and we're talking about maybe 5,000 to 10,000 who receive early intervention or prevention services would be impacted,” Warren said.
Micahel Kaplan, the Community Engagement Director for Transitions Mental Health Association, says Growing Grounds in both San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties could also lose funding under the new system.
“All of them provide paid employment and vocational training to adults living with a mental illness,” Kaplan said. “That's the kind of program that is suddenly going to be underfunded. I mean, they all have contracts with the county, and yet if the M.H.S.A. [Mental Health Services Act] funding for those programs gets slashed by 35%, those become a little difficult to justify."
Navarro told me that current county funding would be allocated by the state instead in a competitive process.
“The county [of Santa Barbara] currently provides an anti-stigma campaign,” Navarro said. “We have an anti-suicide campaign right now, you may have seen, that we recently launched. These are some of the programs that we would no longer fund ongoing past 2026 directly. But again, they are all open to that competitive process at the state level to receive funding at that level.”
For more information on Proposition 1, click here.
