Susan Savala insists her resistance to a 190-bed mental hospital near her home isn't NIMBYist reprisal. For 16 years, she's been neighbor to a social services web near Oakey and Jones boulevards. A 103-bed state psychiatric hospital sits nearby. As does a juvenile probation office, mental-health treatment and care centers, Opportunity Village and the Nevada Association for the Handicapped. Hers, she argues, is more NMIMBY opposition—No More in My Back Yard.
"We thought we made it clear in the '80s, when they wanted to put a mental hospital for the criminally insane here, that we didn't want anymore of these projects," she says.
The $32 million facility would sit yards away from several elementary schools and churches, the West Charleston Library, Bonanza High School and the Community College's Charleston campus.
Last Wednesday, on Oakey and Jones, across the street from a light pole residents say a mentally ill homeless man periodically uses as a toilet, Savala and two dozen protesters gathered on the proposed 15-acre site, now a thistle-strewn lot of rock and desert. They told stories about the living among a tangle of social services: periodic burglaries, graffiti, wandering homeless, people sleeping in their own fecal matter, flashers. They agree the Valley needs a psychiatric hospital—just not here. If a local cable news channel hadn't aired a segment about the project, Savala says, residents might've missed a chance to fight it.
"You're going to have people locked down, in rubber rooms and restraints. It's like they're putting a jail in the middle of a neighborhood. This neighborhood is making a comeback. We don't need this."
But the Valley does. Drastically.
Clark County lags behind the national average of state psychiatric beds to residents—4.5 per 100,000, compared to the median of 33 per. With capacity reduced 44 percent in recent years by closures at private hospitals, 20 to 40 psychiatric patients have been forced into emergency room beds where they wait an average of 55 hours to get treatment, says Dr. Carlos Brandenburg, administrator for the state Division of Mental Health and Developmental Services. This means surgeons have less space to handle acute trauma cases like car accident victims and medical emergencies like heart attacks. Last year, the state mental-health system served 25,000 psychiatric patients statewide, more than 80 percent in Clark County. Without the facility, Brandenburg says, problems will continue.
"We have the land, it's near our existing programs, we already have a hospital in the area and the Legislature approved the money contingent on us using that land," he says. "We need this."
The imbroglio is part and parcel of the problem unchecked growth and malleable zoning regulations have wrought: Game-planning for infrastructure needs is routine. Evaluating for social-service impacts? Not so. Plus where to put new supply?
The state is clear: It's Oakey and Jones or bust. The Charleston Preservation, Torrey Pines Oakey Central and Buffalo Alliance neighborhood associations are equally clear: Not here. Working with state lawmakers, residents won a concession: The city planning commission will decide on the zone change. The City Council has final say.
On Wednesday, motorists rode by, some honking for no other reason than it being the thing to do when you see protestors with placards. Mayor Oscar Goodman showed up and heard complaints similar to his long-standing rants on combating homelessness: As Downtown shouldn't shoulder the region's homelessness burden, neither should one neighborhood be a critical mass for psychiatric care.
Of primary importance, opponents say, is safety, given the nearby child-care facilities. In the past six years, four people have escaped from the 103-bed hospital, Brandenburg says, most of them headed Downtown or to Pahrump to get away, but never into the neighborhoods.
It only takes one person to get into a library, school, child-care center or church and cause trouble, retorts neighborhood activist Juanita Clark, creator of the anti-smut group Pornography Only In Zone (POIZ) and area resident. During the protest, Clark supplied everyone with information—a table draped with an American flag-imprinted tablecloth held reams of handouts—and made sure everyone had signs. Some used the backs of Goodman's campaign billboards. One sign noted the mystery of the state allotting $32 million for the hospital but refusing to fund a $1.3 million grant for nonprofit Westcare, which has a center for the mentally ill diverted from emergency rooms and jails. Westcare has laid off 30 percent of staff and could close.
"We've never complained before about all the services, but this is too much," Clark says. Touted as better uses for land: expanding the college (University regents have expressed interest to residents) or adding to the library.
Sen. Mike Schneider, whose district encompasses the area but who admitted initially not knowing about the project's approval, says he understands why residents are nervous, but it's gotta go somewhere. He says the hospital will save the state $100 million over five years.
"This isn't typical NIMBYism," adds Mike Downing, senior pastor at Trinity United Methodist Church, which runs a preschool and elementary school. Consensus among his 600-member congregation is the hospital should go elsewhere, he says.
"The heart and mind of the church here is in support of any programs we can do to help care for people who need it," he says. "We're careful not to place certain kinds of adult retail like liquor stores and strip clubs in zoning areas where you have schools, so the same thing applies here."
Brandenburg says three meetings with residents have produced little positive movement, though more peace-brokering is in the works, including efforts to tout the design (state-of-the-art), security (a lock-down facility) and aesthetics.
"It won't look like a hospital," he says.
Pending approval, completion is slated for January 2006.
If denied? "We have no back-up plan," Brandenburg says. "If the city denies it, we will continue to have the problems we have now treating psychiatric patients."