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MO Depatment of Mental Health Facing Cuts...and Restorations COLUMBIA, MO (KBIA) - In Governor Jay Nixon's proposed budget, the Missouri Department of Mental Health would lose twenty million dollars. It also faces additional cuts from the Missouri House Budget Committee. However, a few cuts from the budget committee's proposed $58 million reduction have been restored. KBIA's Michelle Flandreau reports.


The Missouri House Budget Committee passed an amendment Wednesday that restores $2 million in proposed cuts to alcohol and drug services. It also put back $3.3 million into community psychiatric rehab services from an original $3.8 million cut. In addition, money for the disease management care coordination project was restored.

Tim Swinfard is the president of the Coalition of Community Mental Health Centers. He says the restored budget will benefit both consumers and employees.

"The consumers that won't get discharged from services are the big winners on this because had we had the proposed cuts just on the psychiatric services side we would have had over a thousand consumers have to be discharged from services. And I guess the second group of people who would benefit were the employees that were providing services to those individuals, because had these funds not been restored, there would have been some employees that lost their jobs."

Despite these restorations, the Department of Mental Health still faces significant budget cuts from the House Budget Committee. And on top of that, there's the twenty million dollars Governor Jay Nixon cut in his proposed budget.

DMH Director of Comprehensive Psychiatric Services Joe Parks says there are two major areas that are sill going to be impacted. Parks says there won't be money available for community mental health services that he says directly affects about fifteen hundred adults and one hundred eighty children that are uninsured. He says as a result of cutting those funds, not only will people not get those services but community agencies will face layoffs.

"As more people need mental health services, we won't have the funds there to meet that demand. We won't be able to take new people in at the rate we could have."

Democrat Representative Chris Kelly is a member of the budget committee. He says all the members of his party voted to restore the cuts in their entirety but he says Republicans were against it.

"We tried to restore in committee and in private conversations with the budget committee members, including the chairman, that mental health money. And we got a small bit of it restored, about 10 million. Then we tried to restore more in the committee and we were not successful."

Kelly says the restored money came from a number of places in the budget, by moving money around and trying to be more efficient.

According to psychiatric services director Parks, the next part of the process is for the Missouri Senate to establish its budget. Any part of the house budget that doesn't exactly match the senate budget goes to a conference committee between the house and senate and that committee works through the differences.
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