County Commissioners “Straight Jacket” Mental Health Board of Volunteers

• Steven Klika: “When you have cancer, you get rid of it all.”

Four members of the Johnson  County  Mental Health Board held a surreal meeting December 17 in Olathe. It wasn’t a true meeting – four members don’t constitute  a quorum – but an official meeting had been scheduled for that day until board chairman and Johnson County District Court Judge Kevin Moriarty canceled it.

The four board members – Ben Hodge, Stuart Conrad, Cynthia Neighbor and Mary Uhl – thought the timing of the cancellation was poor form. Two days later, the Johnson County Board of Commissioners would vote on whether to scrap the board and assume oversight of the Johnson County Mental Health Center.

So the four members met informally, before local activist Ken Dunwoody and three members of the media, at the Johnson County Mental Health Center. The board members, representing a minority of the eight-member council overseeing the Johnson County Mental Health Center, explained that they had been kept in the dark for years about the department’s finances and had tried to alert county staff about problems with the center. They said a vote by county commissioners to dissolve the board would be illegal.

And yet that’s what happened.

On December 19, a 6-1 majority of the Johnson County Board of Commissioners voted to do away with the mental-health board, an appointed body that oversees operations and maintains some authority over the county’s mental-health program.

The Johnson County Mental Health Center, which opened in 1962, provides mental-health and substance-abuse services to Johnson County residents. It makes its money from grants, county taxes, and fees from clients and Medicaid. It’s viewed as a valuable resource for Johnson Countians but has emerged this year as a troubled agency.

While the county was assembling its 2014 budget, commissioners discovered that the JCMHC was at risk of running a $6 million deficit in 2014.

Commissioners decided to trim 78 vacant (but funded) JCMHC positions, along with other services, for an estimated savings of $6 million. The center also revealed that its reserve fund (kind of like a savings account) was nearly gone.

JCMHC’s finances remain unsettled. Last month, the commissioners voted to send $1 million to the mental-health center to keep the department afloat until the end of 2013.

The bleak financial picture emerged not long before JCMHC executive director Maureen Womack left her position, less than two years after coming to Johnson County from a similar job in Virginia.

Womack was put on paid administrative leave following an October meeting of the mental-health board. She resigned in November.

Prior to Womack’s departure, Kansas City law firm Spencer Fane Britt & Browne investigated allegations of discrimination and harassment within JCMHC. In a redacted summary of the investigation, dated July 25 and obtained by The Pitch, Spencer Fane lawyers found that no laws or county policies had been violated. But they hinted at a lousy work environment within the mental-health center.

That finding was reaffirmed to some degree in a November report requested by the county. The report was written by Ron Denney, a retired mental-health director, with help from other mental-health executives who interviewed JCMHC staff. The report uncovered a number of problems with the center and pinned much of the blame on the mental-health board.

“The current MH [mental health] has created an unhealthy, unproductive atmosphere through a combination of perceived inaction and inappropriate actions,” the report says.

The report recommended that the board be dissolved, adding that JCMHC staff were underproductive and did a poor job of billing and collecting payments from clients.

“It almost came across that the center [JCMHC] is ashamed to accept money from individual citizens, even for high cost care,” the report says.

Some board members disagree with Denney’s report and suggest that it was a pretext for dissolving the board.

Board member Neighbor says county officials failed to alert the board about JCMHC’s finances. She says board members were the ones who started asking tough questions about the budget.

“I think the concern for me is, we didn’t have true numbers,” Neighbor says.

But some county commissioners thought the board diluted communication between the agency and county staffers.

County commissioner Steven Klika says the mental-health board was split ideologically. He adds that information from closed sessions was being leaked, which he called “inappropriate” and “unhealthy.”

“When you have cancer,” Klika says, “you get rid of it all.”