Letter to City Council – Shelly Boismenu & Jeb Hazeltine

April 7, 2014

Dear Mayor Marx and Distinguished Council Members,

It was with great distress that we awoke Saturday morning to the front page article by AnnMarie Cornejo. In her article Ms. Cornejo suggests that there is a plan in place between SLO County and Transitions Mental Health Services to build a “wellness community” on the site where Sunny Acres is located. This site will serve patients with the “most substantial impairment in mental health.”

I (Shelly) happen to be a mental health professional who has dedicated most of my career to working with these patients. My tenure has taken me to programs for female inmates, addicts, mentally ill homeless patients and those with psychotic diagnoses, women in the sex trade industry (most homeless and addicted)as well as severely emotionally disturbed youth.  I believe these will be the bulk of the people Transitions will serve in our community. This is a wonderful goal. This is NOT a wonderful site or size for the project.

We are residents of Fixlini Street and live one block down from the Sunny Acres building. We frequently walk our dog up there and our son loves the area to play. We are familiar with the bucolic setting and the need for something special to happen in that location. We had long hoped for something like was done at the Marin Headlands in San Francisco – an Artist in Residence program that could put San Luis Obispo on the map in the California art community, perhaps a park, a beautiful place for local families to picnic and enjoy the serenity of our dear neighborhood. A community center?

When we consider the impact on our immediate neighborhood we already have a good point of reference. Small numbers of mental health patients and parolees already walk through our neighborhood on a weekly basis as they come to and from the County Mental Health building and the Probation Department. The majority of the county mental health patients are psychotic to some degree or another. They talk to themselves, significantly lack personal hygiene, yell, ask for things and have approached the children who play in the neighborhood. Many parolees and mental health patients that are in our neighborhood use drugs in plain site, including IV drugs. Our neighbors have watched people shooting up in front of their home. These numbers will increase substantially if this project is allowed. The easement that goes from Sunny Acres to Fixlini Street is a thorough fare already used by high school students and the residents who live in the Flora Street neighborhood. It is the quickest way to get from “up there” to downtown. I have no doubt that Transitions’ patients will also see the ease with which they can get from their home to downtown and/or public transportation.

When we consider the impact on our larger community, let me (Shelly, again) just say that it may be difficult for someone outside my field to understand how challenging it is for the severely and/or long-term mentally ill to sustain recovery. The failure rate for treatment is higher than 80%. For every 100 people you try to help at least 80 will “relapse.” San Luis Obispo will now have eighty beds available – the majority of which will be open because of the high treatment failure rates, and in order to cover the expenses and pay the bills Transitions will HAVE TO accept patients from neighboring counties. That’s how it works! As these people “fail out” of the suggested wellness community they will move into our downtown homeless environment which is already an issue. While the city council may be talked into thinking this large scale project will HELP the homeless, mental illness and addiction problems in our community – do not be fooled. It will get worse over time. If you do the research you will find this to be true. Berkeley, California is a notable example. These programs do the most help with the least negative impact when they are on a smaller scale.

I know that there is a deep need to help the tortured souls with severe mental illness and addiction in our community.  I encounter their pain at the parks and downtown and I have spent my career trying to treat them. But, erecting this site between two established neighborhoods with lots of families and children so far from the jobs and educational environments they need is out of step. Not to mention, the size and scope of this project will contribute to the problem by drawing more mentally ill folks to our community.

I would gladly work hard to make this project a reality in a more appropriate setting at a more appropriate size. Say, twenty beds outside a neighborhood environment.

I pray that the council sees the serious short term and long term damage this project will cause. With our city at an already dangerous 50% rental rate, with families barely able to afford to buy a home here, with young families moving to the South and North of SLO in droves how can you not act to preserve the few intact family neighborhoods we have left? Between the recent defeated enormous development threatening us on Johnson St and now this we are beginning to wonder: Does our city even care about its family neighborhoods???

 

Sincerely,

Shelly Boismenu & Jed Hazeltine