There have been concerns from the community over jail deaths, Gale said last month. Those concerns were still present when the board met recently to approve contracts.
“I am not going to vote in favor of this,” Gale said. Gale was the only vote against the fund transfer. Board member Teresa Russell, who is the director of criminal justice outreach at the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, abstained from voting.
“I will continue to ask our county leaders to look at the work in the contract,” Gale said.
Other board members said it was still important to fund the behavioral health services.
“If we’re going to talk about outcomes of individual programs in the county that we fund, having been a social worker in Montgomery County for over 10 years, there are certainly individual outcomes of many programs that I’m not happy with, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t fund the program,” board member Jill Bucaro said.
“I’m not going to...name names, but I’ve had clients at various mental health agencies where I wasn’t happy with the outcome. I’ve had clients that I’ve sent to treatment centers that I wasn’t happy with the services they received. I’m sure that people have sent clients to me and my team that they aren’t happy with how we served them, so I hear your concerns and I share them...To me, it’s not enough to not move forward with a vote,” Bucaro said.
Three board members went on a private tour of the jail and received a presentation from jail staff about the behavioral health services there. The Dayton Daily News has repeatedly been denied access to the jail, including when a request was made to the sheriff’s office earlier this month.
The fund transfer, which was later approved by the board, is part of a memorandum of understanding between the board and the sheriff’s office about how board will fund the behavioral health services at the jail.
Gale asked staff who monitors the NaphCare contract and any performance indicators be included in the contract. Montgomery County ADAMHS monitors the behavioral health services, executive director Helen Jones-Kelley said, but the sheriff’s office is responsible for the contract.
The cost of the county’s entire contract with NaphCare for all of its services at the jail is more than $7 million, board staff said.
The Montgomery County ADAMHS board has $2 million of state and local funds budgeted to be allocated for services at the Montgomery County Jail and the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, staff said.
“It covers such things as a mental health practitioner, program director, a discharge planner, therapists, case managers and on-call access to crisis care to assess psychiatric (needs),” Jones-Kelley said, with the latter meaning the person incarcerated would get transferred to a hospital for that assessment.
“It also provides for medication-assisted treatment with a medical provider,” Jones-Kelley said.
Once someone becomes incarcerated in the jail, they lose access to Medicaid coverage and medication access, so the funds from Montgomery County ADAMHS go toward covering those costs.
“This is a way of providing medication to people who are incarcerated,” Jones-Kelley said.
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