Moccasin Bend will miss further cuts

NASHVILLE — The state is looking at cutting another 120 positions from regional mental health hospitals in the 2010-11 budget, but Moccasin Bend Mental Health Institute in Chattanooga, which has been hit hard in previous budget reductions, will be spared, a top official said.

“That’s correct,” said Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Commissioner Virginia Betts.

She said the ratio of staff to patients at Moccasin Bend will remain at 2.9 staffers for each patient, the lowest among the state’s five institute system. Moccasin Bend is still losing 41 positions in the current 2009-10 budget, bringing its total positions to 367.

Those had been offset until next year with one-time funding.

Staffing patterns at the other four regional institutes, however, will be cut again as the state seeks to cut staff-to-patient ratios to save $6.25 million next year.

Ms. Betts outlined the bed cuts and other reductions during Gov. Phil Bredesen’s final day of public hearings on the upcoming 2010-11 budget. The governor has said he may have to cut as much as $1.5 billion as a result of sagging revenues and increased needs in areas such as employee health insurance.

To get there, Gov. Bredesen has asked agency chiefs to submit plans to cut an additional 3 percent on top of the 6 percent he had previously requested. He listened intently as Ms. Betts urged him to spare poor mentally ill persons from $4.7 million in cuts her department recommended to behavioral health safety net services if the extra 3 percent cuts become necessary.

“We just hope that while you’re making these very, very difficult decisions between competing priorities, I urge you to consider leaving our budget available as much as possible,” Ms. Betts said.

Cutting the $4.7 million could deny as many 6,822 poor, uninsured, seriously mentally ill Tennesseans the community services they need to function, she later told reporters.

Cutting them goes beyond “cutting fat and fluff and feather ... We’re going to be breaking bones,” Ms. Betts said.

Gov. Bredesen told the commissioner to see if the cuts could possibly be found elsewhere.

“Providing inexpensive, crisis-oriented services to people who have no other place to go ... seems right down the center of the core you like to preserve in these things,” he said.

He later told reporters that when it comes to slashing spending at some agencies by 9 percent that he thinks it is possible that will happen.

“Whether that’s 9 percent across the board or you got to fix up Corrections (Department) in some way as we have in the past, that’s yet to be determined. But it’s a serious thing,” Gov. Bredesen said.