Copy of assistant commissioner for community services at the Tennessee Department of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Debbie Payne’s memo.The executive director of a mental health treatment center in Chattanooga is planning to use a $193,000 state grant to shut down the center’s primary therapeutic program rather than finance it for three more months, records show.
TEAM Centers Inc. interim Executive Director Peter Charman said he’ll use the grant to stop admitting patients, lay off 22 employees and shut down the diagnostic and evaluation program effective Aug. 15. The grant — which was meant to continue the program, not stop it — expires at the end of September.
Charman said the shutdown is expensive and “has to occur sometime.”
State officials are baffled.
“I don’t recall him at all saying this money would be used to close the program down,” said Debbie Payne, assistant commissioner for community services at the Tennessee Department of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, who helped Charman apply for the grant. “When I was presenting alternative revenue resources, I thought it would help them sustain their program.”