This morning, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors gave the Department of Health Services Director (Nolan Sullivan) two gifts. The first was the appointment, starting tomorrow, of Mia Shim, MD, MPH as the new Sonoma County Health Officer. Dr. Shim served recently as interim health officer and chief medical officer for Public Health in Seattle, Kings County, Washington, one of the largest local public health systems in the country – serving 2.3 million residents. More on her career can be found here.
The second gift was what Nolan described as “a moonshot, and probably a career-defining project”. Authorizing the termination of a decade-old effort to utilize $40 million in State funding to build a 72-bed facility for mental health treatment and recovery of jail inmates, and the redirection of $27 million in local match funding and up to $9 million in Opioid Settlement funding, the Board approved the acceptance of a new $54 million State grant to build two 16-bed Mental Health Recovery Centers and fifty-six Substance Disorder beds on either or both of the current Orenda Center Detox site and Los Guillicos properties in Eastern Santa Rosa. Read more on a previous HEAPA post.
The Board voted to give permission to the Department to fast-track a community Request for Design-Build Proposals in the two months to see if the remaining gap in projected costs can be cut to what might possibly be funded from every other County and regionally-contracted source imaginable. “If we fail, we’ll continue to pay an enormous amount of money to send our residents to distant private facilities far from their families”, said Director Sullivan.
Homeless Emergency Assistance Program Association 