Greetings!

I’ve been asked by many to provide my perspective on the County’s development of the Proposition One’s required Sonoma County Three-year Integrated Plan for Behavioral Health and Substance use Disorder Services beginning July 1, 2026.  Having served on the County’s Behavioral Health Board for the last two years, and as Chair of the Board’s Subcommittee charged with its review and report until early April, I was in a unique position to monitor the County’s performance.

The instructions from the California Department of Health Care Services to counties, concerning the process of developing the Integrated Plan, represented a significant expansion of the programs and funding sources involved, as well as the variety of additional stakeholders required to be included in the planning.  County staff, complaining of delayed state direction, consumed nine of the twelve months of planning providing stakeholders with information from the initiative that impacted the previously reported MHSA funding (Prop 63).   How was Sonoma County was going to add substance abuse services, spend thirty percent of the funds on housing for clients, and half of the Full support Partnerships on those under 25 years of age without any additional funding?  When combined with the failure of the Health Department’s Fiscal Division to deliver to the Department any useful information concerning the remaining 90% of the Plan’s responsibility, the proposed stakeholder engagement and Board review of the proposed Plan quickly became an exercise in unproductive meetings with repetitious powerpoint presentations.

The Subcommittee I chaired soon found themselves useless in their attempt to build an understanding of the work of Plan development, and as a result could not adequately assist in informing required stakeholders.  Adding to the barriers to engagement, one of the largest stakeholder oversight entity (Sonoma County Homeless Coalition) was never approached by the Department, or given a chance to participate.  

The result is a year of missed opportunities to inform and consider the views of an expanded stakeholder community concerning the expenditure of over a billion dollars of government funding for those with behavioral health and substance use disorder needs. 

Gregory Fearon