2006-08-25 TPLANNING DIR. - Laserfiche WebLink

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SIRACUSA:Well, I was wondering, the gentleman raised some issues and I was wondering if our Director would care to address any of them. ALAMEDA:Mr. Director? YUEN:Well, I think there were two questions he asked. One is how did the number eight arise or arose out of our discussions with the State Department of Health as to what the optimum scale of a facility like this would be? They felt that they wanted definitely more than the five unrelated persons. They thought that eight was sufficient. More staff the better the control level. So that’s why we added the staff as being additional to that. The eight was the clients. The variance would, this gets into a technical discussion of a variance. A facility would not qualify for a variance. ALAMEDA:Any other questions for our testifier? Seeing none, thank you very much, Mr. Carter. You can be seated. CARTER:Thank you. ALAMEDA:Sir, could you please state your name and address for the record? MICHELL:My name is Gary Michell. My address, office address is 75-166 Kalani Street in Kailua-Kona. I’m the Hawai`i Island Services Director for Mental Health Kokua. Mental Health Kokua has been providing recovery based rehabilitation housing for adults who have mental illness in the State of Hawai`i for the last 30 years. We do not have any homes right now in the Keaau Ag Lots, and so we’re not involved in that dispute. We are one of several housing vendors that are contracted by the Department of Health, the Adult Mental Health Division in Hawai`i County; and we are monitored and certified by Adult Mental Health Division. Just to give you some ideas of the numbers of consumers that we have served over the past fiscal year, we’ve served 135 consumers. That’s a total of over 15,000 bed days. Current zoning laws allow us to serve only five unrelated persons in group homes. We recently opened a property in the upper Kaumana section, a very large property about 2,500 square feet. We currently have five consumers in that house, although we’re capable of accommodating very easily eight consumers. What that means is that right at this very moment there are three consumers out there that either have inadequate housing or they’re homeless. Our studies have shown that the mentally ill, if they had adequate housing, mental health treatment is more effective, there’re fewer hospitalizations and they live more productive lives. On the other hand, for the mentally ill who do not have adequate housing, what we find is that they decompensate, they destabilize; and the end result is the use of County funding for police intervention, for emergency room visits, for increased hospitalization, and so forth. EXHIBIT D 9