Written by Michael Lewis on December 22, 2025
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County commissioners in January will struggle with the same puzzle a committee ducked this month: how can we afford to open the long-awaited Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery?
The answer should be that we can’t afford to leave our $51 million investment closed.
Yet a commission committee this month put off a needed vote to open the center because the county couldn’t prove it would save us money. Nobody questions the need – every committee member praised the effort – but they demand proof that the center wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime.
For more than 20 years this community has been striving to open a center that will treat the half of all 4,400 jail inmates who have severe mental illness. Now we jail them to warehouse them instead of treating them, and when we release them they simply reenter the criminal justice system in a vicious cycle.
That’s thousands of people who need treatment we don’t give them, and thus they have little to no chance of ever leaving a life of jail time that every taxpayer helps to fund. We’re eating up human capital and financial capital at the same time, while the entire community suffers as people live on the streets between trips to jail.
How can caring humans sit back and allow that cycle to go on? Yet commissioners say that opening our seven-story center rests on proving that running it won’t cost tax money.
We don’t refuse to open a fire station or police station because we can’t prove that it will pay for itself. It costs money to put out fires and fight crime, and the public willingly pays for safety.
We know we get a real gain from safety, but you can’t put a price on lives saved or the peace of mind we enjoyed because police and firefighters are at the ready. We take it on faith.
In doing so, we’re absolutely right. Think of living without police or fire protection – there’s no way to put a price tag on what you’re missing.
In that vein, how much would it be worth to Miami-Dade County to jail only half as many people and get some of those that we no longer jail into productive jobs – one of the aims of the mental health center? How much would safer streets be worth? How much would it be worth if fellow Miamians lived more humanely? It’s like the Mastercard advertising campaign – priceless.
But it wasn’t priceless to the county’s Appropriations Committee. Although we’d fund the first two years at $10 million a year entirely through an opioid settlement that costs taxpayers nothing, the committee asked the county to prove that the next three years would also be cost free.
They were told that we’d have to pay far less to house people in jail, grants would be available, the City of Miami and Miami Beach have promised funds, health benefits that jail inmates lose would be available in the mental health center – in other words, multiple sources of funds would offset the cost of running the center in its third through fifth years.
The problem is that because the center doesn’t exist, nobody can yet prove that the savings will actually occur and funds will flow. You can’t test a car that hasn’t been built to see how fast it runs and how smooth the ride is, because you can’t test what doesn’t exist.
Proponents of the health center want to start slow, using just 75 of its 200 beds at the outset as it revs up operation, a sort of prototype. But committee members demanded documentation.
“I want to see 30 pages on how we’re actually going to pay for the services,” said Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins.
“I don’t want to see it fail and I think you’re setting it up for failure as it is” by opening with only 75 of the 200 beds in use, said Commissioner Natalie Milian Orbis.
An audit is needed to tell commissioners how much the center will save in current spending, said Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez.
These commissioners all say they think the center could do great things – “I feel like this could be a game-changer for the nation,” Mr. Gonzalez said.
Yet these and other commissioners could nibble this mental health center to death by seeking proof of what cannot yet be proven: that it will not only change human lives for the better, make streets safer and improve our community, but will leave us with more in our pockets. Much of that is predicted, but like the car we never built, we can’t prove it on the track.
“This is a national model that is already being emulated,” Public Defender Carlos Martinez told the Appropriations Committee. “The only sad part is that we’re being emulated and we haven’t even opened.”
The only way to show it works is to open the building we’ve got standing idle and eating up $1 million a year just to keep the lights on.
And if against all odds it should fail? The fallback is to close the doors again and warehouse our human capital in jail rather than coaching many inmates to more productive lives. We’d be no worse off than we are today.
The parallel to leaving the center closed would be to defund the firefighters and the police – just think of all the money we’d save … and how much harm we’d do to our community.
Instead, why don’t we just try to do the right thing? We can’t afford not to.