{"id":92273,"date":"2025-12-22T10:22:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T10:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/92273\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T10:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T10:22:11","slug":"you-cant-evaluate-our-mental-health-center-until-you-open-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/92273\/","title":{"rendered":"You can\u2019t evaluate our mental health center until you open it"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tWritten by Michael Lewis<\/a> on December 22, 2025<\/p>\n

\"www.miamitodaynews.com\"\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Advertisement\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"You<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

The answer should be that we can\u2019t afford to leave our $51 million investment closed.<\/p>\n

Yet a commission committee this month put off a needed vote to open the center because the county couldn\u2019t prove it would save us money. Nobody questions the need \u2013 every committee member praised the effort \u2013 but they demand proof that the center wouldn\u2019t cost taxpayers a dime.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s thousands of people who need treatment we don\u2019t 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t cost tax money.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t refuse to open a fire station or police station because we can\u2019t prove that it will pay for itself. It costs money to put out fires and fight crime, and the public willingly pays for safety.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We know we get a real gain from safety, but you can\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In doing so, we\u2019re absolutely right. Think of living without police or fire protection \u2013 there\u2019s no way to put a price tag on what you\u2019re missing.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s like the Mastercard advertising campaign \u2013 priceless.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t priceless to the county\u2019s Appropriations Committee. Although we\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

They were told that we\u2019d 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 \u2013 in other words, multiple sources of funds would offset the cost of running the center in its third through fifth years.<\/p>\n

The problem is that because the center doesn\u2019t exist, nobody can yet prove that the savings will actually occur and funds will flow. You can\u2019t test a car that hasn\u2019t been built to see how fast it runs and how smooth the ride is, because you can\u2019t test what doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to see 30 pages on how we\u2019re actually going to pay for the services,\u201d said Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to see it fail and I think you\u2019re setting it up for failure as it is\u201d by opening with only 75 of the 200 beds in use, said Commissioner Natalie Milian Orbis.<\/p>\n

An audit is needed to tell commissioners how much the center will save in current spending, said Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez.<\/p>\n

These commissioners all say they think the center could do great things \u2013 \u201cI feel like this could be a game-changer for the nation,\u201d Mr. Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t prove it on the track.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a national model that is already being emulated,\u201d Public Defender Carlos Martinez told the Appropriations Committee. \u201cThe only sad part is that we\u2019re being emulated and we haven\u2019t even opened.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only way to show it works is to open the building we\u2019ve got standing idle and eating up $1 million a year just to keep the lights on.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d be no worse off than we are today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The parallel to leaving the center closed would be to defund the firefighters and the police \u2013 just think of all the money we\u2019d save \u2026 and how much harm we\u2019d do to our community.<\/p>\n

Instead, why don\u2019t we just try to do the right thing? We can\u2019t afford not to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Written by Michael Lewis on December 22, 2025 Advertisement County commissioners in January will struggle with the same…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[225,227,226],"class_list":{"0":"post-92273","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-hialeah","8":"tag-hialeah","9":"tag-hialeah-headlines","10":"tag-hialeah-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}