BLOOMINGTON, Ill. (WMBD) — A federal grant that helped McLean County residents navigate the mental health treatment landscape was abruptly canceled late Tuesday night, according to McLean County officials.
Marita Landreth, the director of the county’s Behavioral Health Coordination department, said the email was sent at 11:33 p.m. stating that their $501,232 grant would be terminated immediately.
“We had about 30 minutes’ notice that our grant that we originally had two additional years on was getting terminated effective immediately,” she said. “It is abnormal for there to be less than 30 days of notice for a grant being terminated.
“So it is even more abnormal for there to be only 30 minutes for a grand to be terminated by the federal government,” Landreth said.
Kelley Amigoni, who works with the Children’s Mental Health Initiative, said the termination was not related to performance, compliance or corrective action.
The money, Landreth said, was through the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. McLean County used the money for its System of Care program which operates to fill in the gaps that are within the mental health arena.
There was no explicit reason given why the four-year, roughly $2 million grant was stopped in its third year. Landreth said they were told that the program, which serves children and people up to 21, “no longer aligns with the agency’s current national funding priorities and that federal resources are being redirected accordingly.”
System of Care is a program that is designed to “fill in the gaps” for people who are historically underrepresented within the mental health arena. Landreth noted it is difficult to know what you don’t know.
So the program was aimed to help people by pointing them into the areas that might help them and if that didn’t work, then to point them into another area.
The immediate impact is unclear. The county has budgeted money towards the program, as the grant required some type of monetary match. And there is a sales tax for mental health and public safety that might come into play, they said.
“We’re doing a lot of work in our department to look at what we originally had budgeted, to see what we can do to make sure that these services that we contracted with to help support are still going to be supported throughout the rest of the year, and then be working with this kind of what those next steps are,” Landreth said.
She’s also asking anyone else who has seen their SAMHSA grant cut to contact her office so that they can determine the overall impact of these cuts and grant terminations on the county.