New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams unveiled the lawmaking body’s first ever Mental Health Roadmap on Monday — a plan aimed to serve as both a compliment and counterbalance to Mayor Adams mental health policies.
The roadmap includes several bills expected to be reviewed publicly in the coming days.
Among them is legislation that aims to require the Adams administration to submit data on the implementation of its controversial policy clarifying when and how to involuntarily remove mentally ill people from public spaces.
Other bills in the plan include one that would more than double the number of Crisis Respite Centers in the city, one that would expand the number of community centers for people experiencing acute mental illness and a third that seeks to push the administration to conduct enrollment campaigns for city mental health services.
The bill’s are expected to be reviewed at a May 4 Council committee hearing.
Council Speaker Adams, who’s not related to the mayor, framed the new initiatives within the context of the COVID pandemic and what she described as the city’s “years of neglect.”
“There is no denying that our city is facing a mental health crisis exacerbated by many of the pandemic’s impacts on our city and our communities,” she said. “This crisis has been shaped by years of neglect, stigma and inadequate public investments and policy.”
The roadmap’s implementation — which is being spearheaded by Councilwoman Linda Lee, head of the Mental Health, Disabilities and Addiction Committee, and Council Majority Leader Keith Powers — will also rely heavily on “advocating” that several programs receive “adequate funding” in the city’s upcoming budget, work that will almost certainly prove difficult given the mayor’s push for savings within all city agencies.
The plan calls for $28 million in additional cash to strengthen school-based mental health services, $45 million more for supportive housing and an unspecified amount of “adequate funding” for non-profit and community-based groups that focus on “linguistically diverse mental health supports and services.”
Locking down those expenditures will likely prove challenging.
Indeed, Mayor Adams and the City Council have clashed in recent days over current budget negotiations, with the mayor contending the city has less money at its disposal than Council numbers crunchers have projected.
And with the mayor set to update his administration’s budget projections later this week, the latest spending Council Speaker Adams is advocating for in her mental health plan could represent yet another bone of contention between the mayor and lawmakers.
Asked how the Council is prepared to field pushback from the administration, the Speaker played coy Monday, saying simply that she isn’t “looking forward to push back.”
“We’re going to deal with it,” she said. “We’re going to be as forceful as we are with, you know, with anything that is a vital and critical issue to all New Yorkers.”
Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, did not touch on the budget ramifications of the Council’s plan Monday, and instead commended the Speaker for her and the Council’s “partnership.”
“The ongoing mental health crisis in our city demands a strong response from all levels of government,” Levy said. “Mayor Adams has confronted this crisis head-on, unveiling an ambitious mental health blueprint earlier this year that will improve mental health resources for families and children, reduce opioid overdoses, and strengthen community-based treatment and care for those with severe mental illness … We applaud the speaker for unveiling this agenda and thank her and the Council for their partnership.”
The Council’s roadmap has four main goals: bolstering support services, expanding the city’s mental health workforce, public outreach and reducing the interactions mentally ill people have with the criminal justice system.
“Incarceration cannot continue as the de facto response to people with mental health challenges because it only exacerbates the problem,” the Council Speaker said. “When half of those in our jail system have a mental health diagnosis, quite frankly, we have failed.”
To address that, the Speaker said the city needs to expand access to programs diverting people away from the criminal justice system and toward mental health treatment.
Lee’s bill, which seeks to require that the city provide data on the mayor’s involuntary removal policy, is also geared toward addressing the incarceration of mentally ill people, according to the plan.
“We need to have the data to be able to better improve where certain adjustments need to be made,” Lee said.
