Milwaukee County Budget: Mental Health Board — Behavioral Health
This was frustrating to read. I had trouble following where the money here came from, and how it was spent. Seems like the written budget has failed me most in this section.
This area has about $240M in expenditures, which comes from $135M in “direct revenue” (patients and their insurance, I presume), $47M from “intergovernmental revenue” (never clear where exactly), and $53M from county taxes. The bulk of these expenditures are from the “Community Access to Recovery Services (CARS) Division” ($144M, 168 FTEs) and “Wraparound Services” ($73M, 50 FTEs). Both are “Mandated” by the state. Some of the funding comes from ARPA.
CARS serves about 10k patients each year through a bunch of different teams: “Comprehensive Community Services (CCS), Targeted Case Management (TCM),” and 12 more teams that are never defined as to what exactly they do. As an example, there are two pages describing a $12M program called “Community AODA Services” that never defines “AODA” (Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse, I had to look it up separately).
If you know what to look for, there are some details. But they are not happy ones. I was sad to see they have an over 50% 7-day readmission rate, which seems high but could be standard for this kind of stuff, I don’t know.
Anyway, with all the acronyms and different programs, it was hard for me to make much sense of this. I think I support “behavioral health” services, but I don’t even know everything that entails, and it’s hard for me to tell from the budget what the County does with its money.
