Need for county mental health diversion center grows

Travis County’s mental and behavioral health diversion center is more than five years from opening and needed more every day, the Commissioners Court learned Tuesday. 

With an epidemic of mental illness and an overcrowded Travis County Jail, commissioners said the county must build the center as quickly as possible while involving relevant community groups. The project also includes a new central booking facility for the jail. 

Commissioners voted in March to create the new center based on recommendations from Dell Medical School. In Travis County, 37 percent of people incarcerated in October 2021 were receiving mental health care in jail, the medical school reported. By May 2022, the rate had increased to 42 percent.

The diversion center will be an important part of the “system of interventions” the county is developing to keep people with serious mental health challenges and substance abuse issues out of jail, Tyronne Jolly, senior program manager for the mental health diversion program, said during a presentation to commissioners.

“Many elements of this system are in place and serving members of the community well,” he said.

Examples include crisis response programs, mental health courts, jail “in-reach” programs and “re-entry programs” that offer connections to stable housing and other necessities. Experience with these programs will shape the new diversion center, Jolly said. 

Concerning the project timeline, Gabriel Stock, the county’s interim director of facilities management, said it will take 18 months to design the center, 32 months to build it and four months to transition into it. 

“It’s about a five-and-a-half-year project once the request of qualifications is issued,” he said.

The request of qualifications will identify the architectural and engineering design team needed to complete operations planning, evaluate the preliminary site downtown and design the facility. 

Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez said the new booking facility is needed because the existing facility is “small and outdated” and limits the services offered by the sheriff’s department and its partners. She noted that the diversion center is important because the jail population continues to grow. 

“Today, our jail population is higher than it’s been in a long time at 2,343 people. Moving forward with the diversion center is very important to TCSO,” Hernandez said.

Precinct 1 Commissioner Jeff Travillion said he would like to see community partners help shape the new center.

“We identify what pastors see, what health care professionals see in the community and where they go for resources now, and whether there is a logical nexus for this type of project,” he said. 

Travis County Judge Andy Brown said he hopes the project can proceed quickly.

“What the sheriff said about the numbers in jail and what the Legislature’s doing that could increase those numbers even more really argues for doing this as quickly as possible,” he said. “At the same time, I agree with Commissioner Travillion, wanting to make sure we’re doing it right.” 

Mental health diversion is a growing trend in law enforcement. Diversion centers similar to the center proposed for Travis County have been built in communities around the country.

Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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