State Senator Creigh Deeds got a nice year-end Op-Ed piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, here’s an excerpt:
“Gov. Glenn Youngkin has proposed significant investments to begin to catch up after decades of underfunding critical mental health care programs. While I applaud the governor for his intentions, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind him and my colleagues in the General Assembly that these proposed investments should be viewed as the floor, not the ceiling. If our goal is to keep people out of crisis, then we have more work to do. The governor’s plan is a crisis-first response, closely resembling that of Arizona’s. The premise of the plan is centered around regional crisis centers with the idea that these centers would service individuals in need faster, get police officers out of emergency rooms, and take pressure off of ERs and hospitals — all policies that we can agree on and ultimately support. There’s no question that we need this response, but instead of having a “crisis-first mentality” we can do more to fix our broken system now.”