Published Date: 2012-05-30
A proposed law to increase safety at Napa State Hospital in the wake of the 2010 murder of psychiatric technician Donna Gross is unlikely to make it out of the Legislature due to budget constraints, legislative staff say.
The bill — Senate Bill 60 — by Sen. Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, was introduced last year. It cleared the Senate but was held up in the Assembly’s Appropriations Committee, where it remains.
Evans spokeswoman Teala Schaff said Tuesday that the bill’s prospects of getting out of committee are dimming given the state government’s increasingly bleak financial picture.
The bill, if enacted into law, would require the state to assess each patient admitted to a state hospital for their potential to be a security risk and commit violence. Current assessments focus on the patients’ risk of escaping.
Fiscal analysis of the bill states that performing these assessments would add hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual costs onto the state’s general fund. This has crippled its chance of passage during a legislative session in which lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown have confronted a $15.7 billion budget shortfall.
The committee still has time to resurrect the bill from its suspense file, but Schaff said that wouldn’t happen unless the state received a “significant windfall of revenue.”
“Unfortunately, the money trees are dying,” Schaff said.
Coby Pizzotti, legislative and political liaison for the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association, which sponsored the bill, said his organization will continue to advocate for it. The group hopes that the idea is brought up when the state’s financial troubles lessen.
“We absolutely love that bill, and we’d love to see it move forward,” Pizzotti said.
Pizzotti said lawmakers have been receptive to measures that would improved safety at state hospitals, including Napa State, but the state’s money troubles have prevented them from accomplishing that.
“I think it’s not for a lack of passion — they were hampered by fiscal constraints,” Pizzotti said.
Pizzotti said several well-intentioned bills have suffered similar fates as they move through the Legislature — either by getting gutted to cut costs, or by failing to move out of committees.
“It seems each year there’s no shortage of good legislation that starts out,” Pizzotti said.
Pizzotti said his organization is continuing to work with lawmakers, including Assemblymember Michael Allen, D-Santa Rosa, Evans, and others who have made state hospital safety a priority.
Specifically, Pizzotti said the association is backing three bills from Allen that are moving through the Legislature that would keep the hospitals from laying off staff, mandate they compile annual safety reports and call for the state agency that operates the hospitals to allow police officers working there to be armed.
Ken Murch of the California Association of Psychiatric Technicians said his organization will continue to work to get the violence and risk assessments in Senate Bill 60 implemented if the bill dies in committee this year. His group supports two of the Allen bills, but opposes the one allowing police to carry firearms in state hospitals.
“We’d like to come back on that again,” Murch said. “Anything with a cost associated with it has just fallen by the wayside. Hopefully the fiscal picture would be better.”
Pizzotti said framing the issue in dollars spent won’t be enough to get lawmakers to act.
“At some point, we have to make a determination — what is the value of safety?” Pizzotti said. “Donna Gross ... she lost her life. Where is your cost-benefit analysis for her life? This is not something that’s going away soon.”
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