The San Diego County Board of Supervisors will decide on Tuesday when to implement a new state law that will expand conservatorship to include people with serious mental health illnesses or severe substance abuse disorders.
Counties across California have a two-year window to implement the new law.
Proponents, including San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, have said the law will help reduce the number of homeless people on the streets who are unable to take care of themselves, but medical professionals in the region say their hospitals and facilities are at capacity and are not capable of handling a potential influx of new patients.
"We can't just use the hospital as the dumping ground for society's social problems," said Chris van Gorder, CEO of Scripps Health.
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Van Gorder is appealing to the supervisors to delay the implementation of the law until January 2025.
"Now you have this whole new population, and it's going to create a real problem for the hospitals in terms of being able to appropriately care for emergency patients, much less this new population," Van Gorder said.
There are those who disagree with Van Gorder, however, including Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, who said that the county has had ample time to prepare for the new law.
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Lawson-Remer has said that mental health is an urgent crisis and the law should be implemented as soon as possible.
"I'm frankly just concerned," Lawson-Remer told NBC 7. "Everyone has known this was coming for months and months and months, and we already should have been making a plan. We should not have been waiting until the due date — the dog ate your homework — to make a plan."
Supervisor Jim Desmond said he understands the concerns of the medical leaders in the area but also that he believes waiting a year isn't going to change much.
"We got to turn it on sometime, and this one-year reprieve to me — I don't think a lot's going to be done in a year," Desmond said.
San Diego Sheriff Kelly Martinez has also publicly expressed her stance that the implementation of the law should be delayed, saying that she needs enough time to train deputies on the new law. A spokesperson for Sharp Healthcare said in a statement to NBC7 that the implementation of the law on Jan. 1, 2024, would "significantly impact our emergency departments, which are already receiving record high volumes."
