The News & Observer
Editorial - October 12, 2007
 

Rarely does a state-funded agency so misspend public money as has the Albemarle Mental Health Center. Last June, when The Charlotte Observer reported the center's unseemly expenditures and stupendous salaries, the odor of financial excess was obvious. Now that the state auditor has confirmed the abuses in a detailed study, the stench is overpowering. If this wasn't outright plundering of the public purse, surely it was the next worst thing.

Here's an agency set up to provide mental health services in northeastern North Carolina, one of 26 such "local management entities" around the state. In the chaotic universe of mental health "reform," agencies such as Albemarle Mental Health in Elizabeth City are supposed to provide care locally, reducing reliance on state facilities. The agencies have a hard time doing that even when they aren't wasting money hand over fist.

Not only is Albemarle doing a below-average job of providing services, according to performance measures cited by state Auditor Les Merritt, it paid its top two officials the highest salaries in the state for such positions -- by far.

The director got $319,000 a year (since reduced to $225,000, still higher than state guidelines allow). The center's board members luxuriated at the Inn on Biltmore Estate during a mental health conference in Asheville, running up a $12,000 hotel bill. And the center hired a top Raleigh lobbyist, or former lobbyist -- Don Beason, remember him? In all, lobbying cost the center -- the taxpayers -- $76,000 last year.

That, the auditor found, was an improper expenditure which must be "immediately discontinued."

The center and its board, which also employs a Raleigh public relations agency -- another ridiculous expense -- dispute most of the audit's findings. They say that big bucks were needed to keep talent like center Director Charles R. Franklin Jr. on the job in a challenging rural area, etc. With area center directors making an average of $115,000 (in Wake County, $133,000), the defense is unpersuasive and amounts to a justification of greed.

The legislature, alarmed at the Albemarle spending, took steps to rein it in. Maybe that will work. Meanwhile, it would be encouraging to learn of a mental health center spending too great a percentage of its funds on its clients.