By Paul Monies, Oklahoma Watch
The state’s new behavioral health center for central Oklahoma faces a massive cost overrun because the project’s initial estimate didn’t include furniture and equipment and bathrooms must be redesigned from hallways to individual rooms.
The Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services requested an additional $125 million to finish the Donahue Behavioral Health Center in Oklahoma City. The initial cost estimate was $150 million.
Lawmakers and other state officials broke ground on the Donahue Center in March and expected the facility to be finished by 2026. That opening may now have to be pushed back to 2028, said Sen. Chuck Hall, R-Perry, the chairman of the Senate’s Appropriations Committee.
Hall said multiple factors, including inflation, went into the higher costs. When lawmakers vetted the project in 2022, they anticipated making $50 million on the sale of the land at the aging Griffin Memorial Hospital in Norman. That has now dropped to $10 million due to soft demand and possible building remediation costs.
Former leaders at the agency did not include costs for furniture, fixtures and equipment in the initial project estimates to the Legislature, Hall said. Mental Health Commissioner Allie Friesen took over in January.
Hall said the original design had bathrooms in hallways, not in individual rooms. He said the agency’s new leaders worried the facility might not be able to get certified if bathrooms weren’t in patient rooms.
“The current commissioner is reporting to us that certification of the building might be in question,” Hall said. “There are safety concerns and additional costs associated with having to take a client from their room to a hallway and back to their room and not be intrusive to the patient.”
Agencies had to submit their budget requests for the upcoming fiscal year by Oct. 1. Agency requests are on the House’s budget transparency portal.
“A few months ago, we engaged a construction manager to review cost estimates and provide a more accurate price per square foot,” Mental Health spokeswoman Kelsey Davis said in an email on Tuesday. “Their analysis identified additional costs previously excluded from the initial estimates. This updated information has been submitted to legislators, and we await their guidance on the next steps.”
Hall said Friesen alerted lawmakers of a possible shortfall in May. Discussions continued throughout the summer, and the agency provided its latest estimates in September.
“They’re in a bad place, too,” Hall said. “They really can’t do any engineering for any of these changes until the Legislature decides what the plans are related to filling the funding gap.”
The Legislature committed $87 million in federal pandemic relief funds for the Donahue project in 2022. The rest of the funding was to come from the sale of the land at Griffin.
The 200,000-square-foot Donahue Center replaces Griffin, which dates to the 1890s and is the state’s largest behavioral health hospital. The Donahue campus, at Interstate 44 and West Reno Avenue in Oklahoma City, was expected to have beds to treat 275 adults and 55 adolescents. That bed count may be reduced slightly because of the need to have bathrooms in patient rooms, Hall said.
Speaker-Elect Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said discussions about the shortfall are ongoing.
“Increasing mental health capacity in our state has been a priority for the House, and we are working diligently with the Senate and the Department of Mental to understand what is needed in order to do that,” Hilbert said in a written statement. “We’ve publicly discussed a known funding gap for this project, and we are working to find ways to meet our state’s mental health capacity needs within the constraints of the funding we have.”
With the delay in opening Donahue, Hall said he expects the Department of Mental Health to continue using Griffin in Norman. He said that private treatment beds on a temporary, contract basis might also be needed.
“We want to bring these beds online as soon as possible,” Hall said of the Donahue project. “We want to be responsive to the need, but I can’t unilaterally make a decision to fill a funding gap without running it through the legislative process.”
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
