MONTEREY — A planned mental health treatment center for children and adolescents in Monterey was green-lighted Tuesday by elected officials. The Montage facility will be built from a $106 million gift from Bertie Buffett Eliott, the sister of billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
The 55,000-square-foot, 16-bed residential and outpatient Ohana Center will be built just off Lower Ragsdale in the Ryan Ranch Office Park. The facility will help address some eye-opening statistics provided by Ted Nylen, a Montage vice president who is overseeing the project.
A survey has shown that one in three Monterey Peninsula Unified School District high school students are suffering from depression-related feelings, he said. Nearly one in five has seriously considered suicide. A decade ago the Central Coast had the third-highest suicide rate in the state, Nylen said.
“Our children and their families are struggling and not enough is being done to help them,” he said.
Montage’s Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula’s Behavioral Health Services in the Hartnell Professional Center is too small to meet the expanding need for youth care. Nylen said that as of mid-June there were more than 100 children on a waiting list to be seen by a therapist. One-third of those children are under the age of 10.
Kimberly Cole, Monterey’s Community Development Director who is overseeing the project for the city, provided the City Council with details of the buildings — three structures layered upon each other on a banking slope roughly 300 feet from Highway 68.
Councilman Alan Haffa noted the city would allow for architectural variances that would require the city to amend its zoning ordinances. In return, he asked whether the facility would provide care for low-income residents.
“We will see all children at the Ohana facility,” Nylen said. “We will see children regardless of their ability to pay.”
A question was raised about how a 16-bed facility could possibly meet the demand Nylen outlined earlier. He responded that the 16 beds are only for intense in-patient treatment and that there are many therapy rooms available for children and families for treatment that can be provided on an out-patient basis.
Councilman Ed Smith asked about water — the big question to any construction project on the Peninsula. Cole answered that the project has secured water through the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District’s critical facilities allocations.
The entrance to the serpentine-designed building will be at street level along with the outpatient clinic. The mid-level will comprise group therapy facilities, the cafeteria and a gym for patients. The bottom level will house residential patients.
The architects on the project, the global firm NBBJ, worked with Dr. Susan Swick, the physician in chief of the facility to provide what Nylen described as a healing environment that includes features such as an abundance of natural light.
Before coming to Montage, Swick was an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is board certified in psychiatry and children and adolescent psychiatry.
The facility will also feature a gym, since physical fitness is a key part of mental health, Nylen said, as well as a garden where patients will be able to grow some of the food they will eat in the cafeteria.
Nylen ended his presentation, which preceded the council’s unanimous decision to approve the project, with a quote from Bertie Elliot:
“Few people can make a gift of this size, and fewer of those would choose this cause,” she said. “If I didn’t do it, it would not get done.”