No Laura’s Law?

Excuse me? But the last time I looked, if you can’t follow directions and do the job, as a presidential hopeful would say: “You’re fired”! Alice Gleghorn, the head bureaucrat at county Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Services (ADMHS), seems to be stuck, yet again, at the five-yard line not knowing how to run, pass, or kick.

Though, she’ll remind you she’s hard at work, just look at her time card. Santa Barbara County is finally on the cusp of developing an all encompassing master plan for our society’s most vulnerable, the mentally ill. Law enforcement has joined in by readdressing their traditional “lock ’em up” practice and jell-cell therapy by instead proposing new housing and allocating of beds for this segment of the incarcerated. But ADMHS’s continued status quo policy of resisting the implementation of Laura’s Law, regardless that 15 other counties have it currently enacted, is doing the procedural equivalent to rotating a bald tire.

Their existing policies and practices don’t work, and never will, no matter how many times they justify their rejection of Laura’s Law. The day I walk downtown and do not encounter the same wretched souls that I have met for the last 25 years will be the day we have sealed the crack they’ve been falling through their whole life. Santa Barbara is better than that.