Sacramento Spent $15 billion. Zero New Beds Opened.

Media
May 12
3 min read

I need to tell you about Jázmin Pellegrini.

She was 15 years old. She had been struggling with her mental health since she was 12. By the time she was a sophomore, she had been admitted to ten different psychiatric facilities on 40 separate occasions.

She needed long-term residential care. California did not have a bed for her.

So the state sent her to an unlocked facility. She ran. She was hospitalized one more time. Three days after she was discharged, she was found dead on the streets of San Francisco from a suspected fentanyl overdose.

Her mother had given up legal custody just to try to get her a bed.

This happened on Governor Newsom's watch. And it happened after he stood in front of cameras in 2022, declared a youth mental health crisis, and promised California parents that help was on the way.

Here is what help looked like.

Sacramento spent more than $15 billion.

They planned eight new psychiatric residential treatment facilities for the entire state of California. 158 beds total.

Five years later, not one has opened. Zero. For 39 million people.

A new investigation by City Journal walks through where the money actually went , and every parent in San Diego County needs to see it.

More than $3.5 billion went to "prevention" aimed at every kid in California, sick or healthy. $400 million turned schools into mental health billing operations. $278 million went to a brand new workforce of "wellness coaches" who are required to have just two years of community college and whose official code of conduct commits them to advancing "social, economic, and environmental justice.

"$381 million went to a grant program where the treatments did not have to be proven to work. State dollars flowed to drum circles and sweat lodges. The consultancy hired to write the program's guiding principles, paid $4.4 million of your money, identified the root causes of children's mental illness as "racism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism."

That is a direct quote from the official state report.

Meanwhile, in many California school districts, parents cannot opt their kids out. In some, providing your child's insurance information is mandatory. And under a state law passed in 2023, your son or daughter can begin ongoing mental health treatment at age 12 without you ever being notified.

This is not a health care system. This is a state agency walking past parents to get to children. And while it was being built, kids in real crisis were left in emergency rooms, cycled through short-term programs that never stabilized them, and in Jázmin's case, sent to die on a sidewalk.

While Sacramento was busy funding consultants, we got to work in North County.

We built a system of three Crisis Stabilization Units across the District, real places people in psychiatric crisis can go that are not jail and are not the emergency room. Before this, North County had nothing like it.

We initiated the new Psychiatric Hospital Facility on the Tri-City Medical Center campus. Actual beds. Actual care. The kind of capacity Sacramento has been promising for five years and still has not delivered.

We launched the mobile crisis response team pilot in North County, so when a family is in the worst moment of their life, the people showing up at the door are trained mental health responders, not just patrol officers.

This is what real work on mental health looks like. It is not glamorous. It is not a press conference in front of a state seal. It is beds, clinicians, and getting help to the people who need it most.

We still have a long way to go. The need is bigger than what any one County can solve, especially while the state pours billions into ideology and almost nothing into the kids who are actually in crisis. But North County families should know we are not waiting on Sacramento.

If you want to read the full investigation, look up "How the Equity Agenda Consumed California's Youth Mental Health Crisis" in City Journal. Every parent should see it.

Then ask Sacramento where the beds are. We will keep building ours.