In the coming months, Mental Health Partners’ Walk-In Crisis Clinic will move from its current location at 1000 Alpine Ave., to 3180 Airport Road, just off Valmont Road.
While the move will consolidate a number of mental health services under one roof, it will do so at the cost of longer bus rides and more walking, which means the new location could be less convenient for clients in crisis who do not have personal transportation.
Estimated travel times will vary according to traffic conditions throughout the day, but the new location will triple the distance for clients traveling via bus from downtown Boulder. According to a Tuesdayevening Google Map search, making the one-mile trip by bus from the Boulder Transit Center to the Crisis Clinic’s current location on Alpine takes approximately 10 minutes during 5 p.m. traffic. This trip includes a six-minute bus ride (with six stops) and two-tenths of a mile of walking (around three minutes). The shortest bus trip from the transit center to the new location on Airport Road is estimated at 29 minutes, with a 22-minute bus ride (26 stops) and three-tenths of a mile of walking (about seven minutes). The new location is just more than three miles from the Transit Center.
Though the difference may seem minor, current and previous employees say they worry the move will make it too difficult for some clients to reach the critical services they need.
“My understanding is there’s little to no available public transpiration [to the facility on Airport Road] and it’s pretty far out there,” says Chuck Littman, a former employee of Mental Health Partners (MHP). “From the center of town it’s probably, I would guess, 3 or 4 miles. It would be a very tough walk, particularly in bad weather and particularly for folks who have physical or mental handicaps. I don’t think it’s the brightest idea.”
Ann Noonan, interim vice president for Acute Care at MHP, says the nonprofit organization isn’t blind to the possibility that the Crisis Center move could be hard on some clients, but they will be “carefully” watching for significant changes.
“I would say we would prefer if there were more robust bus service out there, but there is a bus that stops at the corner of Airport and Valmont,” she says. “It’s still in city limits. It’s further away, but still in city limits.
“We’re concerned about the bus schedule itself,” she elaborates. “We have plans to talk to RTD about increasing their service to that area.”
Noonan says MHP hopes to have the new Crisis Center open at Airport Road before the end of winter, but unfortunately, she doubts RTD will be able to beef up services to the area before then.
However, she says the point of moving the Crisis Clinic to Airport Road is ultimately to better assist clients.
“The whole point is integration. People don’t just have substance abuse issues. They don’t just have mental health issues. We’re more complex creatures than that,” says Noonan. “We treat people who are intoxicated and psychotic, people who are suicidal and in withdrawal. We want to be able to treat people concurrently and in an integrated way.”
MHP’s current Walk-In Crisis Clinic has been located on Alpine Avenue for the past year, since MHP received state funding through Colorado Crisis Services specifically to develop a 24-hour walk-in crisis clinic for Boulder County. Noonan says when the County received the state grant, placing the new walk-in clinic with MHP’s other facilities on Iris Avenue wasn’t a possibility, so the clinic ended up on Alpine.
Boulder County built the facilities on Airport Road around eight years ago. That building currently houses MHP’s Addiction Recovery Centers Division and the Transitional Residential Treatment program.
“In our continuing plan, now it’s time to bring those services together where it’s less expensive, but also less traumatic for clients,” Noonan says. “Sitting in an emergency room, there are lots of things happening and people are waiting for hours — it’s traumatic for someone who is already in crisis. This new facility will be a much more customer-friendly site. People will be able to walk in the door not having decided whether they should go to the ER. Should they go to the crisis clinic? Should they go to detox? They just come in one door and we help assess what their needs are.”
Former MHP employee Littman says he understands why the organization wants to integrate services, but he thinks the move is counterproductive.
“It doesn’t make sense to me to make it more difficult for patients that are already experiencing some difficulties,” he says.
Noonan says there’s always been concern about transportation across the county for MHP clients.
“We have people in Longmont who need to come to detox [in Boulder]. The challenge is there are no finances within the County to pay for that,” she says. “If you’re using an ambulance, you must go from one medical facility to another, and we’re nonmedical. When police are picking folks up, they transport folks to us, but it takes officers off beat while they do that transportation.”
She adds that MHP has a new proposal in development to look into alternative options for transportation, such as the MHP owning a van or subleasing with other transportation services.
“The challenge is to find community support for that,” she says. “There’s no health insurance coverage for that, so law enforcement ends up holding the bag for it. It is a tough situation. All programs like ours have to deal with it in one way or another. I think we’re going to have to be creative to set up funding for our own transportation — it’s not like Uber. We have to have someone available with the van, 24/7.”
Despite mild concerns about transportation, Noonan says the consolidated services at the Airport Road facility are a positive change for Boulder County’s mental health services.
“We’re super excited about this opportunity to bring these services together. We’ve wanted to have a triage center for many years. I visited one 18 years ago with the idea that we’d do something here,” she says. “It’s a dream we’ve had within this community for very long time. “
