FARMINGTON – The state will be making cuts in the emergency mental-health system starting March 1 and local providers are worried that reducing and consolidating current services will affect rural communities.

School and community counselors, legislators, police and town officials and the public are invited to a forum to discuss the cuts at a breakfast forum from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. Tuesday in the Ben Franklin Center at Franklin Memorial Hospital. It’s open to the public.

Emergency mental-health services include immediate, crisis-oriented evaluation and treatment of children and adults with serious mental-health issues including those relating to substance abuse. Services are provided through mobile outreach and at sites such as Franklin Memorial’s Emergency Department.

“The Franklin County program serves approximately 900 individuals per year,” said April Guagenti, executive director of Evergreen Behavioral Services. “The crisis team that includes a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and qualified mental health crisis workers receives an annual grant from the state of about $244,000 to subsidize the program that operates 24-hours per day, seven days per week.”

Guagenti said she became alarmed when the new contract for emergency crisis services only extended through Feb. 28, 2009, instead of a full year.

LD 2290 was approved by the Legislature last spring following several hearings on proposed major cuts to health and human service programs that caused an uproar from the community. Some compromises included in the final bill presented by state Rep. Janet Mills, D-Farmington, were consolidation of mental health services and elimination of duplication to reduce state costs, with management and access to critical services centralized in more populated areas.

The cuts are set to be implemented March 1 but Guagenti said so far, there has been no word from the Department of Health & Human Services on how the consolidation will proceed.

“Reducing or eliminating our program will have a devastating effect on the community. Emergency room providers, law enforcement and schools have relied on Evergreen staff to deal with many complicated and critical issues in the past 14 years,” she said.

The community trusts the psychiatrist and crisis workers on staff to stabilize situations and help people get back into the community safely with local providers to treat them, she said.

“Centralizing the management and access for the program would put an unreasonable strain on services such as hospitals, law enforcement and schools to stabilize mental health crisis issues while seeking assistance from a location that for us, would probably be in the Lewiston-Auburn area,” she said.

“At this point, I think we can still have an impact on how the state will cut the programs. We might be able to get them to take into consideration smaller communities with sole providers,” she said.

Crisis counselors Guagenti has contacted in other counties are also nervous.

“We are all shell-shocked. Right now, the community has to know what is going on,” she said.