Integria requests county donate land adjacent to its crisis center for new mental‑health facility

Jimmy Dickey, executive director and CEO of Integria Community Mental Health System, asked the Lee County Commission during a work session to donate a little more than 2 acres of county‑owned land adjacent to Integria’s crisis stabilization facility on Corporate Drive so the nonprofit can build a purpose‑built facility.

Dickey told commissioners that Integria — the locally incorporated community mental health system created under Act 310 of the Alabama Legislature and serving Lee, Russell, Chambers and Tallapoosa counties — provides a broad continuum of services including outpatient therapy, medication‑assisted treatment for opioid use disorders, mobile crisis response, assertive community treatment and a crisis stabilization unit. Over the past 12 months, he said, Integria has invested more than $11 million in local salaries, delivered roughly 181,000 services to 4,172 Lee County residents and provided more than 1,300 inpatient crisis‑stabilization days; about 42% of those services served indigent residents with little or no insurance.

"Our request is for the commission to consider donating that property to us that currently and has always kinda sat unused, undeveloped," Dickey said, describing the parcel as wooded and immediately adjacent to Integria’s current crisis stabilization facility. He said consolidating crisis response, case management, access to care, diversion work and outpatient clinical services on a single campus would reduce training costs, improve operational efficiency and create space for a pharmacy and dedicated staff training.

Commissioners pressed Dickey on how Integria’s work overlaps with the new East Alabama psychiatric hospital. Dickey said the hospital is essentially an inpatient psychiatric provider and not the community mental‑health provider: Integria provides the full continuum of community services and maintains a contract for access to seven hospital beds. He added that Integria recently expanded its crisis stabilization unit from 12 to 16 beds, is planning a separate 12‑bed unit in Phenix City, and expects the proposed assessment unit to provide short‑term observation capacity that would improve law‑enforcement diversion.

Dickey said architects were scheduled to meet the following day and that Integria was exploring multiple regional options, but that using the county parcel next to its crisis unit would save acquisition cost and speed implementation because the properties literally touch. Commissioners noted the immediate space needs and thanked Dickey; one commissioner suggested placing the request on a future agenda for formal consideration. No formal vote was recorded during the work session.

Next steps: Dickey offered to supply follow‑up information to staff and commissioners; the commission indicated it would consider the request for placement on a future agenda.