A community committee that has been working for a year hasn’t yet found enough evidence to ask Lawrence Memorial Hospital to reopen its inpatient mental health unit.

“We have to have the facts be our fire and brimstone on this issue,” said Nancy Jorn with the Lawrence Douglas County Health Department and a member of the Community Health Improvement Project’s Task Force on Mental Health. “And right now we don’t have the facts to demand LMH open a unit.”

Instead, committee members believe a new permanent mental health authority should be established by city and county commissioners to continually monitor the overall mental health care system in the county. And perhaps most importantly, members said, the new board would be responsible for determining when a new inpatient mental health unit would need to be opened in the community.

“We would hope this group would be the people who bang this drum on a regular basis,” said Mark Buhler, a former state senator and county commissioner who chairs the task force.

Buhler’s committee hasn’t yet made any formal recommendations, but on Wednesday the group met to begin writing a final report that they hope to deliver to the community in June.

The task force was formed in May 2005 following the closing of LMH’s inpatient mental health unit, and amid concerns that it was a burden for residents to leave the city for inpatient mental health care.

But task force members on Wednesday said they hadn’t yet seen data that clearly showed the number of patients in Douglas County needing inpatient mental health care was enough to support a quality unit. LMH leaders closed the unit because they were having difficulties finding psychiatrists to staff it, in part because its patient levels were low.

Several task force members, though, said they weren’t convinced that enough investigation had been done to determine the true demand for inpatient mental health care in the county. For example, the hospital leaders recently reported that about 30 times per month they are transferring patients from the emergency room to other communities to receive mental health treatment. But task force members noted that the total number of Douglas County mental health patients being hospitalized outside the county would be higher because many never go to the emergency room in the first place.

How much higher the Douglas County numbers are, though, is unknown. Task force members said collecting that data should be a major goal of a new mental health authority.

“The statistics will become our club,” said Alan Miller, a task force member and mental health care advocate. “It will give us the power to say ‘damn it, we do need a unit.'”

Some task force members, though, are leery of whether their recommendation for a new mental health authority will result in any meaningful change.

“This mental health authority wouldn’t have any authority because it wouldn’t have any money or any power,” said Marcia Epstein, of Headquarters Counseling.

But Buhler said he thought a new permanent city-county appointed board would have the power to get the attention of political leaders who could provide funding and leadership to the issue.

“I guess what I would say is that we are creating awareness and moving the ball forward,” Buhler said.