MARSHALL — When a person needs to be committed to receive mental health care, there’s a financial cost for that travel, Lyon County Commissioner Todd Draper said. However, in recent years some area counties weren’t clear on whose responsibility it was to pay that cost.

Lyon County commissioners discussed mental health transports during their regular meeting Tuesday. Commissioners agreed with the Southwest Health and Human Services governing board that each county should cover the cost of transports instead of billing SWHHS.

“It was brought up to us at our last Southwest Health and Human Services meeting that we are receiving these bills for transportation of clients,” Draper said Tuesday. These clients were people who had been civilly committed to go to a mental health treatment facility, he said. In SWHHS’s six-county service area, the authority to transport committed people had been given to sheriff’s offices.

“In the past, we had been getting a few bills (for transports), and all of a sudden we’re getting a lot,” Draper said. “And so the question is, should it be Southwest’s responsibility to pay for that, or should it be the responsibility of each individual county?”

Not all counties in the service region had been billing SWHHS for civil commitment transports. Lyon County Sheriff Eric Wallen said Lyon County had not been billing those costs out.

“Right now, we’ve been doing (transports) with our current staff,” Wallen said. “I asked for the numbers — I think we’re at a couple a month or one a month. It’s not a huge number, but you just really never know when they’re going to pop up either. So it’s hard to plan.”

Transporting a person to a behavioral health hospital is usually a day-long trip for a sheriff’s deputy, Wallen said.

“There’s been runs where we go to Sioux Falls and pick up a person and take them to Anoka. We’ve been up towards Fargo,” Wallen said.

Draper said the governing board’s consensus was that each county should cover transport costs, instead of billing it to SWHHS.

“It’s got to be a hard item to budget for, because who knows when it’s going to happen?” Draper said. “My opinion on it at the board was it’s easier for each county to take care of its own than to have Southwest do it.”

“Some of (the counties) had three, four, multiple ones, and then another county didn’t have any,” Commissioner Gary Crowley said of the transports. “So it’s not fair to put it on Southwest Human Services’ levy.”

Crowley said it was estimated that it would take a 1% levy increase to cover the cost of civil commitment transports.

“And why should one county pay for another county?” he said.

Commissioner Rick Anderson said the situation was similar to that of child protection cases in the SWHHS region. Individual counties had different needs for child protection services, and it wasn’t possible to predict exactly when those services would be needed, he said.

After discussion, commissioners said they agreed with SWHHS that it was individual counties’ responsibility to cover the cost of civil commitment transports.