POTTER COUNTY, Texas — Potter County Judge Nancy Tanner has been telling us for years about the need for a new mental health hospital in the Texas Panhandle.
In 2024, they’ll be one step closer to the help they need.
Lawmakers earmarked $159 million for new hospitals in Amarillo, Lubbock and the Permian Basin.
While that’s great news for those areas, Tanner still doesn’t know where the Amarillo building will be located.
“There’s been several places that we have tried to commit, and everyone says no it’s not for sale, no it’s not for sale. We had some land donated to us. It’s not big enough. It was seven acres; they need 15 to build this building. So, we’re still looking,” she told us on Inside Texas Politics.
Once the location is decided, they’ll hold a groundbreaking ceremony in 2024, and Tanner says they hope the project will be completed by the end of 2025.
While she’s not sure it can all happen that quickly, she says converting an existing building versus building something new from the ground up could speed up the timetable dramatically.
First, though, Tanner says the state will need to figure out that Amarillo is divided between two counties, Potter County, which she oversees, and Randall County.
“The state sent me an email the other day and said, hey, we found some property over here, and I went, no, no, that’s Randall County. It needs to be in my county. And they went, oh yeah, okay,” she said, laughing. “So, we’re still on the hunt for some really good property. We’ve got some good ideas.”
Tanner says other priorities for 2024 include addressing a growing problem of suicides.
According to a 2022 report by the state, suicides in the 21 counties in the Panhandle region jumped 81% over the last two decades.
Tanner even told us that five people in Potter County under the age of 40 committed suicide in one week’s time in November.
Beyond the hospital and improving mental health, Tanner says Potter County will also attempt to keep taxes low, something that can be difficult to do in a county like Potter, where even keeping county vehicles fueled could lead to a minor increase.
“We never raise taxes very much, maybe one percent, sometimes less than that, every year. But we have to. We have a fleet of sheriff cars, a fleet of road and bridge cars, a fleet of fire trucks that we have to fuel every day, and with gas the price it is, we can’t help but inflate the taxes a little bit to cover the cost of just fuel for our departments,” she said.