Accusations Against Kevin Crye Over True North Grant Failure Miss the Mark Entirely
- Staff Writer
- Mar 16
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 17
Redding, CA — In the wake of the California Department of Health Care Services’ announcement of $1.18 billion in Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program (BHCIP) Bond Round 2 awards on March 11, 2026, challenger Erin Resner has wasted no time pointing fingers squarely at District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye, her political opponent for the upcoming District 1 Supervisor's race, for the rejection of the Arch Collaborative’s massive “True North Behavioral Health Campus” proposal. Resner and her allies have labeled the outcome “political theater” and “organized opposition” orchestrated by Crye and the Board of Supervisors. The accusations are not only unfair—they’re flatly contradicted by the cold, hard data from the very awards list the state just released.
Let’s start with the most inconvenient fact for the blame-Crye crowd: Shasta County actually won a grant in this round. The Family Dynamics Resource Center in Anderson secured a solid $24,705,061 for its Pathways to Leadership Campus Expansion. That award will deliver 20 children’s crisis residential beds, 30 adolescent residential substance-use-disorder (SUD) beds, a 10-bed peer respite, and an outpatient community mental health clinic—real, tangible help for local families.
Crucially, this project moved forward without any direct support or letter of endorsement from the Board of Supervisors. No special meetings, no political drama, no grandstanding. A local nonprofit simply put together a focused, realistic application that fit the state’s criteria and got funded. If the BOS under Crye were the insurmountable barrier Resner claims, how exactly did Family Dynamics succeed where the $206 million True North behemoth failed?
The answer lies in three objective realities that have nothing to do with Kevin Crye—plus one uncomfortable truth about the project’s own backers.
A) The Arch Collaborative's ask was simply too large—period. The True North proposal sought roughly $150 million in state bond money for a single regional mega-campus. Not a single award in the entire $1.18 billion round came close. The largest investment for any one campus was $135.8 million (two separate awards to the St. Vincent Behavioral Health Campus in Los Angeles, with a population 54x greater than Shasta County). The largest single award was $99.5 million to San Diego County, with a population 18x that of Shasta County. The overwhelming majority of the 66 funded projects came in at around $18 million each. The state deliberately spread the money across dozens of smaller, targeted projects rather than betting the farm on any one $150 million gamble. Arch Collaborative CEO Kimberly Johnson herself acknowledged the project’s “large scale” as a major risk factor. Blaming Crye for the state’s clear preference for fiscal prudence is pure political spin.
B) The proposed operator—Signature Healthcare Services—carries a well-documented, troubling track record. A December 2025 San Francisco Chronicle investigation exposed serious issues at Signature facilities across California: patient deaths, chronic understaffing, regulatory violations, and aggressive financial practices. Local critics repeatedly raised red flags about the company’s Santa Rosa operations. While supporters argued oversight could fix the problems, state grant evaluators are not obligated to ignore such a history when handing out taxpayer dollars. Placing a for-profit operator with that baggage at the center of a $206 million public project was always going to be a heavy lift, independent of any supervisor’s stance.
C) The awards list reveals other structural mismatches. Scanning the full roster of 66 grantees shows the state heavily prioritized nonprofit, county, and Tribal applicants; smaller, laser-focused projects; rural, Tribal, and first-time recipients; and projects with clear, unified local backing. The True North proposal checked very few of those boxes. It was enormous, operator-heavy, and emerged from a region that had already seen a very public debate and an initial BOS letter of opposition (later reversed).
And the effort itself was underwritten by Arch Collaborative and Children’s Legacy Center. The 16-month planning, community engagement, consultant work, and coordination that produced the True North proposal was underwritten by Arch Collaborative (a DBA of Children’s Legacy Center/CLC). Those internal investments—staff time, travel, consultants, and related overhead—directly contributed to CLC’s $2.15 million operating deficit in 2024, a shortfall the nonprofit covered by drawing down reserves. Meanwhile, the leader of that effort, Arch Collaborative CEO Kimberly Johnson, is paid in excess of $224,000 per year by Children's Legacy Center, according to the organization’s most recent Form 990. Additionally, according to the Form 990, CLC's total executive compensation exceeds $1 million, which is approximately 25% of total wages paid. This is high when compared to other similar nonprofit organizations.
Kevin Crye raised legitimate questions about long-term county costs and operational risks—questions the state’s own funding decisions now appear to validate. Turning that into a campaign attack ad ignores the data, insults the intelligence of North State voters, and does nothing to help the thousands still waiting for mental health beds.
The complete list of every awardee, project name, county, and dollar amount is publicly available here: https://www.infrastructure.buildingcalhhs.com/bhcip-data-dashboards/bond-round-2-unmet-needs-data-dashboard/ (The full Excel export is one click away on the page.)
If Resner and her supporters want to score political points, they should aim at the real obstacles: unsustainable scale, questionable operators, mismatched state priorities, and the very organization that underwrote the risky gamble—not a supervisor who simply asked the tough questions before the state answered them with its checkbook.
