Today, community activists protesting the scheduled closure of four Chicago mental health clinics held a sit-in at Mayor Daley's office before being ushered into a meeting with his chief of staff.  The Tribune's Hal Dardick concludes his report on the incident with this explanation of the closures:

City officials said the four, among 12 city centers, are closing because of a $1.2 million cut this year in state funding for the city's mental-health programs.

But while that may be the story Mayor Daley wants the public to believe, there's more to it than that.

The state cut the budget by $1.2 million because of billing errors by the Department of Public Health, as Dardick's Tribune colleagues Deborah Shelton and Dan Mihalopoulos reported in January:

[S]tate officials said the city did not submit bills for services such as counseling and psychiatric care provided at the centers.

Starting with the current state fiscal year, which began July 1, mental health services are being paid based on the amount of services billed. Previously, the state distributed money for mental health services through grants approved at the beginning of the fiscal year.

"They were advanced too much [money] in fiscal year 2008, and they didn't bill for [services]" after the new payment system began, said Tom Green, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Human Services, which oversees funding for mental health services. "So in effect they got too much, and the budget was reduced to reconcile the difference between what they were paid and what they billed us for." [...]

[Chicago health commissioner Terry] Mason said glitches in the Health Department's new computer system, implemented in October 2007 and April 2008, have caused delays in billing. "We have been meeting with vendors, the state, with everybody weekly, going through testing and making sure things are working," he said.

Of course, caught in the crossfire of all this incompetence are the patients treated by these four clinics, who now face new hurdles to receiving care.