This is not advocacy. This is stigma dressed in scrubs. Let’s be honest about what happened Monday in the Council Chambers. More than 260 residents of one of Lexington’s wealthiest, most comfortable neighborhoods showed up to fight tooth and nail against a mental health facility moving in down the street. They brought attorneys. They brought PowerPoints. They brought a real estate developer from Richmond Road who somehow kept a straight face testifying against another developer’s project. They brought doctors, nurses, a pharmacist, and a pediatric urologist — all credentialed, all earnest, all deployed in service of keeping sick people somewhere else. And when the Board of Adjustment voted 4-2 to approve the permit anyway, they booed. They jeered. They shouted at the board. In a government chamber. At volunteers doing their civic duty. It was, in a word, a disgrace. Not the vote. The vote was correct. The disgrace was the performance that preceded it — and the ugly punctuation mark the crowd provided at the end. To be clear: not every concern raised Monday was illegitimate. Questions about enforceability of the 33 proposed operating conditions are fair. The procedural issue around the applicant’s noticed name is a real legal question. Anyone who has watched a conditional use permit get rubber-stamped and then ignored by a future operator has reason to be skeptical of promises on paper. Those are arguments worth making. Some of them were made well. But that is not what defined Monday’s hearing. What defined it was the fear. The escalating, coordinated, evidence-optional fear. A website called “Chevy Chase Deserves Better” that ran ads warning of “a drug rehab clinic next to three schools and two churches.” Speaker after speaker invoking worst-case scenarios — elopements, psychotic breaks, guns — as though the facility were proposing to warehouse the violently unstable next to a playground rather than provide structured, voluntary, privately insured residential care for people with depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. One speaker invoked the murder Rob Reiner by his schizophrenic son as a reason to deny the permit. Another warned the board they would be held personally responsible when “something bad happens.” A nurse who identified herself as having worked with Roaring Brook patients told the board flatly: “There will be an unfortunate event.” This is not advocacy. This is stigma dressed in scrubs. Here is what the opposition did not reckon with, and what the board ultimately had to: a 26-year-old Lexington man named Kian Johnson stood at that podium and told the room he has been fighting an eating disorder since he was 12. That he traveled to West Palm Beach for treatment at 20 because there was nothing in Kentucky. That he relapsed when he came home because there was still nothing. That he has been told multiple times it is a miracle he is alive. “I want so badly to live,” he said. “I’m just a human being who’s suffering, and I need a helping hand.” The crowd that booed the board’s vote had just listened to that testimony. They heard it. They simply decided their property values and their neighborhood character mattered more. Erin Scussel, a PhD researcher who lives on Turkey Foot Road — in Chevy Chase, notably — described checking herself into a residential mental health facility in Atlanta’s North Druid Hills neighborhood in 2016 after hitting bottom. She credited the residential, community-embedded setting with saving her life in ways a cold institutional hospital could not. She was speaking directly to her neighbors. They did not seem to hear her. There is a word for what happened Monday, and Kelly Gunning, the advocacy director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Lexington, said it plainly from the podium: this was NIMBY behavior. Not-in-my-backyard. The finest example of it, she said, in her 25 years of mental health advocacy in this city. And Chevy Chase is, it must be said, a neighborhood uniquely positioned to engage in it. This is old Lexington money. Tree-lined streets, walkable to Romney Road boutiques, the kind of place where property values are not just investments but identity. The kind of place where residents have the time, the resources, the legal connections, and the social capital to mount a six-week coordinated campaign against a zoning application — complete with outside attorneys, a neighborhood website, a petition with hundreds of signatures, and enough bodies to wrap a line around the block on a Monday afternoon. People without those resources don’t get that kind of fight. The people who need a facility like 319 Duke Road — who need residential mental health care and eating disorder treatment and don’t have the money to fly to Florida for it — certainly don’t. The opposition called this “predatory development.” The real predatory dynamic on display Monday was a wealthy neighborhood using every legal and procedural tool available to ensure that the people who need the most help stay out of sight. The applicant’s attorney, Bruce Simpson, closed his presentation with a passage from Matthew 25: Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. He acknowledged it was the first time he had quoted scripture before the Board of Adjustment in nearly four decades of practice. You could feel why he reached for it. Because that is ultimately what this case was about. Not parking. Not setbacks. Not the precise legal definition of a sub-acute step-down facility. It was about whether this city — and this neighborhood in particular — is willing to make room for the people who are struggling. The ones who can’t afford to go out of state. The ones who grew up here and need to heal here. The Board of Adjustment, by a 4-2 margin, said yes. Chevy Chase, loudly and in chorus, said no — and then booed when it didn’t get its way. That should embarrass every resident of that neighborhood who knows better. And based on Monday’s testimony, there are at least a few who do. The post Chevy Chase Showed Its True Colors Monday. It Wasn’t Pretty. appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less