You might see coverage this week of the release of Michael Trott from Western State Hospital. We recently reported on impending construction necessitating the move of a memorial to Seattle police officer Nick Davis who was slain in 1984 during a struggle as Trott tried to skip out on his bill at the Madison International House of Pancakes.

It’s a good TV story. Convicted cop killer at a mental hospital set free some 20 years after the crime. The more important news came a month ago when this report was published about the budget slashing of state mental health programs that cut loose not only Trott but two dozen others:

“We’re in serious trouble,” said Amnon Shoenfeld, director of King County’s Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division, which sends many of its clients to Western when they need long-term psychiatric care. The lack of beds has meant more people are being held in hospital emergency rooms while waiting for psychiatric beds to open up. During one week last month, the county “boarded” more than 25 in ERs throughout King County because they’d been declared a danger to themselves or others, Shoenfeld said. “We had no place to put them.” The most recently cut program, called PALS, or Program for Adapted Living Skills, housed more than two dozen former patients no one else would take because of behavioral problems, medical needs or histories such as arson.

Our partners at TheSunBreak remind us how the deterioration of the state’s mental health system has been dramatically felt here on Capitol Hill — 20 years after the death of Nick Davis:

As to whether our community health systems are equipped to adequately deal with mentally ill people with troublesome histories, I submit a hatchet murder and a knife murder as evidence that they are not. (Let me also stress that it’s the actions of our legislators, not those of the mentally ill, I’m asking you to watch out for.) Are you upset? Are you angry that legislative “austerity” takes precedence over your safety? Then sit down and count to ten, because the reason PALS is closed is this: Its budget was cut until it became too expensive to run, and then it was shuttered. Economist Tyler Cowen writes that left-wing economists are often guilty of “evaluating government spending on a program-by-program basis, rather than viewing the budget as a series of integrated accounts.” It’s not just left-wing economists, I think. Especially during budget cuts, people fight for funding on a program-by-program basis, trying to remove costs from their budget areas. If in good times you might have tragedies of the commons, in austere times, you get penny-wise, pound-foolish tragedies of the line item. Last October, Governor Gregoire proposed sweeping cuts as part of supplemental budget reductions. It called for the end of the state’s Basic Health Plan, but it also put mental health administrators on notice that they needed to find a way to cut $17.5 million from state spending, $5.2 million in King County, in the next seven months.

Maybe it takes a “cop killer” story to frame the issue. But moments like this seem to indicate the push toward smaller government might have gone far enough.