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State-run mental hospitals will overflow by 2024 if Virginia does not change how it funds and administers public mental health treatment, the state’s behavioral health czar told lawmakers on Thursday.

“Business as usual is heading toward a wall or off a cliff or something,” said Jack Barber, interim Commissioner of the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. “It’s going to demand more beds.”

Specifically, Barber projected there would be about 40 more people in need of residential treatment than spaces to accommodate them, based on a 2 percent annual increase in traffic across state facilities if lawmakers do not make radical changes. The projected overage would come in spite of a plan to add 56 beds at Western State Hospital by 2022.

The prediction unsettled some members of a state panel tasked with re-envisioning Virginia’s public system of mental health services who have voiced support for shifting more resources toward community-based care.

“Our fate is in our hands in terms of where we want to go with that,” Sen. Emmett W. Hanger Jr., R-Augusta, said of Barber’s projections. “We can’t increase bed capacity and our citizens deserve better than (more institutionalized care), I would say.”