State mental health officials want to build a new, $18 million children’s psychiatric hospital to treat some of South Carolina’s most severely ill patients after the State Hospital closes.

The state Mental Health Commission proposes using money from the sale of the 178-acre State Hospital grounds on Bull Street to pay for the new hospital.

“There is no hospital at present to serve these children,” once the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute closes, said commissioner H. Lloyd Howard of Landrum. “Where do we put them?”

In a proposal delivered to Gov. Mark Sanford’s office, commissioners recommend that a single-story, 80-bed hospital be built on a 14-acre tract the Department of Mental Health owns on Harden Street, between Slighs Avenue and Colonial Drive in Columbia.

The property is just northeast of the State Hospital grounds, which lie between Bull and Harden streets.

Sanford was out of the country Thursday. Spokesman Chris Drummond said the governor’s staff has begun reviewing the “complicated” proposal and had identified a number of factors that would need consideration, including financing options and location.

The commission says it would take 28 months to build a new psychiatric hospital, once construction begins. That would miss a July 2006 deadline the agency has to close the hospital.

Potential stumbling blocks in the plan are proposals that developers either lease the Hall hospital back to the mental health department while a new hospital is built, or that Hall not be sold with the surrounding property.

A Miami-based architect has been hired by the Central Carolina Community Foundation to redesign the State Hospital grounds for development.

Led by Sanford, state government officials have been eager to market the property in hopes that proceeds would aid budget needs the state has been unable to meet.The Mental Health Commission has the legal authority to build the hospital. It must submit its plan to the state Joint Bond Review Committee and the State Budget and Control Board for approval.

Lawmakers this year cleared the way for the mental health agency to benefit directly from the sale of the State Hospital property, estimated to bring in $16 million to $32 million.

A temporary law passed in May stipulates that 50 percent of the profits from the sale of land controlled by a state agency must go to that agency to be used to buy or repair buildings.

More than 100,000 seriously emotionally disturbed children in South Carolina between the ages of 9 and 17 show substantial or extreme functional impairment, according to the Department of Mental Health.

The number of S.C. children showing up at hospital emergency rooms for treatment of mental or substance abuse disorders is up 29 percent since 1997, the department said.

However, many such children aren’t accepted by private psychiatric facilities because they are violent, aggressive, prone to set fires, are sex offenders, or pose a danger to themselves or others, according to the commissioners’ report.

These children become wards of the state.

Hall Institute is the only hospital in the state that accepts children who are committed for treatment by the courts. There are about 70 mentally ill children at Hall, which can accommodate 83 patients.

Mental health commissioners say the impending sale of the Bull Street campus forced them to look more critically at the state’s total mental health delivery system for children.

Mental health officials named two other possible locations for a new state hospital:

• Land the agency owns on Colonial Drive next to the Columbia Area Mental Health Center

• Property it owns off Farrow Road near Morris Village and the Bryan Psychiatric Hospital

The commission also offered options to pay for a new hospital — long-term bonds, federal funding, private sources and a lease-purchase option.

Commissioners favor using proceeds from the State Hospital sale.

In January, the commission had considered:

• Renovating the partially-closed Crafts-Farrow state hospital near I-20 and Farrow Road and moving the children from Hall there

• Contracting services, by sending a dozen mentally ill girls who are in Juvenile Justice’s custody at the hospital to privately run facilities in Charleston or Florence

• Acquiring existing facilities to move more than 24 more children with serious mental disorders and substance abuse problems from Hall, which was built in 1963

• Finding space at Mental Health’s Tucker Nursing Center, where elderly patients are treated, to move some of the children.

The latest plan rejects all those options in favor of a new, comprehensive solution.

The commission also recommends the state eventually build regional residential treatment facilities in the Pee Dee and Upstate for children and adolescents as a result of expected population growth over the next 20 years.

Reach Burris at (803) 771-8398 or rburris@thestate.com