Waste of the Day: Planning A Canceled Project

Oklahoma spent $6.2 million planning and designing a behavioral health campus that was never built — and State Auditor Cindy Byrd says the work wasn’t helpful for the replacement project officials ultimately chose.

Planning a project they never built

Key facts: The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services planned to build the Donahue Behavioral Health Campus in Oklahoma City for patients in need of urgent, overnight care.

The state appropriated $87 million for the project in 2022, using federal Covid-19 relief funds. Oklahoma City and County contributed a combined $2.5 million.

Before construction began, the mental health department spent $6.2 million on planning, architectural work, design, surveying, consulting and other development costs.

Auditors later said officials failed to adequately evaluate the project’s feasibility and price tag before spending millions of dollars. Rising construction costs and budget shortfalls eventually made it impossible to pay for the project. 

By May 2025, the plan was totally abandoned. Instead, Oklahoma decided to purchase and renovate a vacant former nonprofit hospital into a mental health center.

Unfortunately for taxpayers, Byrd determined that the millions already spent on the abandoned Donahue campus didn’t carry over.

The original work “did not result in a completed capital asset or usable project deliverable,” she wrote. The planning and design work also did not transfer to or provide value toward the replacement facility.

Byrd classified the entire $6.2 million as a “wasted cost” that provided “no measurable benefit.”

The mental health department disputed that conclusion. It argued that without spending $6.2 million on planning and consulting, officials would not have realized that the health center was unaffordable until later in the construction process.

The mental health department had been in financial trouble before

Background: The mental health services department received an emergency appropriation of $30 million last year to bail it out of a budget deficit caused by “unrealistic” budgeting and spending on services unrelated to its mission. One particularly absurd expense saw $500,000 of state and federal funds go towards filming a hip-hop adaptation of “The Nutcracker.”

The department’s former chief financial officer also admitted that the department “routinely” overestimates its expenses to receive more funding from the legislature, a state report found. 

Summary: Learning a project is unaffordable may have value, but taxpayers should not have to spend millions to find that out.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.