We had quite a few interesting headlines this week, so I figure I’ll give my 2 cents on a few:

City Firing

I shook my head when I read the court papers related to the arrest of former Ogdensburg Parks and Recreation Department employee Bryan Pribble. Mr. Pribble was fired and charged with petit larceny over the alleged theft of $1 worth of empty bottles and cans from a city dump truck. He also supposedly took some other junk that didn’t factor into his criminal charge.

His firing is headed to arbitration, which isn’t cheap. Let’s also factor in the cost of police and court time to prosecute Mr. Pribble. I don’t have exact figures for how much the mess will cost city taxpayers, but it sure adds up to a lot more than a dollar, especially if the city ends up on the losing end of arbitration and has to cough up Mr. Pribble’s back pay.

I don’t know Mr. Pribble. Maybe he had other issues with the management. But if that’s the case, surely the city could have come up with a more compelling reason for dismissing him than him taking stuff the city was going to dispose of anyway. Those cans and bottles were apparently considered precious city property.

The most ridiculous move on the city’s part was having him criminally charged so the whole mess became a matter of public record for the whole community to see. I don’t know what city officials were thinking. It makes for interesting news, but taxpayers don’t find it amusing.

Regional High School

The long-awaited study on the prospect of Heuvelton, Morristown and Hermon-DeKalb Central Schools forming a regional high school got an initial airing this week. We are still taking a look at the details, but I can’t say I’m surprised by its finding that a regional high school is the best option. Its parameters made it difficult to conclude that any option but a regional high school should be considered.

I’ll wait until I digest its findings to make a final judgment, but it’s going to have to make a pretty compelling case to convince me that mergers aren’t the way to go and that the Ogdensburg City School District shouldn’t be part of that effort. Parochial interests must take a back seat to opportunities for children and relief for taxpayers.

Postcard Campaign

The task force working to get the state to make the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center a regional center of excellence has undertaken a postcard mailing campaign to keep their view fresh in the minds of state officials.

It’s great to see that nobody involved in the effort is sitting on their hands while waiting for news from Albany. Anyone who cares about the psychiatric center’s future should fill out a postcard, affix postage and mail it. We have them available in our office in Ogdensburg, and there are also a bunch at City Hall. Stop in and pick some up.

OBPA, City Make Friends

It’s high time that the city and the Ogdensburg Bridge and Port Authority developed a cooperative relationship. The two entities’ economic development interests are the same, yet for years they found themselves competing against each other for prospects. It’s wonderful to hear that ridiculous situation has ended, and the two are meeting regularly to talk about how they can help each other.

If we’re going to dig ourselves out of the economic pit of despair, we have to work together. I hope other economic development agencies follow suit in joining forces for a common good.

time is running out

You would never know that District Attorney Nicole Duvé was up for election this year. Her office can’t help but shoot itself in the foot.

In two separate cases this week, the DA’s office failed to bring indictments against two people within the statutory 45-day time frame. One of them had been charged with stabbing and robbing an Ogdensburg resident.

It’s pretty sad that this isn’t the first time we’ve reported on the office dropping the ball. Common reports have been that paperwork gets lost, deadlines get missed, and attorneys don’t show up to court.

I don’t want to make it sound like the office doesn’t do good work. There are plenty of cases where people committing serious crimes get convicted, but they are unfortunately overshadowed by all the bungling. It’s hard to ignore.

It’s unclear whether we can chalk it up to inexperienced attorneys, the need to travel to scores of municipal courts, or massive case loads the office is too under-staffed to handle. But something is clearly wrong, and has been wrong for a long time. Ms. Duvé needs to get her house in order before another person accused of a violent crime gets set free on a technicality. If there is something county administration or the Legislature can do to help her, they should do it fast.

The lack of a U.S. flag on an Ogdensburg landmark that also happens to be the oldest federal building still in active use has caused quite a stir.

And it should. Under construction or not, an active federal building should be flying its nation’s flag at all times.

It’s not surprising that Ogdensburg residents noticed it was missing. Our local widespread custom among businesses, residents and boaters is to fly a U.S. flag, sometimes right alongside the Canadian flag.

The response to a story we ran Friday about the lack of a flag at the Robert C. McEwen Customs House has been overwhelming. Local and federal officials starting working vigorously to make sure that the colors retake their rightful place over the building.

Congressman William L. Owens, D-Plattsburgh, has pledged to make a flag available if the General Services Administration, which oversees the building, needs one. Ogdensburg Mayor William D. Nelson has promised that if no one else will do it, a city employee will go each day to hang the flag and take it down if there isn’t a means keep it lit at night. City Councilman Daniel E. Skamperle is looking into getting at least a temporary light, and has stressed to the GSA that even if they need to leave it down while construction at the building is ongoing, it’s important to at least have a flag flying there for our summer events.

The Customs House, the oldest building in Ogdensburg and one of the most recognizable city landmarks, is undergoing an interior renovation. It’s temporarily vacant, so the GSA hasn’t been flying a flag there.

That sounds like a reasonable explanation for the lack of a flag, but it’s still not one anyone seems willing to accept. The general consensus I hear is that there is absolutely no excuse for an active federal building to not be flying our country’s flag, especially within sight of an international border.

I don’t think GSA officials realized how big of a deal the lack of a flag would be. I think they are genuinely surprised at how upset people are about it and at how many calls they have gotten from residents and politicians asking where our flag is.

They could have saved themselves some trouble by realizing how important the building is to the community and by letting us know in advance what they were up to.

Mr. Skamperle told me Friday evening that a GSA official he spoke with was pleasantly taken aback by the level of concern the flag’s absence has prompted. He said the GSA official found Ogdensburg’s patriotism refreshing and positive at a time when there is so much negativity associated with a government that is widely viewed as ineffective and intrusive.

When he called the GSA Friday night, it was to tell them that he had found no light on site to illuminate the flag pole. The official he got on the phone told him they had also sent somebody to the building to see whether there was already a means to keep the flag lit.

I am glad so many people are working to remedy the situation. I am confident that one way or another, the red, white and blue will soon retake its rightful place over the building. It almost restores your faith in government a little bit.

The news Friday that the state Office of Mental Health has delayed the release of its plan to revamp its mental health services was probably hard to take for those waiting to hear whether the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center would close. Nobody wants to have to wait any longer to find out what’s going to happen.

But a couple of months more from the date OMH originally hoped to have a plan in place could make a world of difference for the better.

The delay appears to be a signal that OMH acting Commissioner Kristin M. Woodlock is taking to heart the comments our community members and leaders made last month in support of keeping the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center a vibrant center for mental health care in the north country.

I have to admit I was wrong when I wrote in this column a couple of weeks ago that in all likelihood the state already knew what was going to happen to the psychiatric center and just hadn’t bothered to tell anyone.

In my defense, though, I’m not the only one who believed that. Mrs. Woodlock made it clear during the May 15 listening tour stop in Ogdensburg that she expected to have the state’s plan for the future of mental health wrapped up by May 20. That didn’t give anyone much hope that she was going to do more than politely let us talk about how valuable we think the center is to our region while knowing full well that its fate was already sealed.

I’m glad I was wrong.

Make no mistake, though. I don’t know any more than the next guy about what the state has in store for the psychiatric center. It could very well still end up on a closure list. Our officials must remain prepared to fight for its survival if necessary.

But this delay could very well mean that even if Mrs. Woodlock did go into the listening tour stop here with a plan ready to go, some of the things she heard here made her rethink that plan.

I don’t think OMH officials figured we would turn out in the numbers we did to support our psychiatric center. I don’t think they knew how closely our colleges and universities already work with the center and how willing they are to expand on those close relationships.

I don’t think they realized how much we care about the patients housed there and those trying to carry on productive lives in our communities. I don’t think they knew how much we care about the people who dedicate their lives to helping them, either as professionals or volunteers.

And when it gets right down to it, I don’t think they realized just how isolated we are from the rest of the state. That must have been a long drive from Albany. I hope they shuddered at the thought of making that trip in a snowstorm, and it made them think about the burden that would place on patients, their families and friends.

I’m glad I was wrong about how quickly OMH was going to have a plan in place, and I hope I’m right about the potential reasons for the delay.

Families of patients and workers at the psychiatric center have been on pins and needles waiting to hear what will happen, and it’s too bad that they will have to wait a little longer.

But the outcome could turn out to be worth the wait.

I learn about things just about every day that disturb me. It’s an occupational hazard. But every once in a while I read a story that nags me to my core.

I’m referring to a police report we received Friday about three teens — ages 17, 15 and 14 — who are facing misdemeanor obscenity charges related to some nude photos that they are accused of sending as cell phone text messages.

We don’t know everything there is to know about the circumstances that landed these particular kids in trouble, so I’m not going to talk about that specific case. But the story got me thinking about similar stories I am hearing more and more all the time.

Kids taking nude photos of each other or themselves isn’t a new thing. I can remember when I was a teenager hearing about kids getting caught with nude photos of their boyfriends or girlfriends. One boy I knew was grounded for what seemed like forever after his mother found a provocative photo of a girl he was dating. He got in big trouble.

I can’t, however, remember him arrested for it. His parents were the ones to make sure he learned the error of his ways, not the police.

Kids do dumb things, and some of the dumb things they do, especially if somebody could or does get hurt, merit criminal charges. But taking nude photos of each other, while not the brightest thing to do, shouldn’t result in jail time. I have read stories about young teens in New York and other states getting slapped with child pornography distribution charges because they took an inappropriate photo of a willing boyfriend or girlfriend - or even themselves - and sent it to somebody else.

These momentary lapses of judgment are resulting in prosecution every day. This is a gross misapplication of laws that are intended to target predators, not kids who should — but apparently don’t — know better.

We aren’t talking about adult predators disseminating lewd or sexually explicit photos of innocent children. We are talking about kids doing something dumb without understanding the potential consequences, as kids are prone to do.

Don’t get me wrong. “Sexting,” as it has been dubbed, is cause for parental alarm. With technology offering easy access to publishing materials online for quite literally all the world to see, somebody’s life could be tarnished forever once the “share” button is pushed. In that respect, kids don’t just play I’ll show you mine if you show me yours anymore. They play I’ll show you mine and then I’ll take a photo of yours to post on Facebook. And if that photo makes it online, it is in all likelihood there for good.

It is a potentially serious matter, but not one that should result in a criminal charge that will haunt a child for a good portion of his or her life. Being haunted by an embarrassing photo is one thing. Being haunted by a criminal record to rival that of a bona fide pornographer is quite another.

It is also evidence of a disturbing trend where police action is taking the place of parenting. That is not the direction our criminal justice system should go.

These kids need to be made to understand the potential consequences of their actions through parental discipline, not the state penal code.

Those responsible for meting out the law should weigh the benefits of prosecution in these matters against the harm a criminal charge can do to a teenager whose only crime is being prone to do dumb things.

The state Office of Mental Health’s listening tour stop in Ogdensburg last week didn’t offer us much more insight into what will happen to the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center than we already had.

We will still have to wait for news of its fate. Acting Commissioner Kristin M. Woodlock said she hopes to have a plan for regional centers of excellence in place by Monday, but even if the plan comes about that quickly, OMH will have to get the blessing of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo before any announcement is made. That could take a while. I don’t recommend that anybody hold their breath.

What’s really frustrating is that it’s clear OMH has a plan that it’s just not sharing. Nobody could put together a sweeping overhaul of the state’s mental health system in five days. OMH officials have obviously been working on their plan right along and already had it pretty well finished by the time they arrived in Ogdensburg.

On the positive side, Wednesday’s session did provide a little more detail about the state’s plans to revamp its mental health care system, and gave community members the opportunity to say what was on their minds. It was, at the very least, a cathartic exercise for anyone who cares about the psychiatric center.

Mrs. Woodlock also had a positive message about the state’s vision for the future of mental health services. Our system is antiquated and needs an overhaul. More people would have a chance to live productive, positive lives in the community if they have the supports they need to make it on their own. Fewer people would be stuck in institutional care. The state wants parity between coverage and access for behavioral health care and the coverage and access already available for primary health care.

That is music to the ears of anyone who has been through the mental health system themselves or has a loved one who has gone through it. And the phrase “center of excellence” has a beautiful ring to it.

But those intimately familiar with the current system are understandably skeptical. They’ve heard it before, back in the 1980s when the state gutted its inpatient institutions and decided community-based care was the wave of the future. The problem was that only a small fraction of the money saved from downsizing institutional care actually went to community supports. The rest was absorbed by the state’s general fund and spent on everything under the sun but community-based care.

Funding was not enough to care for the people who suddenly found themselves on their own back then, and that has never changed.

This latest glowing vision for the future only works if OMH can guarantee that it will dedicate sufficient money, manpower and programs to meet the increased demand for outpatient services that downsizing inpatient care will create.

Glenn Liebman, CEO of the Mental Health Association of New York State, hit the nail on the head when he told me that the state needs to reinvest every last dime of the money saved from downsizing inpatient services into community-based services.

OMH cannot be expected to do that through policy decisions alone. It’s high time the state Legislature recognized that the funding it allocates for mental health services is woefully inadequate and does something to fix it.

The state has a long-standing commitment to caring for its most vulnerable. The mentally ill and those getting alcohol and substance abuse services have not been included in that commitment, and that needs to change. Their voices have been ignored for too long.

All we can do at this point is hope that OMH will do right by its clients, its employees, and the communities in which it plays a prominent role, and that state lawmakers will act to give the department the tools it needs to follow through on its promises.

Time will tell if everybody does the right thing. We will be watching.

Wednesday is an important day for the north country.

That’s the day state Office of Mental Health officials will hold a listening tour stop in Ogdensburg to ask us what we think the future of mental health care should be in the state, and, hopefully, when they will let us know more about their plans to that end.

So far we know this: state officials think there are too many inpatient mental health beds and more reliance needs to be on community-based support for the mentally ill. We don’t yet know what that view and a nebulous plan to establish “regional centers for excellence” built around that view holds for the future of the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center, its patients and the 520 people working there.

We don’t know for sure whether that means the center could close. But that’s not a chance any of us want to take. Its closure would have a devastating economic effect, not just on Ogdensburg and its surrounding communities, but the entire county and beyond. The potential loss of 520 jobs should have every business mobilized to tell state officials that their decisions leave St. Lawrence County’s fate hanging in the balance.

That’s 520 customers no longer able to afford to shop on our stores. That’s 520 people who might have to move away to find work. And, just as important, that’s lots of patients who might join the ranks of the mentally ill currently roaming our streets without proper support or care and without hope.

If you think our area is a ghost of its former glory now, just wait.

It could be that all this worry is for nothing, and I hope it is. We already know, however, that OMH proposed four unnamed psychiatric centers for closure in the state budget, a proposal that the Senate rejected. State officials also wanted to lift the required 12-month period for it to let hospitals know they would be closing. Again, that proposal was rejected.

Being rejected then only meant that those plans didn’t get into the state budget. That didn’t kill them for good.

It’s clear that under OMH’s plans to revamp state-run mental health care, being cheerily billed as the formation of “regional centers of excellence,” hospitals will close.

We do have some things in our favor to keeps ours open. It doesn’t make sense for the state to close a hospital as geographically remote as ours, which already serves the entire area north of Syracuse. It also doesn’t make sense for the state to close a hospital that has been recognized time and again for the high quality of care it gives its patients, and the relative cost-efficiency it affords the state in delivering that care.

But those things are in our favor only by assuming that the state makes logical decisions. We know that is not always the case.

When the state closed Utica Psychiatric Center a few years ago, according to state Sen. Joseph A. Griffo, it had just invested in a new building on that campus. Mr. Griffo, who represents Utica, has told me we shouldn’t take anything for granted. We should probably listen to the voice of experience on this one.

As of Thursday, there were more than 200 people registered to attend Wednesday’s meeting, which runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the psychiatric center’s Unity Center. Of those, more than 50 are registered to speak. I would bet that even more have registered since then and will register over the next few days. We’ll see you all there.

To register, go online to http://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/excellence/registration.html. Our newspaper’s website also has a quick link to the registration form. It’s on our homepage, www.ogd.com, at the top of the left column.

As a note to anyone who gave us a letter on this issue that does not appear in today’s edition, they will be published over the next few days in The Journal.

Keep those letters coming so the state can see how important the psychiatric center is to our community, its patients and their families and the economic well-being of our region. We don’t know how soon decisions will be made, so it’s important to keep reinforcing the message until they are.

The squeaky wheel has gotten the grease before. Hopefully it will again.

Good things come to those who wait.

That is the phrase to keep in mind when you consider the potential for Ogdensburg’s waterfront. One day, the city’s waterfront will be attractive to tourists, merchants and home buyers.

City officials earlier this week held a meeting to get residents’ feelings on the latest plans for four waterfront properties on their way to redevelopment. Those plans are the culmination of years of work.

It’s a major understatement to say the process is long to get these sites from contaminated eyesores that aren’t fit for any use to sporting businesses and/or homes and back on the tax rolls.

It takes decades, with a lot of blood, sweat, tears and frustration in between.

It’s easy for city residents to criticize officials for a seeming lack of work on these lands, many of which still sit vacant or worse, sporting unused, dilapidated buildings.

But these endeavors take a long time. Take the former Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. property in the town of Clifton, for instance. A ton of work over the last couple of decades has gone into getting it cleaned up to this point, and there is still a lot of work ahead to get it to a point where a business will operate there. Officials have opted to break off a smaller, less polluted portion of the overall 54-acre site so that at least some of it has a chance to be redeveloped in the foreseeable future.

It has taken so long, in part, because of bureaucratic red tape and government funding setbacks, but mostly because it just takes a really long time to clean up heavy contamination to a point where the land is no longer dangerous to anyone’s health. It takes testing, assessing, digging, more testing, more assessment and analysis, lather, rinse, repeat.

In the case of Ogdensburg’s waterfront, the city first had to acquire the lands and test to see how bad the contamination was, then had to apply for funding from the right programs and jump through the appropriate hoops to get it. Once the funding was granted, the agencies involved in getting those sites cleaned up had their own jobs to do, which, as outlined above, can take a really long time. We are finally at a point where city officials are considering concrete plans to direct how those parcels are going to be redeveloped.

Once those plans are in place, they will have market the lands to people willing to invest in business and housing projects. That process will be a whole other ball game that won’t play out overnight.

In the meantime, residents don’t see anything to show for all that work. Grass grows on these sites, and they attract the occasional bit of trash, but there is no visible progress. It’s easy to understand why so many people wonder if city officials are ever going to get off their duffs and do something with those properties because nothing has been built. It’s hard not to scoff when you hear them talk about all the progress that has been made.

But a lot of progress has been made. We are a long way from where we were 20 years ago with all of these properties, and it’s not like the decisions that have been made so far have been made in a vacuum. Residents’ feelings about what should happen have played a major role in the process. In that respect, the naysayers really have no right to complain.

Officials have not sat on their duffs. They are working on it. And once the process is done, Ogdensburg will be a better place.

We have to have faith that good things are on the horizon. And good things come to those who wait.

It’s easy to get so distracted by all the negativity in the world that we ignore the good things. We in Ogdensburg know that better than anyone. I don’t know what it is about our lot, but we love to complain about everything that is wrong with our community and hate to talk about the good things going on around us.

That’s why I think it’s important to call out good things when I see them.

The Greater Ogdensburg Chamber of Commerce has done right by the community by keeping up an initiative it started four years ago to encourage residents and businesses to improve their properties.

The main point of the program is to make our community more inviting for visitors in hopes that a good-looking city will encourage them to return. But it’s also important for those of us who are here every day. We are more affected by our environment than we realize.

When large swaths of the community are in disrepair, it doesn’t make us feel great about the place we live. We get stuck in a negative community mind set that leaves us believing that our community doesn’t deserve anything good. We are skeptical of any effort to improve the community as a result.

We, my friends, are a community suffering from low self-esteem. We have to dig ourselves out of that hole.

Initiatives like the chamber’s Gateways and Corridors program can help us take pride in the place we live, which, when you get right down to it, is a pretty great little corner of the world.

This time around, the chamber is encouraging residents and businesses along State, Main, Canton and Fine streets and New York Avenue to improve their properties. The improvements don’t have to be grand; a fresh coat of paint, some flowers and minor landscaping can go a long way to improving the appearance and general feel of a neighborhood.

Home and business owners who spruce up their properties get recognized every month, which helps them take even greater pride in their efforts.

Chamber officials will probably tell you they don’t feel they have gotten enough participation in the program over the years, but they’re being too modest. Even getting a handful of businesses and homes to improve their appearance goes a long way. Although not every home or business along Ford Street has participated in past efforts, the street is looking a lot better than it did a few years ago. The city is a better place as a result.

My hat is off to the chamber for keeping the program going and branching out to other parts of the city.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the other groups working to make a difference in the city’s appearance: the Pride and Beautification Commission, the Tree Commission and the Ogdensburg Garden Club.

They are all unsung heroes, working hard behind the scenes without getting the recognition they deserve. Every square inch of earth they till, every tree and flower they plant, every bush they trim and weed they pull, every basket hung from a lamp post counts. They deserve to be thanked more heartily and more often than they are.

The Ogdensburg Garden Club works hard to keep up the gardens in Library Park, the downtown Arterial and other visible places around the city. That work isn’t easy and it isn’t cheap. To help raise some money to pay for their efforts, the club is holding a “just for the birds” silent auction and sale Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Frederic Remington Art Museum building at 311 Washington St.

The club will auction 50 birdhouses of all shapes, sizes, colors and tastes. The few I have seen are magnificently crafted. A $10 ticket gets you a chance at a door prize as well. Plan to attend, and you might win a stunning quilt made by member Debbie Bruyere.

If we’re going to make our city a better place to live and work, we need to start by taking pride in our properties and supporting those who take the lead in improving our community. With their help and some initiative of our own, we can make our city one we can be proud to call home.

The tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon last week understandably made us all jumpy. St. Lawrence County officials proved that a few days after a misplaced lunch bag prompted the evacuation of the county office building.

Better safe than sorry is a good policy I suppose, but I couldn’t help laughing when I heard that somebody’s lunch caused all the trouble. The suspect lunch was in a bag that was left in an unusual place because its owner apparently had to set it down for one reason or another and forgot about it.

It brought me back to 9/11 and the anthrax scare that followed. Just about every day for a few weeks following, our newspapers carried reports of people finding suspicious powdery substances. In each instance, the substances turned out to be harmless, but only after the police and county’s hazardous materials response team were called.

I remember one instance where the office of a local college newspaper was evacuated and the hazmat team called because a suspicious powdery substance was found on a desk. That substance turned out to be dust from a bag of mints. Another woman reported a suspicious powdery substance in her cake mix. Those are just two reports that immediately come to mind, but there were many others. There were also reports for months involving suspicious people, vehicles, airplanes, you name it. Anything out of place was cause to alert the authorities.

I don’t typically gamble, but I do put a lot of stock in mathematical probability. The probability that a person or building in our neck of the woods would be a target for a terrorist attack or some other malicious act is slim to none. We have about 110,000 people in our county. Our numbers, while insufficient to garner the attention we think we deserve from time to time from the state and federal governments, are in our favor when it comes to how safe we are from terrorists.

I needed to find out why anybody would think it reasonable to conclude that a misplaced bag in a building in Canton carried something that could kill or injure a lot of people. I figured there must be some common psychological tendency behind last week’s county building evacuation and the widespread panic a dozen years ago about powdery substances.

I asked St. Lawrence University assistant professor of social psychology Mark Oakes what he thought about the phenomenon. Turns out there’s a name for it: availability heuristic.

In a nutshell, Mr. Oakes said the term refers to how often somebody thinks a particular event occurs based on how readily they remember that event. In other words, if you hear about a bombing and that story sticks in your mind, you might automatically think that bombings are more likely to happen than they actually are.

Case in point: if you see a bag where you wouldn’t normally see a bag, and you have a fresh memory of a recent bombing that involved a bomb in a bag left at the finish line of a major race, your brain might automatically associate the out-of-place bag you see with the bombing. As a result, you would conclude that bag is likely carrying a bomb.

With availability heuristic, your brain makes you jump to a particular conclusion quickly without making time for reason or critical thinking.

It sounds like a reasonable explanation for what happened at the county building last week. The conclusion that a bagged lunch left in an unusual place was a reason to evacuate could have been the result of somebody’s brain tricking them into panicking when there was no reason to panic.

We shouldn’t laugh too hard about it because we are all susceptible to this sort of thing.

I also think there is a lesson to be learned here. Erring on the side of caution isn’t a bad thing, but we need to force our brains to think before our brains force us to panic.

The horrible events in Boston put people on edge, especially since many of us have friends and family there. But everybody needs to calm down. This was a tragic but isolated incident. Remember that in the long run, probability is on our side. Force your brain to think before you call in the hazmat team to investigate a suspicious powdery substance in your cake mix.

The news last week that the state Office of Mental Health will include Ogdensburg on its list of meeting sites to gather input on a plan to downsize its number of inpatient beds for psychiatric patients is a mixed bag for us.

It’s good because OMH won’t end up ignoring that we do, in fact, have a state-run inpatient psychiatric hospital in our back yard and we might have some feeling one way or the other about what happens to it. Until last week, Syracuse was the farthest north OMH officials were planning to travel to hold a meeting on their “listening tour.”

The bad news is that the so-called plan to right-size care for the mentally ill is really too vague for anybody to get a handle on what the state is up to. It’s hard for anyone to weigh in on a plan that isn’t more than an idea, especially when that idea is wrapped in the notion of providing the best possible care for the mentally ill. Opposing that notion is like being against puppies and kittens.

As state Sen. Patty Ritchie told me last week, it’s hard to fight something when you don’t know what you’re fighting.

The state has only made part of its vague plan close to clear: the state has too many inpatient psychiatric hospitals and that states bigger than ours presumably get along just fine with only a handful of inpatient facilities. I believe an example on OMH’s website, www.omh.ny.gov, is that New York has 24 hospitals in state with a population of 18 million, while California, with its population of 37 million, has five inpatient hospitals. That means there is a pretty good chance some state-run hospital, somewhere, is going to close. Employees at the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Hospital in Ogdensburg are understandably worried that hospital is ours.

I’ve tried to get answers from OMH about the details of this plan, if you want to call it that. They haven’t responded.

It could be that they don’t have those details, which begs a question about why they would be trying to gauge public feeling about something they haven’t even thought out themselves. Or it could be that they’re holding their cards close because they expect there will be objections to their vision for the future. Neither scenario is great.

Coupled with the notion that we have too many inpatient psychiatric hospitals is the feeling by state officials that OMH has to do more to support mentally ill people so they can make it on their own. That’s something we in Ogdensburg have known for a long, long time. We see it every day, hopeless, lost and frightened on our streets.

It’s clear that the state’s outpatient mental health services are woefully inadequate. It’s also clear that the state will have to do a heck of a lot to turn that situation around, especially if inpatient treatment options are reduced. Again, details for what OMH has in mind to bolster outpatient services are nowhere to be found.

I hate to be cynical, but let’s face it. OMH does not have the best track record for being up front with the public about its plans. Back when the Sexually Violent Predators Unit was established here, getting any answers from the state about how it would come about was like pulling teeth. As somebody who pays attention to history and tries to learn from it, I don’t expect that the meeting they will hold here May 15 - from 10 a.m. to noon at the Unity Center on the psychiatric center campus - will yield many answers to the questions we have.

But what it will do is give us an opportunity to tell the state how we feel about the prospect of the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center closing its inpatient services and forcing people to drive hours to get the care they need. It will give us the chance to tell them how we feel about the evidence we see every day about how lacking their outpatient services currently are.

It will allow us to let them know we’re paying attention to what they’re doing.

We will be at the meeting with bells on. I predict we will have lots of company.

If you can’t make the meeting but you want to weigh in, you can submit comments to OMH online at http://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/excellence/comment_card.html .