The Legislature showed a level of commitment Thursday to helping Nebraska children with mental or behavioral health issues, advancing a safe-haven related bill from first-round debate.

The bill (LB346), which advanced on a 36-0 vote, would establish a 24-hour crisis hotline, peer support to help parents navigate the mental health system and help for families who adopt former state wards or become guardians.

This help for families, and another bill introduced by Sen. Annette Dubas of Fullerton that would fund children's mental health services, grew out of the response to a safe haven bill passed last year. That bill allowed parents and guardians to drop off any child up to 18 at a hospital.

Thirty-six children were left at hospitals before the bill was changed in a special session to address its original intent to save the lives of newborns whose parents abandon them.

"The eyes of the world were on us last year," Dubas said. "(Safe haven) pointed out very important issues many of us were not fully aware of."

Sen. Tim Gay of Papillion, who introduced the bill, said the hotline and other services were a starting point.

But as debate began, he and others were still trying to nail down the $5 million funding for programs in the bill. They knew coming into the session that funding was going to be difficult, Gay said. The state's financial picture is in flux.

The original idea was to find that money in other programs that weren't as high a priority.

"We're still in that process and don't exactly have that down," Gay told senators.

The estimated cost of the hotline, expected to get about 1,800 calls a month, would be $1.7 million a year, according to a fiscal note attached to the bill.

The peer support program, called Family Navigators, would cost $1.05 million annually.

Post-adoption and post-guardianship services would also cost about $1.5 million a year. An evaluation process and other details round out the costs.

An amendment to the bill would require that trained professionals staff the hotline, and that an evaluation of the programs be done to see how they are working.

Omaha Sen. Gwen Howard, who made LB346 her priority bill, said the evaluation would give the state information on what services are available and what services are not.

Lincoln Sen. Amanda McGill, who headed a legislative task force to address the needs of children with mental illness, said she supports the hotline bill, but the Dubas bill is also an important need. Once families call the hotline, they need someplace to go for help, she said.

The safe haven issue showed many families felt they had to make their children state wards to get them help. Otherwise, they couldn't get their children into some programs.

McGill is concerned that if the money for programs in the bill doesn't come through, the state will raid the mental health regions to fund the hotline. It's the regions that are trying to help these kids to avoid crisis, she said.

"We need to be helping them when they are 6 and 7 years old," she said. "We need to do whatever is necessary to fund an increase in these (regional) programs."

Gay said only a minimal amount would be taken from regional programs. Many of the six regions have their own hotlines, for example, he said, and maybe there should be just one statewide.

He has held back on one of his own bills (LB661) in the Health and Human Services Committee that was expected to provide some savings to the state, to make sure savings would not lead to more costs in the future, he said.

"We will continue to work together to find the funding," he said.

Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.