Twenty-five beds at a state mental hospital in Roanoke County will continue to sit empty as the region copes with a space shortage in psychiatric treatment facilities.

A request for $2.2 million in state funding to staff the beds on the darkened seventh floor of Catawba Hospital was not included in a budget approved Thursday by the General Assembly.

"It was a bad budget year," said House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, who earlier had expressed support for the proposal. "There was some real interest, too."

By increasing Catawba Hospital's current operating capacity of 110, mental heath advocates had hoped to ease a shortage of psychiatric beds that has sometimes resulted in patients waiting for several days in hospital emergency rooms for a bed to become available.

"I'm very disappointed to hear that," Phyllis Scruggs, president of the Roanoke Valley chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said after hearing the news Thursday.

While $2 billion in cumulative revenue shortfalls complicated this year's budget process, Scruggs said she hopes a regional task force on the mentally ill that made the request will try again next year.

"I'm sure the need is not going to change, so hopefully we can continue to work on this," she said. "Sometimes, persistence pays off."

Last spring, a space crunch in secure psychiatric centers in the Roanoke Valley was so severe that as many as a dozen people subjected to the civil commitment process were forced to wait in Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital's emergency room -- some for as long as three days -- before a bed became available.

"This is unconscionable," the Roanoke Valley Task Force on the Mentally Ill in the Criminal Justice System said in a report calling for additional bed space at Catawba.

Since the problem approached a crisis last spring, staffing adjustments by Carilion at its privately run psychiatric center have reduced the backlogs considerably.

"You will still sometimes see a backup on weekends," Carilion spokesman Eric Earnhart said. "A patient may wait seven or eight hours to get a bed, but that is an improvement over the way things used to be."

But "down the road," Earnhart added, "any improvements that can be made in areas beyond our control, we'd certainly love to see that."

Located in North Roanoke County, Catawba Hospital has 60 beds devoted to geriatric mental patients and 50 for adult psychiatric care. The facility's operating capacity is down from 270 in the 1970s, in keeping with a statewide trend to de-emphasize institutional care in favor of giving patients more independence through community-based treatment.

While mental health issues have been in the spotlight since April, when a disturbed Virginia Tech student killed 32 people and then himself in a campus shooting rampage, problems with the state's system have been known for years.

In its report, the Roanoke Valley task force said more secure beds are needed not just to reduce backlogs in hospital emergency rooms, but also to provide options in dealing with mentally ill people in area jails.

A 2005 study by the Senate Finance Committee found that 16 percent of the statewide jail population was mentally ill. Advocates say many people who need psychiatric care wind up in jail, often on minor charges, where they stay for two reasons: the shortage of beds in treatment facilities, which in turn feeds the rationale that they are safe from harm in a secure setting.

Staff writer Michael Sluss contributed to this report.