DAYTON — A 153-year-old tradition will end this summer when the state closes the inpatient facility for the mentally ill on Wayne Avenue once known as Dayton State Hospital.

As part of a plan to cut more than $733 million from the state budget, Gov. Ted Strickland announced Thursday that the Ohio Department of Mental Health will close the Dayton campus of Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare at 2611 Wayne Ave. by July 1.

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"We've been there for 150 years plus, so it's very sad for us all," said the department's deputy director, Jim Ignelzi.

The 110-bed hospital serves people in 14 area counties with a staff of about 200. Staff will be offered early retirement incentives and the option to transfer to another state hospital, but there could also be layoffs, said department spokeswoman Amy Cooper.

There will be no cuts in the funding for services the state provides to the county mental health boards, but with the closing, inpatients will be transferred to state hospitals in Cincinnati, Columbus and Toledo, she said.

"It just seems like the people we're trying to serve keep getting the short end of the stick," said Joseph Szoke, executive director of the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Montgomery County.

He said visitors will have farther to drive, as will county sheriff deputies transporting patients placed at the hospital under court order.

"The state may be saving money, but the community sure isn't," Szoke said.

Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin said she's troubled by not only the loss of jobs, but the impact on people with mental illness.

"Many of the issues we face in Dayton, including the homeless situation, are related to mental health," McLin said. "How do you fight the state, when they are doing what they have to do in these trying economic times?"

State Rep. Clayton Luckie,

D-Dayton, said he is "disappointed and disheartened" about the closing, and that his office will work to help families affected by the closing.

"I understand that these are difficult decisions in the face of this national economic slump, but I still feel for the workers and the patients affected by this closing."

The institution has been in decline for decades. Opened in 1855 as the Southern Ohio Lunatic Asylum, it was later known as Dayton State Hospital and Dayton Mental Health Center.

The facility has been reduced from 2,000 patients and 77 buildings on 1,000 acres in the 1960s to 110 patients on about 100 acres today. New drug therapies and efforts to treat people in less restrictive outpatient settings have slashed the rolls.

The state has gotten rid of most of the hospital grounds, often for a nominal fee.

The distinctive main building at the intersection of Wayne and Wilmington avenues is now a retirement center, the hospital farm is now Kettering's Miami Valley Research Park, and other hospital land is now the site of private homes and Hospice of Dayton.

The department is donating almost 50 acres of the 100-acre hospital property to the Dayton Public Schools as the site of a reconstructed Belmont High School, Ignelzi said.

He said the department will be working with the city of Dayton, the schools and Montgomery County on a reuse for the remaining 50 acres.

"I have no doubt that the state will bounce back, but when it does I hope (officials) will look back at the price people have paid, so that the people who are sacrificing now can at least be made whole."