Aurora – Aurora voters in May will be the first in Colorado to decide whether to set up and fund a special district for underinsured mentally ill patients.
Last year, state lawmakers passed legislation to allow the creation of the districts, conceding that many children, families and adults in Colorado aren’t able to qualify for state- and federally funded mental-health services.
Aurora is the first to attempt to set up a mental- health district. The City Council approved the formation of the district and the election, and a District Court judge has approved the May 2 vote.
It will ask to fund the Aurora Mental Health Special District through a 0.2 percentage point sales-tax increase – roughly 1 cent on $5 – to raise $6.4 million a year for 10 years.
The district is needed to help people who don’t have insurance or who are woefully underinsured, said Randy Stith, executive director of the Aurora Mental Health Center.
“We need it just because of the demand,” he said. “We serve about 6,000 clients a year. Even now, the uninsured make up 50 percent of that number.”
Arapahoe County, which includes most of Aurora, had the second-highest rate of uninsured people in Colorado in 2003-04, with 20.4 percent of the county’s population without insurance, according to a report by the Colorado Health Institute. The highest rate was Denver County, with 23.1 percent uninsured.
The state helped approximately 14,000 fewer mentally ill people than it did three years ago, according to a study by the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
“Over the last few years, with the budget crisis in Colorado, there have been major reductions in funding for the mentally ill,” said Carol Ann Reynolds, director of Colorado’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “People who had been getting service” stopped getting it.
When people don’t get care for mental illness, problems spill over into other agencies and become a taxpayer burden, she said. Untreated mentally ill people can impact law enforcement, schools, the courts, health facilities, social services and particularly jails and prisons.
Finding more money to help mentally ill people is a worthy and noble cause, said Aurora Councilman Ryan Frazier, even though he voted against allowing the election and doesn’t support the sales tax.
“It will have an impact on the sales-tax rate,” he said. “Aurora would then have the highest rate in the metro area, if approved.”
In parts of Aurora in Arapahoe County, the sales tax would increase to 8.3 percent.
In the parts in Adams County, the tax would rise to 8.75 percent.
Frazier is also against the May election, believing too few people will vote.
“Wouldn’t it be something if 5,000 people in a town of 300,000 people … were able to levy a tax on the entire city?” he said.
Aurora voters in November didn’t support a property-tax increase to pay for public safety, and Stith knows it won’t be easy to get a sales-tax increase passed for mental-health money. But he and others are beginning their campaign.
“We’re hoping that we can make our case, and this isn’t a property tax,” he said. “My argument is, in general, if Aurora could commit itself to being the single best place to raise a family, we could bring in (more) businesses.”
And, he said, the best community includes fair and available mental-health care for everyone.
Staff writer Jeremy P. Meyer can be reached at 303-820-1175 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com.
