Aurora – Aurora Mental Health officials will proceed with a May election to raise sales taxes for mental health needs despite calls from the City Council to drop the effort.
Aurora Mental Health director Randy Stith said Friday that “it wouldn’t be fair to quit now.”
The election has sparked controversy that resulted in Mayor Ed Tauer and all 10 City Council members signing a letter Tuesday asking that the election be retracted.
The City Council in January voted 7-3 to allow the election and the special district but threw out a proposal to move the vote to November. Now, the council says having a May election is a bad decision.
“Even those council members who voted for it expected a well-run election,” Tauer said. “What we have today doesn’t meet that criteria.”
The council lists a number of “troubling concerns,” including:
That the election hasn’t been well publicized.
Voter turnout will be small because the election is May 2 rather than in November.
Four of six polling places are in Aurora Mental Health facilities, giving voters an improper perception.
Campaign manager Sean Walsh said Friday in a news release that “Colorado law doesn’t permit officeholders or anyone else to cancel an election, simply because they are unhappy with the logistics.”
Legislators last year allowed the creation of mental health special districts to pay for services. Aurora’s is the first one to form. To fund it, voters are being asked to approve a 0.2 percentage point increase in the sales tax – about 1 cent for every $5 purchase – to raise $6.4 million a year for mental health needs over the next 10 years.
The tax increase is necessary, said Stith, because government funding has been cut. Other agencies – such as hospitals, police and schools – are dealing with the fallout of underserved mentally ill patients, he said.
Tauer agrees mental health issues are critical to the city but said a broader discussion must take place about how to fix the funding.
“If you have a well-publicized issue on a November ballot, you can do that,” he said. “But this (discussion) is not about the issue of mental health. It’s about the process of the election.”
Stith denies running a “clandestine” campaign, as described in the council letter. He said volunteers have been staffing phones and will begin going door-to-door this week. He said the campaign has $120,000 and plans to spend 80 percent of it two weeks before the vote.
Staff writer Jeremy P. Meyer may be reached at 303-820-1175 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com.
