Bob Yates is a regular opinion columnist to boulder reporting lab. He is a former member of the Boulder municipal council. Each month since 2016, Bob has published The Rock BulletinA newsletter on the local government and the community.
Colorado ranks among the country’s worst states for mental health care. According to Forbes, our state is the sixth with the treatment of adults with mental illness. And we are the third time to provide mental health insurance to young people. It’s pretty embarrassing.
Although convincing arguments can be put forward so that federal governments and states provide the mental health care that coloradans need and deserve, do not hold your breath. The federal government – with increasingly bizarre proclamations of the means of providing less Physical and mental health care for Americans – is not the place to seek leadership these days. And a billion dollars in the state budget means that the counties and cities of Colorado are alone for a while.
Thus, the Comté de Boulder commissioners unanimously put a proposal on the ballot this fall that we won to pay mental health treatment for the residents of the county. Admittedly, the tax measure is only a stopgap, intended to last three years. But this will allow the county to finance the treatment that the state and the federals cannot or will not.
The proposal on the ballot is a fairly modest sales tax of 0.15%, which happens to a penny and a half on a purchase of $ 10. But this mental health tax will bring $ 14 million a year for the next three years, allowing the county to finance mental health programs that are hungry for state and federal support.
While we are talking about heart disease or cancer freely, mental illness continues to be a taboo subject, something that others have and that should not be discussed in a polite conversation. Unlike almost all other human diseases, where we are improving treatment, we seem to go back on mental illness. Statistics tell the story:
An out of five Boulder County resident reports poor mental health. Imagine if one in five people had cancer. It would be a health crisis worthy of immediate attention. Mental disease is ignored.
Colorado’s suicide rate has recently passed from the highest 10th in the eighth above. And the suicide rate of Boulder County climbs faster than that of the State. On average, one person per day is brought to an emergency room in the county after trying to commit suicide. Too many people succeed.
The Latinos in Boulder county are three times less likely to receive mental health care than non -Hispanic whites. People who identify themselves like LGBTQ have twice as much depression like the rest of the Boulder County population, with almost three young in four transgenders signaling poor mental health, often untreated. We have people in our community with untreated schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Daily of treatment options, some people self-meditate and then become dependent on these substances, aggravating their problems.
I volunteer at the shelter for homeless All Roads Emergency, and I know that two thirds of non-compliant people have a mental health disorder. The sheriff reports almost the same report among the prisoners in Boulder County prison. We freely complain about people who behave inappropriately or commit crimes, but we cannot deny that many do because their mental illness is not treated.
Thus, we can do one of the two things: we can live with all this depression, suicide and homelessness and crime in the county of Boulder, hoping that one day federal governments or states will come to our aid. Or we can take matters into hand and collect the community funds necessary to treat our colleagues residents of the county. All you need is for us to pass the measurement of the 1B ballot, which will increase the sales tax in the county by 0.15% from January 1, and ending on December 31, 2028.
Now don’t get me wrong. The county plan to spend the money that this temporary sales tax will be perfect is not perfect. The absence of federal and state funding means that we will have to build the plane while we pilot it. We will have to improvise over the next three years, applying the county tax funds to mental health interventions which, in our view, will be very useful. Some will work and others not.
But during these three years, we will make observations and collect data so that, when the mental health sales tax expires in 2028, residents of Boulder County can decide to extend it for a longer period. Perhaps we even designate the financing of a residential mental health establishment, as our neighbors of the county of Large did in 2018.
Taxes are not fun. We already have too much, and many of them are dedicated to bad things. We are not going to fix this overnight. But what we can repair now is the difference in mental health treatment created by our inattention to this growing problem, exacerbated by the collapse of federal and state budgets.
If we want to bring the county out of Colorado and boulder from the uninvable position to have an inadequate mental health treatment, we will have to intensify and pay what is necessary to take care of our neighbors. We had floods and we had fires, and we gathered. We can start again.
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