County needs to renew mental health tax

Small levy finances drug and mental health treatment and better policing; commissioners should put aside their hesitation

This decision should be a slam dunk.

Cowlitz County’s mental health tax will expire at the end of the year unless the Cowlitz County commissioners renew it — as they should.

The 0.1 % sales tax costs consumers a penny on a $10 purchase, or $1 on a $1,000 purchase. It raises about $2.5 million annually. 

By law, the money only can be used for mental health and drug addiction treatment. 

The tax provides major funding for Cowlitz County’s drug and mental health courts. It finances drug and mental health treatment for Cowlitz County Jail inmates. It funds the sheriff’s department behavioral health unit, which responds when individuals are in crises that call for specialized training.

Cowlitz County Commissioner Arne  Mortensen said at a recent meeting that he was “conflicted” over renewing the mental health tax, saying that even though it’s small its still another incremental burden on taxpayers.

I get his point. But this is a tax that saves money and prevents tragedy. 

Study after study has shown that drug court, for example, sharply reduces criminal recidivism, saving future costs to prosecute and jail repeat offenders. Adam Pithan, manager of the Cowlitz County Therapeutic Courts, estimates that about 80% of drug court participants don’t reoffend over a three-year period following completion of drug court. 

And the tax saves lives. It is well known that a huge percentage of jail inmates are drug abusers. Treating them helps reduce future crime and homelessness and returns offenders to productive lives.  

Most recovered addicts will tell you that they could not have reformed without the accountability furnished through programs like drug court. To think most of them can cure their own addiction is as naive as Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” campaign.

Money from the tax enables the sheriff to dispatch trained specialists when police confront subjects in mental health crises. This will help avoid police shootings, sparing lives of people in distress and the trauma they cause for officers and the community. 

I wish such specialists had been available when an escalating confrontation led Kelso police in 2001 to fatally shoot Daniel Flannery in what they called an act of self-defense. At the time, police said they had been unaware of the teenager’s mental health problems. 

If commissioners don’t renew this tax, they need to let the public know how they will continue to support these successful programs.  What would they cut elsewhere in the general fund to pay for them — or where would they get the money to pay for a jail population that will inevitably rise without them?

One more thing: It’s popular for opponents of gun regulation — which include Mortensen — to attribute the rise in mass shootings to mental health problems. We have a mental health crisis, not a gun crisis, they say.

Putting aside debate about gun regulation for now, it would be disingenuous to make this assertion while undercutting programs that address this community’s need for mental health and drug treatment. (This is also why, to be consistent, gun rights advocates should reverse their opposition to  “red flag” laws that make it easier to take guns from people suffering mental health problems that make them a risk to themselves and others. But that is another topic.)

The mental health tax came into being because traditional “get tough-on-drugs” policies did not work and that the county, like the rest of the nation, has a drug crisis that needed a new approach through treatment and counseling.

No one likes taxes. But letting this one expire would cost taxpayers more in the long run and make the community less safe and livable. It would be pennywise and pound foolish.

The commissioners should not hesitate to renew it.