Some community members, including the former Massey Commission’s managing director, say the inaugural Sangamon County Mental Health Board has to better address the communities it is attempting to support if the board wants to be successful.
Since the Mental Health Board began meeting monthly at the end of May, some of the specific asks have included streaming meetings, having meetings take place somewhere other than the county complex and changing the monthly meeting time.
The Mental Health Board is responsible for disbursing tax revenue to mental health programs in the county through a limited 0.5% sales tax levy (groceries, medication and services are excluded) which the county estimates will bring in roughly $14.7 million in its first year.
The county-funded Massey Commission – born out of then-sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson shooting and killing Sonya Massey in her home on July 6, 2024 – met from September 2024 through the end of 2025.
Kelly Hurst, who served as managing director of the commission, addressed the Mental Health Board at its Aug. 26 meeting and expressed her concerns with how things were starting off. One example she gave was its 3 p.m. meeting time, which she said is at “a highly inconvenient time of day and that you actually could do a whole lot more with the community.”
Hurst also expressed concerns to Illinois Times over the board’s early decision-making, contending “this Mental Health Board shouldn’t have to discover from scratch that compliance is not community or that procedure isn’t trust.
“My concern is that they are busy, very busy, and they are building the room, putting up the walls, choosing the tables and chairs, deciding where everything goes and then they want to invite community in to tell us whether or not we like the decorations,” she said. “If community enters after all of that architecture is settled, then they’re not helping to build the house.”
Specifically, she said the board might not be able to actually engage with community members due to its monthly meeting time and location.
“We ask people to come to the county building – which I understand – that’s a natural place to have it. It is also a place where people who struggle with mental health have a problem coming in. They don’t want to necessarily walk through a metal detector and be surrounded by policing when policing them for their mental health issues was a part of the problem in the first place. We’re asking people to enter into spaces of trauma in order to talk about how we actually mitigate trauma. That doesn’t make any sense,” Hurst said.
She also cited past reports by the Massey Commission and Mental Health Commission as part of a foundation for the board to develop priorities.
“Ultimately, Sangamon County does have a great opportunity that very few communities get. We’ve got a significant public investment; we have extraordinary primary community knowledge; we have existing research; we have relationships built over a long time, not just the last two years but in that work we do; and we have people across this community who genuinely want this to work. We just don’t have to begin from scarcity. We can begin from abundance here,” Hurst said.
Chair Steve Nardulli, a former judge, told Illinois Times he expects the board to change the meeting time, but likely only by an hour or so.
“It appears to several of our board members that a lot of the people who attend the meetings are mental health professionals who are attending during their work day. You make a meeting more convenient for one set of people, (then) you’re making it more inconvenient for another set of people,” he said. “My guess is – and this is a board decision, not a Steve decision – that we might move the meetings back to 4 or 4:30. I doubt that we will move into the evenings.”
Hurst said she noticed multiple employees of Memorial Health, the largest healthcare provider in Springfield by virtually every metric, attending meetings.
Nardulli told the board Aug. 26 he had recently met with Sheriff Paula Crouch, jail superintendent Larry Beck, Josh Sabo of Heartland Housed and the UIS Child Advocacy Studies program. In addition to praising Heartland’s approach to homelessness, Nardulli told the board he expects the sheriff’s office and some UIS researchers to apply for Mental Health Board funding.
The board also plans to help smaller organizations who have less grant application experience by providing seminars that walk through the steps of incorporating a nonprofit, how to apply for grants, and so on.
“We’re pretty much restricted to issuing grants to 501(c)(3) organizations,” Nardulli told IT, of public health organizations,though who those organizations will be is still to be determined.
“We’re still in the learning phases of figuring out where these (services) are going to be directed… if we’re going to be using taxpayer dollars to provide services, we need to be able to make sure, through the collection of data, that the services we fund are being effective.
“It took a terrible tragedy to get Sangamon County moving forward to passing the referendum for the 708 Board – and that tragedy is really much of the basis for where we are going as a 708 board,” he said.
Two-thirds of counties in Illinois have mental health boards – often called 708 boards after the decades-old Illinois bill-turned-law that granted the formation of such boards through a public vote – which approve funding for local social service organizations through some form of tax revenue.
Primary voters approved the sales tax increase and board in March, though it wasn’t a short road to getting on the ballot. After the Mid-Illinois Medical District and Massey Commission formally recommended the idea to the county, the Sangamon County Board sought an additional commission that studied the topic during 2025.
During the Aug. 26 meeting, the board announced that it has received 11 applications for CEO and three for legal counsel. The board deliberated finalists in a closed session.
The board is scheduled to meet again Sept. 23 at 3 p.m. in the Sangamon County Complex, 200 S. Ninth St.
This article appears in 2026 Fall Guide.
