The Sangamon County Mental Health Board made progress at its first public engagement session by beginning to hash out priorities to be included in the board’s upcoming one-year plan.
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, and possibly more, chair Steve Nardulli said Oct. 22.
“The good news is those financial projections were based upon 2019 and 2020 numbers and there will actually be some few million dollars more,” he said. “Each year, every local mental health board is directed to submit to its governing body – in the case of Sangamon County, the Sangamon County Board – a written plan for a program of community mental health services and facilities for persons with a mental health with a mental illness, a developmental disability or a substance use disorder.”
The board is not expected to disburse funds any time soon, but during the study session, board members outlined what they see as areas to prioritize.
“A lot of us are on the same page with why we’re on the board and what we believe in and where we’re headed,” said Bill Moredock, president of Sacred Heart-Griffin High School.
“I’ve been involved in the mental health community in this area for the past 36 years and as a clinical psychologist, I’ve witnessed a dramatic shift in two areas over these years,” he said. “No. 1, the need for mental health services has increased greatly, particularly in children and adolescents and No. 2, the lack of access to timely, effective mental health resources is alarming.”
Moredock, citing various statistics around poor mental health among youth, expressed an interest in expanding mental health support for children and schools.
“In actuality, not all kids who are struggling with these type(s) of things get a diagnosis,” he said. “Children and adolescents need access to preventive programs and psychiatric and psychological services in our community.”
Outcomes
The board reviewed final recommendations from two temporary county-funded directives, the Massey Commission and the Sangamon County Mental Health Commission, that formally suggested the idea of adopting a county Mental Health Board. The board also reviewed the Forward Report, which was written around 2020 but not adopted.
“When I sat down and read it, I was struck by how pertinent and timely the findings and the recommendations of the Forward Report were now, even six years later. I suspect that the data has not changed very much between then and now,” Nardulli said.
Board member Jennifer Douglas, re-entry coordinator for the Illinois Department of Corrections, rebuffed that approach.
“The Massey Report and the (other) reports are important, but what are we going to do about it now? Because what those numbers look like in 2020 do not look the same that they look now – parents are losing their jobs; it’s not only just kids (but) now the parents are also facing mental health (problems),” she said.
David Racine, former executive director of the Center for State Policy and Leadership at University of Illinois Springfield, argued that outcomes will be the only way to assess the board’s impact.
“We should be paying for outcomes and deciding what outcomes we want to achieve to come to the basis on which we begin thinking in a more specific, concrete way about collaborations that are going to be to achieve those outcomes,” he said.
Nardulli and others responded by saying community members, rather than unelected board members, should be setting benchmarks.
“We need to let the communities tell us what outcomes they’re looking for,” he said. “We should not be the ones going into the community and saying, ‘These are the outcomes you should be striving for.’ Let them come to us, then we should give them access to expertise to help them define their outcomes.”
Douglas and other board members also stressed that conditioning the disbursement of funds to “unrealistic” outcomes could yield faulty results and ultimately not help the board’s broader goal of increasing mental health services.
“We don’t want to have a cookie-cutter response as to what an agency says that they’re going to do. ‘I’ll reduce recidivism’ or ‘I’ll reduce homelessness,’ but what does that look like? ’Cause I’m going to tell you all right now, homelessness – I work with the population coming from facilities – it is insane the numbers (of) individuals who do not have housing,” Douglas said. “There’s DCFS kids now that are sleeping in the office because there’s no site beds that will take these individuals.”
Options
Board members repeated the idea that the board won’t have enough funds to address every issue, but there are still proven programs to immediately consider in addition to the need to build a “countywide response framework” for nonviolent mental health emergency response.
“Every report has referred to a 24/7 low barrier shelter with a sobering unit and that’s best practice,” said Janice Gambach, former CEO of Memorial Behavioral Health. “That requires a lot of organizations to get together on it to find out what we need – at least this first year, figure out what the game plan is going to be with a number of different organizations that should be involved, so that’s No. 1 and most important.”
That’s a model deployed in other countries fairly routinely.
Kingston, Ontario, which is slightly more populated than Springfield, has a similar setting – the Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment Hub that’s open 24/7 and houses multiple local social service programs. Ontario has 29 of these HART Hubs, largely government-funded.
Kingston’s HART Hub was previously the Integrated Care Hub, also run by a group of social service organizations, with an annual budget of roughly $2 million (USD), according to Kingston news media.
Executive director Tatyana Gardner and others underlined the importance of collaboration among providers.
“You can’t come to this board (and) ask us for funding saying you want to make these changes, but yet we’re trying to sit down with you and have these conversations and you’re not interested,” Gardner said. “Steve and I have always said collaboration for this funding is going to be extremely important.”
“In my mind, it’s going to be a condition of funding,” Nardulli said.
“It’s easy to say that you work with an organization. You might’ve been to a meeting, you might have had to talk with someone, but saying that you actually have a partnership, there should be an actual agreement,” said Michael Gaines, corrections coordinator for the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Nardulli also expressed an interest in supporting Sangamon County Jail, but only through specific means.
“I would be opposed to providing the sheriff with a grant that simply enabled the sheriff’s office to hire additional staff. I want somebody in there from outside of the jail who’s providing (services),” Nardulli said.
“One of the things we may want to consider is bringing somebody in from a non-government agency to take a look at the Sangamon County Jail and evaluate the way in which they operate with regards to the people that are incarcerated there, suffering from illness. I’m not talking about bringing somebody in from the Administrative Office of the (Illinois) Courts or the Department of Corrections, both of whom provide those kinds of services, but bring somebody in from completely outside of the system,” he said. “I broached that subject with the sheriff and she’s open to it.”
Sangamon County Jail failed all nine IDOC inspections from 2017 through 2025, according to Illinois Answers Project.
During public comments, County Board member Reggie Guyton asked the board to act with urgency.
“I see a lot of divided efforts, and I see us all trying to bring things together,” Guyton said. “We are running out of a certain amount of time. Every day, there’s harder things happening where we’re dealing with an increase of people who are literally struggling to meet ends.”
Others including Austin Randolph, president of Springfield’s NAACP branch, and Beth Langen, former Massey Commission work group member, asked the board to be equitable in its approach.
The Mental Health Board’s next official meeting is set for 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 28, at Sangamon South Auditorium, 300 S. Ninth Street.
