Naperville Township on track to levy $800,000 for 708 board, a tenth of the maximum amount possible
As Naperville Township prepares to levy property taxes for its 708 Mental Health Board for the first time, decision-makers say they are staying intentionally prudent.
Township officials are expected to OK an $800,000 levy on behalf of the board, far less than the maximum $8 million amount they could’ve requested.
The austerity was a measured decision, officials say.
“(We) have a duty to determine what needs are in the community and then to find a pathway forward to responsibly provide for that,” Naperville Township Assessor Matthew Rasche said.
“In determining what this … budget should be, we wanted to make sure that it was an amount sufficient to do some demonstrable good in the community without being so much that we wouldn’t know how to spend it.”
Naperville’s community mental health board is still a relatively new and exploratory venture, Rasche said. Voters, by referendum, approved creating the body just over a year ago.
Dozens of mental health boards service communities, municipalities and townships across the state. Governed by the Illinois Community Mental Health Act, the boards use property tax funds to improve local behavioral health services, including those tied to mental health, developmental disabilities and substance abuse.
When asked if they wanted a Naperville version on ballots last year, nearly 60% of voters in the township said yes.
The approved referendum also allowed Naperville Township to levy up to 0.15% annual property tax that would serve as its mental health board’s source of revenue. Imposing the full amount would yield about $8 million but the body doesn’t need that much, Rasche said.
“This is our first year,” he said. “This is inaugural. … We wanted to be very judicious with the taxpayer funds and to not get ahead of our skis.”
Rasche is one of nine members on Naperville Township’s mental health board. Other members consist of local mental health professionals, community volunteers and two other township officials, including Supervisor Eddie Bedford.
The group has met intermittently since forming. According to Bedford, meetings “have been very, very productive.”
“(We’ve) had lots of conversations so far about where we can go and where we should go,” he said. “And then a lot of discussion on what the levy should look like.”
Bedford said it was, for the most part, a unanimous vote to seek $800,000.
“The bottom line is that we could have levied up to $8 million,” he said. “(But) the township itself functions on $3.6 million. To levy $8 million, I think the taxpayers would have come after us like crazy.”
With the amount requested, the average township homeowner will see their tax bill go up about $21.
“I think (the $800,000) is a good starting point,” Bedford said.
Final levy approval is to be made at the township board’s Dec. 12 meeting. State law requires that taxing districts file tax levy documents with the county clerk by the last Tuesday in December, which this year is Dec. 26.
Bedford says Naperville Township is “right where we should be’' in developing a mental health board. That’s despite the board’s future being uncertain just a few months ago.
In August, concerns surfaced that not only Naperville’s referendum, but those establishing mental health boards in several other suburban communities were invalid because they didn’t include certain language and details required by state law. The technical error jeopardized local governments’ ability to collect revenue for their mental health board programs next year.
Last month, however, Illinois lawmakers validated the questioned referendums with Senate Bill 690.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the bill Nov. 17, according to Illinois Senate Democrats communications specialist Erin Carney. It went into effect immediately, she said.
“We were very sensitive to the issue that was happening downstate,” said John Waller, Naperville Township trustee and a mental health board member.
“They took it just about to the wire (in getting it passed). It would have been a real time crunch if they had taken it any further. … We convened a special meeting less than a week after they made that decision so that we could get this whole process going and make sure we were doing the right steps.”
Still, even while confusion was being worked out, Waller and Bedford resolved that “we were going to keep going until someone told us not to,” Waller said.
“If we put a pause on things, then you just stopped all the momentum going forward,” he said. “It just defeats the purpose. If the legislature was going to tell us to stop everything, we were prepared to do that. But we also wanted to make sure we were following our plan.”
With the obstacles cleared, Waller said he and other board members are now working towards developing a one-year and three-year plan for how they can best allocate tax revenue. The board plans to engage with local mental health organizations to ensure funding goes where it is most needed, he said.
“I think we need to reach out to (those partners) just as a starting point to ask (them), ‘Where are your gaps? Where are your shortfalls? In the best of all possible worlds, if you could expand your mental health programs, what would that look like? And how could we help you get there,’” Waller said. “That’s going to be our focus.”
