County must pay up on its mental health promise

“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

— Popeye character J. Wellington Wimpy

A year ago, Bernalillo County commissioners played Wimpy to their constituents, asking them to kick in around $20 million a year for mental health services that had yet to be defined.

A year later, they have the first $20 million in gross receipts tax revenue and are still working on that plan for new services to spend it on.

And they are using a small part of that new revenue to backfill a county budget shortfall, and that is not what taxpayers signed up for. In fact, let’s revisit what taxpayers did sign up for: They approved a nonbinding advisory question asking if they would favor imposing a one-eighth of 1 percent gross receipts tax to pay for “more mental and behavioral health services” to provide “a safety net system that develops a continuum of care not otherwise funded” in the state.

It was akin to asking if they would agree to a small tax to help those in crisis and dire need; only a Scrooge would say no.

But it is important to note they did not approve shoveling new money into an old housing program. Yet that’s what they got. The county wasted no time shifting $1.3 million from the new tax revenue to pick up the cost of an existing housing program that helps inmates coming out of jail, freeing up $1.3 million for basic county operational costs. Meanwhile, new program proposals are not even in the pilot phase because staffers are still working with other agencies on how to carry them out.

Commission Chairman Art De La Cruz, a Democrat, is right in saying “it would be a disservice to run out and pell-mell put programs together without them being fully thought through.” So is Commissioner Wayne Johnson, a Republican, who commends “the fact that we are being careful about what we’re going to use those dollars for.”

But it does not change the fact that, in a poor state with a recovering economy, the most populous county has $17 million in new tax dollars and no way to responsibly spend it on what it was supposed to pay for.

The Urban Dictionary explains Wimpy “was a glutton (who) could rarely pay for his habit; (the pay-you-Tuesday) phrase implies the underlying feeling that the person will unlikely actually pay for the hamburger — or whatever — on Tuesday — or ever, for that matter.” The dilemma county officials find themselves in — money in the bank, but no prudent plan to spend it yet — reinforces the point that county officials should not have approved a tax without a plan to deliver services with its revenue.