WOODSTOCK — The McHenry County Board approved borrowing $4 million for a controversial plan to expand the Mental Health Board building.
Board members voted Tuesday, 13-6 with one abstention, to borrow the $4 million in economic stimulus bonds to add 22,000 square feet to the mental health board’s Crystal Lake headquarters.
The vote ends months of debate over the proposal that pitted the Mental Health Board against some of the agencies that it helps subsidize.
“This project is needed now and for the future,” Mental Health Board President Don Larson told County Board members before their vote. “We will not find a better time financially than right now.”
The ordinance puts the decision to borrow in the hands of County Board Chairman Ken Koehler, County Administrator Peter Austin and Finance and Audit Committee Chairman Marc Munaretto. They have a six-month window to borrow the money if two of the three agree that the rates are the most favorable.
The county will borrow for the mental health board expansion through bonding authority authorized under federal economic stimulus legislation.
The bonds encourage lending by giving investors a 45 percent refund of the federal taxes payable on them, which in turn lowers interest rates.
Mental Health Board members and their supporters argued that the expansion was needed because the agency quickly outgrew its 8,067-square-foot location at 620 Dakota St., where it moved in 2003.
The agency rents an additional 10,000 square feet in McHenry.
Opponents accused the agency of far overstepping its mission of funding local mental health groups through a county levy and becoming a bloated bureaucracy of more than 50 employees.
Unlike previous meetings, no opponents spoke Tuesday before the County Board.
Board member Sandra Fay Salgado, R-McHenry, said she voted against the expansion because it sent the wrong message in a bad economy.
Salgado works for Pioneer Center for Human Services, one of the Mental Health Board’s client agencies that opposed the expansion.
“I don’t feel that this is a time when we need to support growth in government,” Salgado said.
County Board members have split along similar lines in the past. A resolution to require the Mental Health Board to pay the county back passed last month by a 13-8 vote, as did an October resolution allowing the Mental Health Board to recoup its planning and design costs from the bonds.
Mental Health Board Executive Director Sandy Lewis said the County Board’s vote would help individuals and their families recovering from mental illness, substance abuse, traumatic brain injury and other problems.
Read the original article from the Northwest Herald.
