State Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson

Allowing people to fall back into the abyss of untreated mental illness is cruel, wasteful and sometimes extremely dangerous. But this is the inevitable result of state budget cuts that are shredding our mental-health safety net.

This situation is not looming somewhere on the horizon. It’s here now. Washington has already slashed more than $85 million from vital mental-health services and the consequences are being felt across our state.

The Washington chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI WA) is rightly sounding alarms: thousands of vulnerable citizens are suffering catastrophic consequences as budget cuts drive more mentally-ill persons into our streets, emergency rooms and jails.

Besides NAMI, hospitals, social workers, prosecutors, police, and many others are seeing the ugly results of slashing treatment and support for people who are struggling to keep their mental illness under control. They’re scared it will soon get worse, because the state budget crisis may soon cause even deeper reductions.

But there is an alternative.

Forty-four Democrats in our House of Representatives are calling for a statewide referendum that asks voters to end sales-tax preferences for out-of-state shoppers and dedicate the revenues to save mental-health services for Washingtonians.

The referendum would raise an estimated $83.7 million from nonresidents—enough to restore nearly all of the state mental-health funding lost since 2009.

Washington is the only state other than New Mexico that makes residents pay sales taxes while nonresidents pay none. The crisis in mental-health funding shows we can no longer afford to excuse nonresidents from paying the same sales taxes the rest of us pay.

We’ve all seen recent examples of mentally-ill persons who have fallen through the safety net. Legislators are seeing other consequences that aren’t as visible.

We’re hearing from parents about suicidal youth who cannot get treatment because local public mental-health services disappeared. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Washington youth between the ages of 10 and 24, claiming two young lives every week.

I’ve heard moms cry in relief when their mentally-ill son or daughter was locked up in juvenile-justice institutions, because it meant their children would finally get treatment for their illness. More than 60 percent of the youth in our juvenile-rehabilitation facilities have some form of mental illness.

While only a tiny percentage of mentally-ill persons are violent, those who are can explode into horrifying random attacks if they don’t get treatment in time. In Seattle, Shannon Harps was knifed to death, and Joseph LaMagno was hacked to death, by complete strangers who lost control to their illness.

The loss of public funding for mental-health services couldn’t come at a worse time. Layoffs, home foreclosures, and skyrocketing number of uninsured citizens are dramatically increasing the need for publicly-funded treatment as the supply shrinks. We are beyond the breaking point.

The answer is to pass the mental-health referendum.

Trying to save money by cutting funding for mental-health treatment never works. It just pushes even higher costs into courts, jails, shelters, hospitals, and the future.

We’re seeing it now. That’s why NAMI Washington, SEIU Healthcare 1199NW, the Washington state chapter of the National Association of Social Workers and many others leaders in mental health support House Bill 2087 and the mental health referendum it proposes.

I’m aware that some businesses support the sales-tax break for out-of-state shoppers, but unequal tax treatment is wrong even if some businesses like it, especially when we can’t afford it.

Readers of the Times can help to prevent tragedies and save lives by telling their lawmakers to support the mental-health referendum.

Saving essential mental-health treatment for state residents is more important than continuing preferential sales-tax treatment for non-residents.

State Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle) chairs the Health and Human Services Appropriations and Oversight Committee in the House of Representatives, and is the prime sponsor of House Bill 2087.