About half the $39 million in funding from the sales tax increase would backfill spending on existing programs; the rest would shore up the city’s crisis response system and fund new treatment beds.
Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his plans to allocate a new 0.1-cent sales tax to a slate of non-police public safety programs yesterday, including programs that might otherwise face budget cuts as well as an expansion of existing programs such as Health 99 and the CARE team, which responds alongside police to low-risk 911 calls.
Standing inside Fire Station 10 a few blocks from City Hall on Thursday afternoon, Harrell called the new tax plan part of a “comprehensive approach to investing in both quality, safety and public health as two sides of the same coin and interconnected and not in conflict.” The city council has to approve the tax before it can go into effect…