Larimer County chooses original behavioral health center site by a split vote - Loveland Reporter-Herald

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Larimer County has decided to move forward with construction of a behavioral health center on the original site southwest of Fort Collins after considering criticisms of the location and the human and actual costs of a delay.

Commissioners Steve Johnson and John Kefalas voted Tuesday to stop looking at other sites and move ahead with design that is underway to place the facility at Taft Hill Road and Trilby Road in Fort Collins, with a goal of breaking ground later this year.

“I think this is the best site,” Johnson said after a 90-minute discussion about the pros and cons of this location and an alternate possibility at 57th Street and Wilson Avenue in Loveland. “I think if other sites were better and took a little more money, that would be money well spent, because we need the best site.”

Commissioner Tom Donnelly, a Loveland resident, did not agree and voted against moving forward at the original site, which he was involved in endorsing early on in the process of building the center.

Donnelly said he changed his mind as more information became available on the cost and challenges of running utilities to the Taft Hill Road site. He also mentioned dust, noise and emissions from trash trucks associated with a nearby waste transfer station and processing facility for the landfill site.

Those do not mix with the ultimate vision for the behavioral health complex, which includes the possibility of supportive housing and therapeutic riding facilities in the future, he said.

“Whatever else we do on this site, whether it’s supportive housing or whether it’s horseback riding, it is going to be adjacent to the transfer station,” Donnelly said. “It’s going to have a constant stream of trash trucks driving right by it. … We haven’t fully considered that. It’s a serious issue. It raises a red flag that there are serious issues about compatibility on this site.

“It’s possible we could have missed this or not given it enough scrutiny,” he said.

Larimer County is spearheading a regional effort to build a behavioral health center with money from a sales tax that voters approved in 2018.

County officials chose the Taft Hill and Trilby Road site in 2017 and pitched the location to voters before the 2018 election. The county has been working on planning and design for that site ever since.

Recently, Fort Collins officials expressed their concerns about the site, which is on landfill property, mentioning environmental concerns as well as their worries about the optics of building a mental health facility next to the landfill.

Larimer County offered Fort Collins officials the chance in July to look for alternate sites, and as a result, four new potential locations were identified. Last week, the commissioners narrowed the possibilities down to the Loveland site at Wilson and West 57th Street and the original site on Taft Hill Road.

On Tuesday, during their meeting, they voted 2-1 to stop looking at any sites other than Taft Hill Road — the location that Fort Collins has criticized.

One reason, mentioned by Johnson, was that this rural setting fits more with the ultimate plan for the behavioral health campus, which in the future could include supportive housing for homeless residents and therapeutic riding facilities.

Donnelly passionately argued that the environmental and utility concerns at the existing site are too great and that the Loveland site would be better suited to the facility. He pushed for the Loveland site and asked his fellow commissioners to, at the very least, delay the decision until Sept. 15 to offer more of an opportunity to thoroughly look at the Loveland site.

Johnson and Kefalas voted against waiting until September to decide.

They said any issues, including environmental and utility concerns, can be mitigated at the Fort Collins site and mentioned the high human cost of delaying construction because it would push back the date the center could open and begin treating people in need.

The county has spent more than two years vetting the original Taft Hill Road site and at least $1 million on design.

The overall cost of the project, if moved, would increase by up to $4.5 million at the Loveland site, according to figures provided by the county building staff.

And county officials said the human cost, too, would be high because changing sites would push back the opening from 2022 to 2024.

Laurie Stolen, the county’s behavioral health director, mentioned increasing suicide rates, as well as crowding at the jail and in emergency rooms due to people not getting the needed treatment. And Kefalas spoke of increasing crisis needs due to the stresses of the coronavirus.

“I would just be real concerned if we were to start over,” Stolen said, “if we were to go back to square one and start over, the delay, the human cost. … We know what our suicide rates are in Larimer County, and they’re not going down. The time is ticking.”

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Larimer County chooses original behavioral health center site by a split vote - Loveland Reporter-Herald
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