The City of Eugene is looking to fund a new peer navigation service to help fill the gaps created by the loss of CAHOOTS.
The city published a report this week on its emergency response trends since April. That’s when the mobile crisis intervention program CAHOOTS abruptly shuttered services in town.
The report found that another program, Mobile Crisis Services of Lane County, saw significantly more use in that time. It responds to some of the same types of mental health calls as CAHOOTS used to, and scaled up its hours of operation earlier this year.
Neither police nor fire services reported a surge in calls. But at a press conference Thursday, Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said the types of incidents that officers are often having to handle has changed.
“My patrol officers every single day are responding to things or hearing about things, or having something on their call screen that they can’t get to, that they think is a nice fit for something to fill the gap,” said Skinner.
Eugene-Springfield Fire Chief Mike Caven told reporters these gaps include non-life threatening mental health calls, non-medical transportation needs, general welfare check-ins and youth crisis support.
“There’s a tremendous amount of individual nonprofits or other service providers that exist,” said Caven. “We don’t have a good way of connecting people to those and also doing follow-up care.”
Now, the fire and police departments say they want to invite organizations to apply for funding to provide a peer navigation service.
Skinner with EPD said the scope of this request will be based on what police officers, paramedics and firefighters say they need.
“What I’ll say is over the course of the 30 years of Cahoots being in existence, that the mission of that particular organization and the way we utilize them got really, really broad,” said Skinner, “and we need to be really good about focusing back on what the actual need is out on the street.”
Caven said he’s recommending that the city provide the $500,000 it set aside for crisis transitional funding in its budget.
He told reporters there wasn’t a clear timeline on when the Request for Proposals would be released.
The gap left by the end of CAHOOTS work in Eugene was ultimately filled by Lane County Mobile Crisis Services. But the report said MCS has struggled with staffing, especially after taking on increased responsibilities.
“It’s intense work, and it’s work that can be challenging,” said Olivia McClelland, Behavioral Health Principal Manager for Lane County.
She said burnout rates among mental health workers went up notably during the COVID-19 pandemic nationwide and the industry has yet to recover.
There are also difficulties that are unique to Eugene.
“As this report pointed out, there’s some resources missing in our community that can be challenging for anybody to do this work,” she said.
Chief among them, the lack of a stabilization center. Lane County is working with PeaceHealth to build a stabilization center, but McClelland’s estimate of when it will open is 2028 at the earliest.
But the report’s plan to shrink some of MCS’s duties by contracting out peer support specialists could help.
“We don’t have the capacity to sit with someone for a couple of hours and help them fill out paperwork and maybe take them to an appointment or get them connected to an ongoing service beyond the initial services that we provide for them,” she said.
Another organization mentioned in the report, CAHOOTS operator White Bird Clinic, did not immediately return requests for an interview or comment.
But Willamette Valley Crisis Care, a group that was founded by former-CAHOOTS workers around the time that White Bird ended the program’s Eugene service, did issue a statement to KLCC.
It said that the group is thrilled with the report and “believe it is a direct result of community efforts to bring this essential service back to Eugene.”
The group also expressed interest in the Request for Proposals for a peer support specialist contractor. That RFP is expected in the coming months.
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