Fewer than four months after the Santa Fe Fire Department removed EMS captains from its Alternative Response Unit, the program’s behavioral health manager has resigned, stating she feels the unit no longer has the resources necessary to be successful.
Nicole Ault’s April 29 resignation leaves the unit with just five employees, a significant drop from its peak of 13.
Concerns about the status of the unit, which has seen a more than 45% decrease in calls between 2022 and 2025, have circulated in the community in recent months among former employees and local service providers. City officials have sought to reassure residents about its future.
During a discussion at the April 29 City Council meeting, Mayor Michael Garcia said he did not want people to use “scare tactics” when discussing the program.
“There is some conversation going around that the ARU is going away and it’s less effective — that is not the case,” he said.
However, some groups that work with the ARU remain worried.
NAMI Santa Fe Executive Director Betty Sisneros Shover said her organization, which advocates for people living with mental illness, has spoken to city and fire department officials about concerns with some of the staffing changes.
“They’re assuring us that everything’s fine,” she said. “But we’re not sure.”
Reached following her resignation, Ault said it was a privilege to work with the ARU and she continues to believe deeply in its mission. While she emphasized she did not “want to be a whistleblower,” Ault agreed to answer questions from The New Mexican about what led to her departure and her perspective about recent changes.
She said her main priority is hoping the remaining ARU employees receive support and that the program “can continue in whatever way is best for it to continue.”
‘Back to square one’
The Alternative Response Unit was created in 2021 to reduce the pressure on police and fire personnel by responding to low-threat calls that did not require an arrest. Staffers responded to calls through the 911 dispatch system and provided ongoing case management, working with many people with mental or behavioral health challenges.
The program was lauded as a proactive approach to dealing with shifting public safety needs caused by rising homelessness and substance addiction, and has largely been embraced by the public. However, data shows it has responded to fewer and fewer calls since its first full year of operation in 2022, and the city’s park ranger program and contract with Urban Alchemy for street outreach to the homeless have raised questions about duplication of services.
Ault joined the city in 2018 as a contractor for the Mobile Integrated Health Office, and in October 2023 was hired as behavioral health manager, providing clinical supervision for the unit.
Throughout her time at the city, Ault said the team struggled with a lack of administrative support, but she said the January decision by fire department leadership to remove the EMS captains from the unit was “a pretty big blow.”
City officials earlier this year downplayed the impact of the decision, with Interim Fire Chief Scott Ouderkirk describing it to the Public Safety Committee in February as a “small change.”
However, Ault said it significantly changed how the unit was able to operate.
Without a licensed medical provider, Ault said the unit was no longer able to transport patients directly to a hospital and instead would need to call an ambulance, which she said is counterproductive to its original goal “to not have a huge response” to people in mental health crisis.
“After losing EMS captains, we were back to square one in terms of having to co-respond with ambulances and fire trucks and multiple police cars and ladder trucks,” she said, a more resource-intensive approach for the city that could also cause some of their clients to be more reactive.
It also limited the unit’s ability to be first responders to a scene unless it was to an individual they already had a lot of familiarity with, she said, another constraint.
Earlier this year, Ault said the city posted positions for three case managers to fill vacancies in the Alternative Response Unit. After a month, she expected to receive a list of candidates but was told no qualified candidates applied.
She said she was also told by Assistant Chief of Support Services Mario Risso, her direct supervisor, that the department has decided based on data about its number of contacts, the program wasn’t “proving to be robust enough to warrant more case managers.”
Ault said she disagreed, saying the ARU had been struggling with how to accurately track its metrics since the removal of the EMS captains.
It was at that point she decided to actively pursue employment outside the city: “I was very discouraged,” Ault said.
‘Wanting to be supportive’
City spokesperson Peter Olson said the city is planning to hire another licensed clinical social worker to replace Ault and will re-post the case manager positions in the near future. He said part of the problem was applicants not wanting to go out in the field with the Alternative Response Unit vehicles: “That’s part of the job, obviously.”
A photo of Nicole Ault taken from the Santa Fe Fire Department’s Instagram account announcing her 2023 hire as behavioral health manager.
He said the city is exploring the potential of creating a technician position for the unit with personnel who could eventually become certified EMTs along with case managers.
He said the unit’s call volume has not significantly changed since last year, and that it is currently averaging about five calls a day, not including case management.
Kate Field, the director of crisis services with New Mexico Solutions, a nonprofit contracted by the county to operate the La Sala Crisis Center, said Monday that the Alternative Response Unit’s involvement as a partner provider has decreased dramatically in recent years.
In the first three quarters of fiscal year 2024, Field said the Alternative Response Unit transferred 113 people to the crisis center. In the same amount of time in fiscal year 2026, it transferred just 50.
Numbers for its 24/7 mobile crisis unit were even starker. In the first three quarters of fiscal year 2024, Field said the unit partnered with the crisis unit on 93 calls, and just 22 during the same period in 2026.
Field and Sisneros Shover, who provided a written statement to The New Mexican about NAMI’s perspective, said part of what made the Alternative Response Unit special is that staff members had specialized training in how to interact with people experiencing psychosis, suicidal ideation or other forms of behavioral health crisis.
Field said she hopes city leaders will be receptive to feedback from the unit’s partner agencies about its future, and understand concerns are coming from a place of support.
“Nobody wants to speak against the program out of malice, but out of recognizing its true value and wanting to be collaborative,” she said.
A path forward?
The Alternative Response Unit is not mentioned in the city’s $521.1 million budget proposal for fiscal year 2027, which includes a $5 million increase for the fire department. The City Council is scheduled to discuss the budget in hearings later this week.
Olson said Tuesday the unit’s budget remains unchanged from what it is now, but did not have a current dollar figure.
Asked in February for the Alternative Response Unit budget, Interim Fire Chief Scott Ouderkirk wrote the unit and the Mobile Integrated Health Office are both funded out of the fire department’s support services division “and funds are distributed to different divisions to support their needs and requirements as needed.”
Ault said some people in the fire department may have had the perception the Alternative Response Unit was taking away resources from the department as a whole, which she does not believe is accurate.
“I’ve never wanted to see anything taken away from the fire department,” she said. “They’re very needed, and I never wanted to pull anything from them — I wanted to work harmoniously beside them.”
Olson said the city remains committed to the Alternative Response Unit and is looking at “evolving” the program to ensure it is meeting the community’s needs.
“The plan is to make it more responsive,” he said.
Some councilors are also exploring the issue.
At the April 29 City Council meeting Councilor Alma Castro said that a “working group” had been formed on the topic and told The New Mexican on Friday plans were in place for presentations about the ARU to the Public Safety Committee and the City Council.
Olson, however, said no official working groups had been formed and he had no knowledge of upcoming presentations.
Councilor Jamie Cassutt said Tuesday she believed several councilors formed an informal group to learn more about the unit but she was not part of those discussions because of limits on how many councilors can meet without breaking open meetings rules.
Cassutt, who has a public health background, said she believes the councilors should have had a say in the recent changes to the unit because it appeared to change the type of work it is capable of doing.
“To me that’s important, because when we stood up ARU, it was a policy decision,” she said.
She said she hopes the city can use this moment to assess the best pathway forward, including an exploration of what resources the city can realistically offer when it comes to addressing the complex web of addiction, homelessness and behavioral health challenges the unit was built to respond to.
“We know we can’t fix this on our own,” she said of the city. The question is, “what part do we want to play?”