The Anacortes City Council on Monday, May 18, approved an agreement with Skagit County for the use of a behavioral health co-response grant and heard about how the city’s light-duty vehicle fleet is managed for efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Behavioral health grant
The city council voted unanimously in favor of an interlocal agreement with Skagit County to use a $270,000 grant for a variety of programs intended to better serve the behavioral health needs of underserved residents throughout the county.
The state-funded innovation grant comes from a University of Washington School of Social Work research and innovation center called Behavioral Health Crisis Outreach Response and Education, or BHCORE.
It aims to help fire and emergency medical services agencies respond to mental-health and substance-use crises with multidisciplinary teams.
Steve Monrad, the Anacortes Fire Department’s community paramedic, said the city applied with the intention of using the money to improve crisis response capabilities countywide.
The city received more money than it would have otherwise because it partnered with the county, he said.
“This partnership is a direct result of our involvement with the North Star project,” Monrad said.
Without that public-private partnership, he said, “we wouldn’t have even considered teaming up” on this grant.
“So it’s been a real benefit to be part of that for the city.”
Most of the grant — up to about $192,000 — will be used by the county for several programs.
Up to about $17,000 will be used to provide a motel respite program through the Mount Vernon Police Department’s Integrated Outreach Services team.
“It’s a pilot program … for folks who are hospitalized and don’t have a safe discharge plan,” Monrad said. “This will give them an opportunity to put people up in a motel where they’ll have follow-up from a nurse practitioner.”
Up to about $175,000 will be used for county-led co-response programs and mobile integrated care efforts in Burlington and Sedro-Woolley.
That money will also add mental health professionals who will be able to respond with fire departments throughout the county, Monrad said.
“They will be available to respond to Anacortes and also the rest of the county,” he said. “It’s going to be a real improvement over the crisis response capabilities that we have now.”
The city plans to use about $45,000 to supplement the cost of a social worker through the Anacortes Family Center and about $33,000 to offset the cost of Monrad’s community paramedic position.
Due to budget constraints last fall, the city funded the Family Center social worker position at $30,000 for 2026, half of the full $60,000 annual cost. The grant will cover that and leave $15,000 for the position in 2027.
“The success that we have seen here in town is because of the team that we’ve assembled with the fire department, the police department and AFC,” Monrad said.
“I truly believe that co-response programs and MIH (mobile integrated health) programs are now a fact of life in fire and EMS and police work.”
The grant also requires Anacortes to host an eight-hour behavioral-health response training for firefighters and emergency medical services providers in the region, Monrad said.
“That’s something that our police officers get,” he said, “but, believe it or not, EMTs and paramedics don’t receive crisis response training in EMT school and paramedic school.”
Vehicle fleet
WiL Ludemann, the city’s assistant director of public works, walked the council through an analysis of the city’s light-duty vehicle fleet.
The analysis was prepared in response to an executive order Walters issued in January, which in part directed staff to find ways to reduce and consolidate the fleet to save money amid ongoing budget challenges.
While the city has about 420 pieces of equipment — including excavators, dump trucks, street sweepers and other specialty equipment — Ludemann focused his analysis on the city’s roughly 100 light-duty vehicles such as cars, vans and pickup trucks.
Those vehicles serve 226 year-round employees and 24 seasonal workers, Ludemann said, with police using the largest share — about 40 vehicles — of any individual department.
Through the analysis, Ludemann was able to get rid of two underused vehicles, shift three into the city’s pool of shared vehicles for a total of five and repurpose two underused vehicles for use by other departments.
However, Ludemann said the fleet is generally the right size, meaning the city has the right number of vehicles and the right type of vehicles for its use.
“We didn’t find any major surplus of vehicles that we didn’t need,” Ludemann said. “Moving forward, we’re just going to focus on finding more incremental improvements.”
The city’s fleet is centrally managed rather than being handled by each department individually, Ludemann said. Repairs are generally handled by in-house mechanics, allowing the city to get more life out of vehicles than would typically be expected, he said.
And, before surplussing older vehicles, the city often keeps them temporarily for use by seasonal workers, he said.
“We have some trucks that are getting replaced, but they’re good enough to pick up garbage or go water the flowers down on Commercial a couple times a week,” Ludemann said. “So we’ll keep those through that season.”
As part of his analysis, Ludemann compared three approaches to managing the city’s police patrol fleet, which accounts for about 25 vehicles.
Those approaches included assigning one vehicle to each officer, sharing or pooling vehicles between officers, and allowing officers to take vehicles home each night within a 30-mile radius.
For about 30 years, the city has assigned vehicles to officers, Ludemann said, allowing officers to take their vehicles home if they live on Fidalgo Island. He said he was surprised to learn that that approach is the cheapest of the three.
“I’ve been within the fleet for 26 years here at the city,” he said, “and I’ve always assumed that the pooled model would be the cheapest model we could do.”
While the pooled approach would require only 16 vehicles, Ludemann said more frequent replacement and repair would drive up the annual cost. He also noted that vehicle sharing would have a negative effect on officer morale.
With the assigned model, vehicles remain in service longer because they incur fewer miles per year, Ludemann said. That’s partly because most are parked at the station each night rather than taken home with the many officers who live well outside of town.
Councilmember Carolyn Moulton said she has asked several times in recent years why every officer has their own vehicle.
“Now we know,” she said, “so thank you for really delving into all of this.”
The take-home model would improve morale and aid in recruitment, Ludemann said, but it would have the weakest public benefit because mileage, fuel costs and maintenance costs would be higher.
“We don’t have a lot of people living in town,” he said, “and especially with the fuel costs we’ve been seeing very recently, that makes it much more expensive.”
Ludemann said the city’s fuel costs were $16,000 greater in April than they were in February as a result of recent price increases driven by the war with Iran. As of May 1, he said, the city had spent 44% of its fuel budget for the year.
“It’s a huge cost increase for us right now,” he said.
Walters said police and public works staff have been instructed to avoid idling and excessive trips. Councilmember Marcia Hunt said she’s happy to hear that.
“I have had several members of the public ask me why those trucks are idling,” she said.
The city currently has five electric vehicles and five hybrids, Ludemann said, and the city considers buying electric vehicles whenever it makes financial and practical sense to do so.
“They’re definitely cost-effective,” he said of the city’s current fleet of electric vehicles. “They just don’t fit every use class, so we’ve had to really look at where they fit and where we can use them.”
Electric vehicles would be ideal for police use in many respects, Walters said, but it may be several years before the city identifies a model it’s willing to invest in.
Ludemann said Chevrolet has a relatively new all-electric Blazer for patrol use.
“We don’t want to be the first,” he said. “We’ve been there and tried that, and it hasn’t really worked out that well.”
Ludemann said the city is also saving about $45,000 a year because last year it switched to auto insurance that has a higher deductible of $25,000. He said those savings are being used to pay for vehicle repairs below that deductible threshold.