Oak Park continues to move toward an alternate response model for responding to emergency mental health calls and other non-criminal calls to 911.
Last week Oak Park’s village board voted unanimously to direct the board’s finance committee to come up with $472,676 in next year’s budget to fund an expanded relationship with the Thrive Counseling Center and more permanently fund the village’s ECHO (Engaging Communities for Healthy Outcomes) program as Oak Park continues to move towards responding to more non-criminal emergency calls, especially mental health crisis calls, without police officers.
The idea is that armed police officers are not needed for many mental health calls and some other crisis calls and that the presence of armed officers sometimes escalates a situation. The current practice is for police officers to respond first to a crisis intervention call while Thrive crisis workers are staged close by. Once the police determine that the situation is safe the Thrive crisis interventionists move in and take over.
Upcoming changes to the WestCom 911 police dispatch system, which serves River Forest and Forest Park as well as Oak Park, that are expected to be completed late this year, would for the first time allow the dispatcher to send a Thrive mental health worker directly to respond to a non-criminal mental health crisis call.
“When these calls come into 911 we would proactively go out with police, and partner with police then to be present on those calls and the goal would be as soon as we identified that the situation seems be safe and there’s no concerns or anything like that we would then move police along and we would follow up with the work that we do on assessing the clinical needs and what we could do from there,” Sarah Weimeyer, the clinical director of Thrive told the village board at its June 18 meeting.
Jonathan Burch, an Oak Park assistant village manager, said the ultimate goal, which could possibly be achieved as early as next year, is for the 911 dispatcher to evaluate the situation and, if appropriate, send only a Thrive crisis intervention worker to respond to a call without the police being present at all. That goal was supported by Cheryl Potts, the executive director of the Community Mental Health Board of Oak Park Township and co-chair of the village’s Alternative Calls for Service Task Force.
“Police should not be at a mental health crisis response unless there is an immediate threat,” Potts told the village board.
Currently Thrive and ECHO respond to only 0.15%
Next year Oak Park expects to pay Thrive $303,276 for crisis workers and spend $344,400 on ECHO. This year the village is paying Thrive $166,000 annually. Since the ECHO unit was started a few years ago it has been funded as a pilot program by a one-time $1.1 million set aside. Now that the village wants to make the ECHO program permanent, and perhaps expand it in the future, the village needs to fund ECHO in its annual budget. The current police budget includes $175,000 to pay Thrive for the services it already provides so the net amount needed for both programs next year is $472,676.
Burch said that while the village staff are not currently recommending that the ECHO program be expanded next year he did provide the numbers of what an expansion of the ECHO program, which primarily responds to social service needs, would look like.
The expansion of ECHO outlined in the presentation to the board would consist of adding five new staff members to the current three person ECHO team. The additional cost is projected to be just over $600,000 when other expenses are factored in.
Three members of the village board, trustees Brian Straw, Cory Wesley and Village President Vicki Scaman were ready to move forward with expanding ECHO next year while the other four village board members were not there yet.
Village Trustee Derek Eder was interested but wanted more information.
“I’m curious to explore it,” Eder said. “If it’s a true alternative response I’d be interested.”
Trustee Jim Taglia said he was concerned about expanding the program given financial pressures the village is expected to face in the future. Taglia said that while the village’s financial situation is currently good, operating deficits are projected in five years.
“I want to make sure that what we’re going to do is sustainable for 10 years, 20 years,” Taglia said. “There’s no point in getting into something and then having it fail. This board wants everything to be successful.”
But Straw noted that an ECHO program could also save the village some money, presumably on police staffing.
“It ultimately has the potential to be a win, win, long term, for the community providing both better service and, in the long term as we move to an alternative response model, it creates an opportunity for cost savings,’ Straw said.