The Burlington City Council delayed voting on Monday on an agreement that would have the Howard Center take over services provided by a city-run mental health response team.
Councilors said Monday night that they wanted more time to make sure they can track how the nonprofit handles the added work.
The proposed agreement with the Howard Center comes as Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak announced that the city would eliminate a mental health response program housed in the police department next month. Two city staffers will be laid off as a result of the cut, which was first reported by Seven Days.
The Burlington CARES program was meant to expand the city’s ability to respond to residents experiencing mental health challenges and provide support and case management.
Since the team launched last year, it has responded to around 600 incidents, according to a city memo. As of October, it was working with 57 people regularly, the memo said.
But the city struggled to fully staff the program — only hiring two people for what was intended to be a four-person team. And the state grant for the program was set to run out at the end of this year.
“It never came online as envisioned,” Interim Police Chief Shawn Burke told the City Council on Monday. “We were going to have a huge uphill fiscal concern running this program into the future.”
A city assessment also found that there was "substantial overlap” between the services offered by Howard Center and CARES.
Burlington officials had already decided to send $249,000 to the Howard Center to support its street outreach team — a larger amount than previous years, according to a city memo. It also, for the first time, formalized the arrangement with a memorandum of understanding that requires the Howard Center to respond to mental health calls and proactively work with people who need mental health and substance use treatment.
Mulvaney-Stanak told the City Council on Monday that it might be better to house the program outside of the police department.
“It’s not a place where those clinicians can be best suited and supported with a chief of police as the ranking, if you will, overseeing authority,” Mulvaney-Stanak said.
But city councilors were worried that the Howard Center might not have the capacity to take on the additional work and there might be service gaps that emerge during the transition. (A representative from Howard Center told councilors they were not concerned about their ability to handle the additional workload.)
Some councilors also raised concerns that they weren’t properly informed about the mayor’s decision to end the CARES program.
“I’m concerned about the lack of transparency of what happened here,” Councilor Melo Grant said. “I personally found out from someone who was receiving services from the CARES team and was devastated to learn that we were defunding this team.”
The City Council will take up the proposed agreement with the Howard Center at its next meeting on Dec. 1.
