Crisis Response Plan Gets $2M, Subcontractor

The Elicker Administration’s proposed non-cop emergency response initiative has a new name, new uniforms, a new subcontractor charged with sending out social workers to certain 911 calls — as well as $2 million of newly approved federal support.

What the long-delayed project still does not yet have, however, is a new start date for when its pilot program will actually begin.

Top city officials and nonprofit partners offered those updates Monday morning during an hourlong roundtable conversation hosted by U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro in the basement meeting room at the municipal office building at 200 Orange St.

DeLauro convened the discussion to celebrate a $2 million federal grant that she secured for the city to implement ​“crisis response initiatives.” 

That now-approved grant, which DeLauro first touted at a city presser last August, was one of thousands of ​“community projects” — formerly known as earmarks — that were included in the $1.5 trillion spending bill that President Biden signed into law in mid-March. One of DeLauro’s first major moves upon rising to the role of federal Appropriations Committee chair in early 2021 was to restore the practice of earmarks, by which members of Congress agree to support a broader bill in return for it including funding for a project in their home district.

“There’s all kinds of initiatives that local governments, nonprofits want to be involved with. But the issue is: Where do the funds come from?” DeLauro said. Earmarks help solve that problem by ​“providing the opportunities to do some of these projects” without bonding, higher fees for nonprofits, or increased local taxes.

The $2 million earmark at the center of Monday’s roundtable will flow to the Elicker Administration’s long-in-the-works efforts to put together a community crisis response team. That initiative will send specially trained social workers and mental-health professionals rather than cops, firefighters and medics to some emergency calls related to homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health issues.

First proposed in August 2020, a planned pilot program for that initiative has been repeatedly delayed as the Elicker Administration embarked on a months long community planning process. It ran into hurdles finding a subcontractor that will actually provide the employees, training, and vehicles to make such an idea a reality.

In addition to celebrating the $2 million in federal support, Mayor Justin Elicker, city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal, and city Department of Community Resilience Acting Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo offered several additional updates Monday about how this project may be getting closer to an actual pilot launch.

Those updates included:

• The initiative is no longer called the ​“community crisis response team.” Rather, Elicker said, it will be called Compassionate Allies Serving our Streets, or COMPASS. Elicker said the name change came because the word ​“crisis” has ​“some stigma associated with it,” while the name COMPASS is an appropriate symbol for a project designed to ​“help people find direction.” Included at Monday’s roundtable were three posterboards showing off the designs of the uniforms, vehicles, and logos for COMPASS. 

• The city has signed on the local mental-health-support nonprofit Continuum of Care to serve as the lead subcontractor on this project. Continuum of Care President and CEO Patti Walker and Vice President of Acute and Forensic Services John Labienic said that that means that their nonprofit will provide the actual ​“boots on the ground” for the program, under the oversight of the city’s Department of Community Resilience and the project’s main contractor, the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC).

Walker and Labienic said that Continuum of Care has already posted job descriptions for two new hires it plans to make for the project: one for a licensed social worker position, one for a ​“peer with lived experience.” Those two Continuum of Care employees will make up the two-person COMPASS team that will respond to certain 911 calls during the ​“daytime hours” — from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or so — as part of Phase 1 of the prospective pilot. He said Phase 2 will see Continuum of Care hire another social worker and another ​“peer” to staff a late afternoon/evening second shift, and a third phase will see yet another two people hired to staff an overnight third shift.

In addition to providing staff, training, and vehicles for COMPASS, Labienic said, Continuum of Care will also make available the nonprofit’s existing ​“crisis programs” — that is, housing and case management services so that people whom COMPASS encounters through its 911 responses do not necessarily have to be directed to the hospital emergency room. Labienic said that Continuum of Care currently has 26 beds spread out across New Haven as part of these ​“crisis programs” — nine beds through a contract with the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, nine through a contract with the Veteran Affairs administration, and eight for patients with commercial insurance.

• Dalal and Sosa-Lombardo said that the city has already submitted a proposed contract to the Board of Alders that would allow the city to formally partner with CMHC and Continuum of Care to finally get this COMPASS pilot off the ground.

According to an aldermanic submission that the Board of Alders Finance Committee will host a public hearing on on Wednesday, the contract would be between the city and Yale University — of which CMHC is a part. It would run from May 1, 2022 through June 30, 2025. And it would see the city pay ​“Yale University and its subcontractors” a total of $3,513,842 from a mix of general funds, federal earmarks, and federal American Rescue Plan Act aid ​“to implement the Elm City COMPASS Team.”

“The team will respond to a wide range of 9 – 1‑1 calls for service whenever these calls do not include any medical emergencies, violence or criminal activity,” Sosa-Lombardo wrote in a letter of support of the contract. ​“The team will also serve as an additional resource to first responders whenever they request the expertise of the team members.” Click here and here to read documents included along with that aldermanic submission.

Pilot Start? Still TBD

So. When will the pilot program actually begin?

“We don’t have a date nailed down yet,” Dalal said during an interview with the Independent after Monday morning’s roundatable.

He said that there are still ​“a few steps in the process” — the biggest and most proximate one being getting the Yale-CMHC-subcontractor contract approved by the Board of Alders. The Finance Committee will host a public hearing about that contract this Wednesday.

Continuum of Care will also need some time to hire the appropriate staff for the project, he said. He pointed out that the nonprofit has already posted job openings for the Phase 1 social worker and ​“peer” positions.

How long would such a pilot program last, whenever it does start?

Sosa-Lombardo said that the pilot will last for 12 months. Those will include roughly six to seven months of an ​“operations” pilot, where Continuum of Care social workers and peers are actually out in the field responding to certain 911 calls. On either end of that in-the-field portion of the pilot will be hiring and training employees and evaluating the program for potential long-term adoption by the city.

And how many 911 calls does the city actually expect COMPASS to take?

During the roundtable, Elicker and Dalal said that an analysis of pre-Covid 911 calls led them to believe that between 10 and 20 percent of such calls could potentially be redirected to a community crisis response team rather than to the police, firefighters, or medics.

This is all new, Sosa-Lombardo said, so the actual call volume directed to COMPASS during the pilot is difficult to gauge. Some calls could take two to three hours, he said. Others could take 10 to 20 minutes.

“We estimate five to six calls per day” for the COMPASS team during the pilot, he said.

All-Night Need

Most of Monday’s hourlong conversation, meanwhile, saw city officials and nonprofit partners repeat many of the same reasons for starting up such a non-cop crisis response program that they have been describing for the past 19 months.

“There are so many other people in the city that are struggling with substance use disorder, with mental health, with not finding adequate housing.,” Elicker said. ​“And we do not currently have the appropriate tools to respond to many of the challenges that people are struggling with.” This program should help with just that.

Dalal recalled talking with the mayor, Sosa-Lombardo, and others in the summer of 2020 ​“right on the heels of the protests” after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis about ​“how can we take this opportunity … and be responsive as a municipal government.” This idea came up and ​“we felt the time was right to launch this type of program for New Haven.”

Bridgett Williamson referenced her own first-hand experience struggling with heroin addiction as she made her pitch for the importance of such a program — and, in particular, for that program being accessible to New Haveners 24 hours a day.

Williamson is the co-director of the Citizens Project in New Haven for Yale’s Program for Recovery & Community Health. She is also on the community advisory board for the planned new COMPASS program.

Williamson said she’s been clean since 1991. But, she said, when she was ​“up in the streets, there were many times when I wanted to get myself together, but there was nowhere for me to go.” That is, at 3 or 4 in the morning, when she didn’t have any more drugs and had nowhere to spend the night, she’d be ​“just standing there,” asking herself, ​“How can I get help?”

“My gorilla,” she said, referring to her ​“substance abuse issue,” would come on at around 11 p.m. or midnight. That’s when she would feel herself most in need of help.

“It’s very important for people to get services in the middle of the night, and not just in the morning.”