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A city official told councilors on Monday that Eugene will soon send out a request for proposals for a new crisis-response service. Also, formal negotiations with Springfield over a shared fire department begin next month.
Eugene plans to seek proposals from crisis-response service providers to help fill the gap left when CAHOOTS stopped operating in the city, an official said Monday.
Assistant City Manager Kristie Hammitt, filling in for interim city manager Matt Rodrigues during an evening work session, told councilors that Eugene’s finance team hopes to issue the request for proposals at the end of the week.
It is the first step in restoring a mobile service in Eugene aimed at directing people, often experiencing homelessness and behavioral health issues, to resources beyond hospitals or jail cells.
The city must secure a contract with a new provider after White Bird Clinic and the city stopped operating the acclaimed CAHOOTS program in Eugene in April after more than three decades.
A newly formed nonprofit — Willamette Valley Crisis Care, run by former White Bird Clinic employees — is expected to be one of the bidders.
First responders like police and paramedics are now handling calls that in the past they handed off to CAHOOTS’ two-person units.
The city is requesting proposals for a peer navigation model — often meaning someone with lived experience — that will work to connect people to housing, recovery programs, mental health services and facilitate referrals to psychiatric care and insurance enrollment.
The program would train peer navigators to conduct proactive in-person outreach seven days a week for 10 to 12 hours a day in designated “high volume corridors,” prioritizing people who have had repeated contact with first responders or who have been chronically unhoused, Hammitt said.
She said the city is looking for a provider that can offer a “dispatchable response,” involving manning phone lines and maintaining a dispatch system that ensures timely in-person response and documented interactions.
“The goal is really for our peer navigators to have a chance to build trust within those communities so we can help these folks get to the right services,” Hammitt said.
She said the provider that ends up being selected should prepare monthly reports with data, brief Eugene Springfield Fire, Eugene police and city staff, and regularly meet with community partners like Lane County Mobile Crisis Response and health care providers.
“We’ll continue to work with Lane County and our other service partners to make sure that the hours align with the greatest need and where this particular service model can fit in to serve the most people as needed,” she said.
Timeline for fire department restructuring
Formal talks between the cities of Eugene and Springfield over the future structure of its fire department will begin in February, Hammitt also said Monday.
The councils of both cities have recently voted to direct their city managers to negotiate an agreement to form an intergovernmental entity, a new style of shared department following inefficiencies caused by the department’s current “functional consolidation” structure.
Both cities hope to provide progress updates on the talks to their respective councils in April, she said.
“There’s a lot of enthusiasm to get in the room together and start talking about the work that needs to be done,” Hammitt said.
Hammitt said negotiations will begin with discussions of governance and employee and administrative alignment, which she described as the “big topics” that will establish a framework for future discussions on issues like funding.
Outgoing city manager Sarah Medary recommended that the intergovernmental entity should be governed by a board with seats for elected representatives from both Eugene and Springfield, and additional citizen member seats to balance proportional representation.
She also recommended that Eugene should issue the required two-year notice for dissolving the current functional consolidation between departments if an intergovernmental entity agreement or “significant progress” cannot be made within the next six months.
“We’ll continue to work on meeting the six-month window that was established and directed by council to get this work moving, to get it done,” Hammitt said.
