Editor's note: City Council approved this extension on Monday, Oct. 30.
City Council last year approved a $2.3 million contract with Servicios de La Raza, an anti-poverty nonprofit that regularly works with the Latinx community in Denver.
The goal of the contract was to provide culturally responsive long-term services to people who are served by the police alternative Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program that sends paramedics and mental health professionals in place of armed officers.
It was an unusual contract for the city: instead of delegating the exact use of those dollars, the contract gave Servicios the leeway to figure out where the money was best needed and partner with grassroots organizations to make that longer-term care happen.
One year into the contract, Servicios de la Raza is asking the City Council for a four-month extension the organization needed about six months to set up, preventing it from spending the money it received in the original contract. The Safety and Housing Committee approved the proposal Wednesday, and all of Council will consider the extension in the next few weeks.
City staff said the organization needs more time to fully staff up the program and spend its originally allocated funds, while the city negotiates a new contract.
According to city data, STAR served around 5,700 people in 2022.
Nearly half of those calls involved welfare checks, while others involved a range of concerns like trespassing and calls about disturbances. The goal of the contract with Servicios is to connect those people to longer term care, after an emergency response from STAR.
Since launching in April, the organization received around 300 referrals, and connected nearly 230 people with services, such as case management, mental health and substance abuse support.
Meanwhile, City Council has asked Mayor Mike Johnston to increase funding for the entire STAR program.
On Friday, Councilmembers asked Johnston for nearly $7 million to expand the program again. It's not clear how much of that would go to STAR specifically, versus the follow-up program in partnership with Servicios.
Tristan Sanders, behavioral health director for the city, said the STAR expansion has been successful so far, but that staffing has taken longer than expected.
"The expansion efforts in this year did not meet fully what we had intended," he said Wednesday.
At Wednesday's committee meeting, Councilmember Amanda Sawyer raised concerns about money outpacing capacity.
"We are in a very tight budget year, Council has a lot of priorities that we want to fund in 2024, and that means tradeoffs. We haven't been able to get a clear answer from the STAR program whether, if we were to give you additional funding, you would be able to utilize it," she said in the Safety and Housing committee. "If you can't use that money in 2024, we can't give it to you, even if we want to."
