Pontiac — An Oakland County program aimed at curbing drug overdoses and mental health crises is at risk of ending if the sheriff’s office doesn’t get hundreds of thousands of dollars by the end of September.
The sheriff’s Crisis Response Unit (CRU) consists of one sergeant and two deputies that work in partnership with the Oakland Community Health Network to provide “referral to applicable services and enhanced response to persons in crisis,” according to the county’s unit description. The members of the team identify people in need from calls for service dealing with substance abuse and follow up with them as well as their friends and family to connect them to resources.
In 2025, the Oakland County Commissioners funded the program through Fiscal Year 2026, ending Sept. 30. They made the move after federal money that funded the program was cut in the first half of 2025, said Commission Finance Chairwoman Gwen Markham.
This year, they’re faced with the same dilemma.
“If you come up with the money, we still have those positions. But we don’t have the money in our budget to fund those positions,” Sheriff Mike Bouchard told the commission on Aug. 4.
The price tag to fully fund the three employees for the next fiscal year would be “in the range of $250,000,” said Markham. The Novi Democrat said commissioners will “probably” fund it for another year.
In the event that the commissioners don’t fund the program in the budget, the sheriff’s office has applied for a $375,000 grant from the United States Department of Justice to keep the money coming. But the federal government hasn’t approved that yet, and Bouchard said he can’t rearrange the OCSO’s responsibilities to keep the program going.
“Ultimately, we don’t have bodies sitting around. We run very lean, so we don’t have people where we can say, ‘Oh OK, we can just take that person and put them there.’ Because whatever they were doing then doesn’t get done,” said Bouchard.
Speaking to the success of the CRU, Bouchard said the team visits people who have been given Narcan to combat overdoses and work to connect them with aftercare. He said the team went to one home to follow up with someone that had been saved, found they had overdosed again, “and saved his life again.”
Commissioner Angela Powell said the CRU would be useful because of an influx of homelessness in Oakland County cities like Pontiac and Royal Oak.
“This is a unit that is changing lives, it’s reducing the number of people we have to put in jail, and it’s bringing the resources to them, to help them,” said Powell, a Pontiac Democrat.
“This is a unit that’s helping us and it’s helping our officers. They don’t have to deal with that. They’re already dealing with a lot of other stuff,” she said.
Commission Vice Chair Marcia Gershenson, a West Bloomfield Democrat, said multiple department heads the commissioners have spoken with have mentioned the value of the CRU.
Asked how the county would fund the CRU for another year, Chairwoman Markham said the commissioners were “in discussion” about where the money would come from. But she also emphasized that they want to fund the program.
“We think it’s important,” said Markham. “It’s working.”
mbryan@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Future of Oakland Co. sheriff’s crisis services program uncertain
Reporting by Max Bryan, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Max Bryan, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
