By Carina Julig
The Santa Fe New Mexican

SANTA FE, N.M. — After more than a decade in social work, Adam Lord thought he had found his calling in late 2021 as a case manager supervisor for Santa Fe’s Alternative Response Unit.

The unit often responds to incidents involving people who are homeless, addicted to drugs, have a serious mental illness — or all of the above. While burnout in the field is rampant, Lord was energized by an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable people.

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“I thought I was going to be doing that for a long time,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is … how I’ll finish my journey.’ ”

Instead, Lord resigned just over 2½ years later following a series of changes to the ARU, including staff departures and turnover and what he described as a lack of support for the program from fire department leaders.

“I left pretty defeated,” Lord said.

While city leaders have publicly voiced support for the Alternative Response Unit, Lord and other former employees said officials have stripped it of resources.

During its first full year of operation in 2022, the unit had 13 employees and responded to more than 1,500 calls. In 2025, it responded to just 827 calls — a nearly 50% drop. The unit currently has only five employees, and case managers have just a quarter of their former caseloads. The Santa Fe Fire Department, which oversees the unit, abruptly reassigned its paramedics in January, saying they were more needed elsewhere.

People interviewed by The New Mexican said hostility toward the program among many members of the fire department, along with a lack of understanding about alternative response models among department leaders — none of whom have worked directly with the ARU — have contributed to its decline.

City leaders have downplayed concerns about the removal of the unit’s paramedics, and plans are underway for a potential overhaul. An informal working group has been meeting since June to discuss the future of the unit, which city spokesperson Peter Olson said will be renamed the CARE team.

The changes will support an expansion of the team’s role, he added.

Santa Fe Fire Chief Brian Moya, who is now serving as interim city manager, acknowledged the Alternative Response Unit has had challenges in the past, but he said the program has always had his support.

“I don’t think it should ever, ever go away,” he said.

‘A huge difference’

ARU employees handed out bottles of water, snacks and other supplies to homeless people congregated at De Vargas Park on a recent day, many of whom they knew by name.

At a Speedway gas station earlier that day, Santa Fe police Officer Charles Ovalle, who is assigned to the ARU, helped hand out water to people living in an encampment near there. He encouraged them to call the unit if they needed more help.

Katelynn Clement thanked Ovalle for his kindness: “No officer has ever told us that,” she said.

Jessica Bohannon, an ARU case manager, said helping people who have fallen through the cracks in the social safety net makes the job rewarding.

“That’s what keeps us all here,” she said. “All of our hearts are in it, that’s for sure.”

Then- Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber launched the Alternative Response Unit in spring 2021 to respond to low-threat behavioral and mental health-related 911 calls, with clinicians trained in crisis intervention techniques.

The case managers worked with an emergency medical services captain, a certified paramedic who can conduct medical assessments and transport people to the hospital if needed. A police officer assigned to the unit would assess the scene during a response to ensure safety.

Like other co-responder models across the nation, the ARU’s goals were twofold: to free up police and fire personnel to respond to other 911 calls more suited to their expertise and to provide a specialized response to people in acute crisis, many of whom could become more agitated when meeting with a large emergency response.

“It makes a huge difference,” said Ericka Kidd, a former program manager at Santa Fe Suites, a low-income housing complex with some residents who previously were homeless.

Incidents at the complex had better outcomes when the ARU responded to 911 calls than when police officers arrived, she said: Police could be intimidating and weren’t always trained in de-escalation techniques. Members of the ARU teams “definitely had less judgment and more willingness to connect,” she said.

At its peak, Lord said the unit was making real progress: “People were actually getting the care they needed.”

However, he and other former employees said many workers in the fire department didn’t support the unit or its efforts to improve how the agency responded to people in crisis.

“As we brought those issues up, it I think brought up a lot of fear and a lot of tension and a lot of friction,” said Ramos Tsosie, who joined the fire department in 2016 as a paramedic for another unit known as the Mobile Integrated Health Office. He began working with the ARU after it started in 2021.

He cited an incident in September 2022 in which a man who had ingested fentanyl pills was booked into jail without receiving medical treatment; he died of an overdose.

The city later settled a lawsuit over the man’s death for $1 million.

Tsosie said he believes he and other ARU leaders initially overpromised the extent to which it could prevent the need for other firefighters to respond to behavioral health and addiction-related calls because of the scope of the need, creating resentment.

“It was very hard for us to shake loose from this idea that ‘we’re going to solve all your problems,’ “ he said.

Founder’s departure

Andres Mercado, the Alternative Response Unit’s founder and former battalion chief, said he frequently clashed with other fire department leaders over support for mental and behavioral health calls, which he felt should be more of a priority.

He said the way the unit operated was at odds with the department’s culture — while speed is paramount when responding to fires, heart attacks and other emergencies, those responding to someone in the throes of a mental health crisis often have to take time with the person to make a difference.

Mercado had a contentious relationship with some of the other people in the fire department’s chain of command and resigned in June 2024 after being reassigned to a desk job, which he said he viewed as retaliation for advocating for the Alternative Response Unit. Though he quit voluntarily, he said he felt he was forced out of the fire department.

Lord and several other of his past co-workers agree.

Firefighter-paramedic Garrett Grantham-Philips said Mercado’s passion for the ARU could lead to confrontations, which contributed to conflict surrounding the unit.

“I think that at times he could be fairly combative, and a lot of people didn’t appreciate that,” Grantham-Philips said.

Moya declined to respond to Mercado’s claims of retaliation, saying it would be inappropriate for him to comment on personnel matters.

“I really can’t get in the weeds about former employees, but I want to say that I supported everyone, and I hope that they knew that,” he said in a Thursday interview.

More changes at ARU

After Mercado’s departure, Lord said he tried to build bridges with fire department leaders, but things still rapidly devolved for the ARU.

Although he advocated for one of the EMS captains to be promoted to battalion chief, the fire department instead eliminated the position. The battalion chief had been crucial for giving the unit a voice in the department’s command structure, he added.

Another concerning change was a decision in late 2023 by then- Community Health and Safety Director Kyra Ochoa to reschedule the ARU’s EMS captains to 48-hour shift work, cutting the hours when they were available to the unit and instead making them available for other work in the department.

The gap was backfilled by other paramedics. Lord said some of them made clear they didn’t want to be working with the unit.

Tsosie said the change was a large factor in his decision to retire in 2023 because it demonstrated a lack of support from city leaders for the ARU’s structure, which he and Mercado had carefully designed.

After Mercado’s departure, Lord said he felt as if he were being asked to make decisions better suited for a battalion chief, such as quality control on calls. When he attempted to raise his concerns with department leaders, “I was met with, ‘You will do tasks as assigned,’ “ he said.

After Lord resigned, he hoped the unit could still find its footing within the fire department under the leadership of behavioral health manager Nicole Ault, who was hired in 2023 after working as a contractor with the previous program, the Mobile Integrated Health Office, for five years.

After running the ARU for about two years, Ault resigned in April, telling The New Mexican at the time she felt like the program no longer had the resources it needed to be successful.

Her departure came several months after interim fire Chief Scott Ouderkirk’s decision to remove EMS captains from working on the unit, and to instead pair up two case managers on calls.

Ouderkirk described the shift as a small change and said it didn’t make sense for the department’s most highly skilled paramedics to be going on behavioral health calls that could be handled by other employees.

However, others who worked with the ARU said it dramatically changed how the unit is able to operate: It can no longer provide medical assessments in the field and must now call an ambulance for backup to transport a patient to a hospital.

Several people said that undercut the unit’s original mission, which was to provide a smaller emergency response to people in crisis and reduce the need for other first responders to come to a scene, freeing them up for other work.

‘A very real fear’

Many people inside and outside city government declined to speak to The New Mexican on the record about the Alternative Response Unit, saying they were afraid of running afoul of city leaders or burning professional bridges.

“There is a very real fear from current employees that if they were to take the side of the ARU, there would be a degree of professional retaliation,” said Grantham-Philips, who is leaving the department later this month to go to medical school.

City leaders, meanwhile, have described worries about the program as overblown.

City Councilor Pilar Faulkner, who suggested removing the ARU from the fire department and having it operate as an independent department, insisted the program “is not under attack.”

However, others who worked with the unit said its services have noticeably decreased.

Connor Caputo, the primary responding clinician for Santa Fe County’s La Sala Crisis Triage Center, which frequently teams up with the ARU, said she used to receive calls about clients from the unit multiple times a week or even several times a day.

She hasn’t been in contact with the unit since May or June, she said.

The unit is also handling significantly fewer cases than it used to: Case manager supervisor Matt Martin told the Public Safety Committee earlier this year each case manager is handling about five clients.

Lord said when he was a supervisor, each case manager had about 20 clients, and he and Tsosie had caseloads of at least that many clients as well.

An overhaul

The city for the last several months has had a working group that has been meeting to discuss how to strengthen the ARU. Olson, the city spokesperson, did not disclose names of members of the ad-hoc committee but noted it includes police and fire officials, city leaders and community partners.

Moya said he has not been a part of the working group meetings because he wanted to give other people the opportunity to bring new perspectives to the table.

His top priority for the unit is making its employees feel supported, he said, adding, “The past is the past and I want this program to succeed.”

The rebrand to the CARE team is intended to more accurately reflect the unit’s approach, Olson said in a Tuesday interview, but also to discourage the idea the program is an alternative to a traditional police response, which he said could make it difficult to receive federal grants for the program.

The phrase “alternative response” is detrimental in grant funding at the moment, he said.

He declined to disclose what CARE stands for. He said in a statement Friday the city “would like to unveil the next phase of the program all at once and when everything is in place,” which could occur in October.

Another change would create a two-tiered case manager career ladder, with caseworkers able to move up to a higher-tier position if they become certified emergency medical technicians. One current case manager is also an EMT.

Lord noted a lack of a career ladder was a problem for the unit in the past.

Olson, asked whether EMTs would improve the ARU’s ability to transport patients, said in a statement, “Anyone can take anyone to the emergency room.”

Currently, none of the unit’s civilian employees are in the fire department union.

Asked whether the working group was considering if ARU employees should be eligible to join the fire department union or the union representing other city employees, Olson said the group doesn’t have that authority.

Tsosie’s paramedic position, which was eliminated after he retired, also was not included in the firefighter union, despite requiring completion of the fire academy.

Tsosie said his position’s exclusion from the union effectively made it a dead-end role when it comes to promotions.

The ARU has four vacancies, as it has yet to fill Ault’s position and three case manager positions that have been vacant since before she left.

Olson said the ARU will remain in the fire department and will be expanded, although he did not elaborate on how many positions will be added. New positions will be “data driven,” and recommendations will be discussed during city budget hearings, he said.

Still, Tsosie and others said they fear the people making decisions about the unit are not well-versed in what it needs to be successful; he noted neither Risso nor Ouderkirk has ever worked directly with the ARU.

“If they’re making changes, and they’re deciding the direction for those programs, they need to have the people with ... experience at the table,” Tsosie said.

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