Eureka crisis response team expands to unincorporated Humboldt County areas

Mental health and substance-use crises in Myrtletown, Cutten and Pine Hill are now being folded into Eureka’s city-run response network, a change meant to keep the right team on scene faster while freeing county crews to cover Humboldt’s farthest reaches.

Crisis Alternative Response Eureka, known as CARE, signed a contract in March with the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services’ Behavioral Health Branch to serve the unincorporated areas around Eureka. For people in those neighborhoods, the practical difference is that crisis calls can now be handled by CARE instead of relying as heavily on traditional law enforcement or the county’s Mobile Intervention & Services Team, which has been stretched across a much larger map.

That map matters. MIST covers a broad swath of Humboldt County, including places where responders might be dispatched from Shelter Cove in the morning and Hoopa later the same day. By taking over a slice of the workload closer to Eureka, CARE is expected to give MIST more room to focus on distant communities and reduce the strain on sheriff and police responses in lower-acuity behavioral health calls.

CARE has been building toward this role quickly. The city says the program has operated since January 2023, began responding to some 911 mental-health calls without police in 2025, and moved to seven-day-a-week service by the end of February. Eureka also says the new county partnership makes CARE part of Humboldt’s 24/7 mobile crisis network, aligning the city team more closely with the around-the-clock model California designed for Medi-Cal mobile crisis services.

Jacob Rosen, CARE’s managing clinician, said the expansion should add about 10,000 to 15,000 people to the team’s service area, including several residential mental health facilities. That scale-up will be measured not just by how many calls CARE can absorb, but by whether those calls are resolved without unnecessary emergency room trips, hospital holds or police involvement.

CARE’s early numbers suggest the model has already found a foothold. A March 2024 city council meeting summary said the team logged 784 total client contacts in 2023, including 145 individual clients, 192 crisis contacts and 570 case-management contacts. In a separate summary of Rosen’s remarks, about 76% of crisis contacts were diverted from involuntary 5150 holds.

The financing, however, remains a lingering test. The contract allows CARE to bill Medi-Cal under CalAIM’s mobile crisis benefit, which the state says is meant to provide coordinated crisis care 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year while reducing avoidable emergency room use, inpatient hospitalization and law enforcement involvement. Humboldt’s 2023-24 civil grand jury warned last year that stable funding is essential if specialized behavioral health response programs are to keep working. For Myrtletown, Cutten and Pine Hill, the expansion is both a service upgrade and a reminder that Humboldt’s crisis system still depends on whether the money lasts.