Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Lakewood City Council Health & Human Services Committee met on October 7, 2026, with Chair Cindy Strebig presiding. The committee approved prior meeting minutes and heard a presentation on the Lakewood Community Care Response Team, a joint Human Services, Police, and Fire Department program. The meeting also included comments from Cuyahoga County Council President Dale Miller, Judge Neff, and two public speakers.
I'm going to call the meeting of Lakewood City Council Health and Human Services Committee meeting to order. We have two orders of business today. The first one being the approval of the minutes of the March 23rd, 2026 Health and Human Services Committee meeting. And I would like to make a motion to approve those meeting minutes. Second. We have a motion and a second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. And that motion passes. And our second order of business today is a communication from Health and Health and Human Services Director. Chief Fairbanks regarding the Lakewood community care response team and a request to present. And before we get to that, I want uh to recognize the other folks that are in the room tonight. We have uh the chief is here, the uh Chief Fisher is here, Law Director Vargo is here, um Fred Mance from the CIT officer, uh Judge Neff is here, as well as Assistant Chief Nick and Neighborhood Paramedic Oliver, as well as Nicole from Health and Human Services. And I'll turn it over to you, Director Barry, to get us started. Get myself adjusted here. Well, thank you for the introductions, and we really appreciate having the opportunity to come and speak in front of the Health and Human Services Subcommittee tonight about our community care response team. Uh the reason we are bringing this to all of you is because we've been working on this uh program uh for about a year now uh officially. And as you'll see, this kind of goes towards some of the conversations that we've had and the council has been having over uh the last couple of years around um responding to crisis mental health, uh psychosocial needs in the community, and this is what uh the Department of Human Services, the fire department, police, and the rest of the administration where we're kind of headed to address those issues in the community. So uh I will uh kind of go through the presentation, we'll hear from um our partners in fire and uh police, and we'll also hear from some of the frontline folks as we go through with uh Nicole talking a little bit. So moving on. And it's gone. There we go. Um so Lakewood uh has um we've really been this establishing and creating partnerships for for a long time, since uh human services was founded in 1992, and certainly before that. But over the last couple years, since Cove Community Center became uh an uh an asset to the community. We've been seeing and noticing certainly more folks coming in, uh working with the neighborhood paramedic as that program has uh come together uh really since 2019, um what the needs of the community are and we're we're seeing and we're trying to build a response to what we're seeing in the community. So we we tackle everything together. So really we've are we've always worked together, like I said. This has been something that's been going on since uh the 90s and before that. We have over 30 years of working alongside police and fire, but again, um since 2019 and the neighborhood paramedic program uh kind of formally coming into being. There's been a couple of iterations over the years since then, and especially with the the most recent iteration with uh Oliver at the helm. Uh we have really kind of amped up our work in the community, and we've really started to work um more closely and establish internal um methods of communication and referral so we can really address situations as they come up and we're not uh missing um opportunities that present themselves. So as you can see, COVID opened. Uh we started sharing cases and having a monthly case review meeting, and then you know, we're we've established since 2025 a dedicated team to work on this. So really it's uh it's a it's a four-pronged approach in a way. We have human services that kind of works on the psychosocial issues, the mental health aspects. We kind of take care of that side of things, so we're the social workers in the field. We have the fire department that handles uh the medical side of things. Oliver goes into people's homes. I'm sure he's gonna share uh quite a bit of information about that, and you all are pretty familiar. Um, but he handles all the medical things, so we can focus on the psychosocial. Uh the police help with safety, our neighborhood officers and other uh CIT trained officers have been incredible asset to the community. Uh you'll see some data in here that I think is uh very uh promising, and it's great to see the kind of work that they're doing, but they handle those immediate um situations in the community.