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In 2025, Santa Clara County saw its lowest suicide rates in the past two decades. Local mental health experts say county employees dedicated to suicide-prevention are to thank.
Specifically, the County Suicide Prevention Oversight Committee has spent years connecting with the community, leading research on safe suicide reporting and helping establish state laws to prevent deaths, among other roles.
But as the county faces across-the-board budget cuts under the federal administration, the Board of Supervisors, which allocates half its budget to health services, is forced to decide how to consolidate public resources. And the program may be among the casualties of this year’s budget season.
“Behavioral health, as the board knows, is the area of our budget where there are the most significant changes,” County Executive James Williams said at a May 11 meeting.
County staff proposed in the 2026-27 budget cutting four out of five full time employees dedicated to suicide prevention in an attempt to save money. Local mental health experts say the terminations will have detrimental effects to public health.
Vic Ojakian, former Palo Alto City Council member and mayor, helped the establish the Suicide Prevention Oversight Committee 15 years ago. The county committee started with minimal funding, he said, but over time was able to hire more staff with unique specialities in suicide prevention and deep institutional knowledge on behavioral health.
Among various accomplishments, the committee helped create the HEARD Model Suicide Prevention Policy utilized by the California Department of Education and helped pass Assembly Bill 2246, which required all high school districts to adopt a suicide prevention policy, according to a letter written by Stanford Director of School Mental Health Shashank Joshi.
“The cost of rebuilding what would be lost is almost certainly far higher – in dollars, in time, and in preventable deaths – than the cost of retaining the staff who hold this work together today,” Joshi wrote.
Santa Clara County staff said aggressive cuts were necessary to create a balanced budget as the county reckons with over $1 billion in revenue reductions on top of its existing general fund deficit.
“Just days into the start of this fiscal year, the Republican Congress and President [Donald] Trump signed into law on July 4 an unprecedented withdrawal of federal funding for two of the most essential things that people need to survive: healthcare and food,” Williams said.
The federal administration’s most recent budget proposal called for a 40% funding increase in the Department of Defense, which would set military spending at its highest level in modern history, Williams said. Besides radical funding changes under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a budget bill that Trump signed into law last July, the state has also reduced funds for behavioral health programs.
County staff devised a three-pronged plan to balance out budget reductions: Use Measure A funds for health services, collaborate with the state on lost programming and consolidate departments and staffing.
Despite efforts to retain resources, the County will face $787 million in changes and a net reduction of about 464 employees, according to budget documents. The County Public Health Department is set to absorb the Behavioral Health Services Department under this plan.
Supervisor Margaret Abe-Koga, who represents District 5 and is a former Mountain View mayor, specifically requested for staff to retain suicide-prevention resources despite the consolidation of departments. Representatives from the Department of Public Health said they could use their own expertise for suicide prevention, but local mental health advocates disagreed.
The Public Health Department will retain one member of the Suicide Prevention Oversight Committee to help ease the transition, said county representative Sarah Redmond, but behavioral health services will likely look very different.
“All the expertise that we have overlaps with suicide prevention, including our violence prevention team and their expertise in general community violence prevention,” Redmond said on May 11.
County staff said they will work to honor the deep partnerships suicide-prevention employees have forged over the years. But the proposed budget states the reduction of suicide-prevention staff will reflect a “modest reduction” in public and community outreach, according to budget documents.
In an interview with this publication, Joshi said suicide-prevention success doesn’t hinge on programming, but on who helps develop it over time. When members of Suicide Prevention Oversight Committee leave, they take with them relationships with school officials, legislators and organizers that are necessary to suicide intervention, he said.
As Palo Alto continues to deal with its third youth suicide cluster, a period of time when various deaths by suicide occur, the county is no stranger to the importance of behavioral health, he said.
“That knowledge is not documented in any manual,” Joshi wrote in his letter to the board. “It lives in people.”
The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to adopt its budget in early June.
