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The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted Thursday to retain three out of five county positions dedicated to suicide prevention as it reckoned with massive federal and state budget cuts that could wipe out its Suicide Prevention Oversight Committee.
While the approved cuts technically reduced the initial amount of proposed cuts to the department, advocates say the county mischaracterized the changes. They contended transitions will effectively eliminate the suicide prevention positions as they currently are.
Initially, county staff recommended retaining only one staff member from the committee, which has spent more than a decade leading research in safe reporting on suicide, establishing laws to prevent deaths and providing community outreach, among other roles. But local mental advocates argued that the staff – specialists who contributed to the county’s record low suicide rates in 2025 – could not be replaced.
The advocacy proved persuasive as the board expressed reluctance to eliminate positions.
“Dollars and cents is one thing, but if the reduction of service relating to suicide prevention is going to probably lead to more deaths, I’m so concerned about that,” Supervisor Otto Lee said at a June 15 budget meeting.
Former Palo Alto Mayor Vic Ojakian, who serves as the co-chair for the Suicide Prevention Oversite Comittee — which he helped establish 15 years ago — said that changes in services could absolutely affect suicide deaths. Youth services, prevention efforts for older adults and postvention practices are all likely to be lost under the approved changes, he wrote in a letter to the board.
“Four people are being reassigned or terminated,” he wrote.
County staff had to retain positions over people, County Executive James Williams said at a June 15 budget meeting. While the county can retain the positions, the question of who will fill them would be determined by seniority regulations in labor contracts.
“There’s a lot of concern that’s been expressed around these specific individuals who form the team and we can provide no assurance that the specific individuals will remain at that specific chair,” Williams said.
The county is facing $787 million in losses, and it predicted a net reduction of about 464 employees in late May. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a budget bill that he signed into law last July, directly called for billions of dollars of reductions in healthcare funding across the nation. In a county that allocates half its budget to health services, supervisors have been forced to decide how to consolidate public resources.
The county hopes to mitigate some of these impacts with revenues from Measure A, a tax measure that voters approved last year and that is projected to bring in about $337 million annually.
“This is the most difficult budget our county has faced in decades,” Lee said before the board voted to adopt the $14.7-billion spending plan. “I want to say that behind every reduction, every restructuring and every difficult choice has an impact on real people.”
Still, advocates and county leaders, including Supervisor Margaret Abe-Koga, whose district includes Palo Alto and Mountain View, pushed to retain suicide prevention staff. Stanford Director of School Mental Health Shashank Joshi wrote among those who submitted a letter to the board, arguing against the cuts.
“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.
The topic of suicide prevention carries a particular urgency in Palo Alto, which is in the midst of its third youth suicide cluster, a short period of time when multiple deaths by suicide occur, according to local mental health experts.
“In 2025, there were eight youth suicides in Palo Alto, and nearly 90% of those individuals were from Asian American or Pacific Islander American populations,” Abe-Koga wrote in a statement. “Additionally, 20% of those youth identified as transgender, highlighting a critical need for intersectional support that addresses both cultural stigma and LGBTQ+ identity.”
Heading community concerns, county staff instead recommended retaining three positions “critical to service delivery,” Williams said. The two committee positions focused on data analytics will be cut, he said.
“We believe there is sufficient coverage from public health’s existing analytics team,” Williams said.
While the county is facing widespread funding cuts, the Behavioral Health Services Department is facing the most significant changes, according to Williams. Not only has the federal administration crippled food and health services, but the state recently changed its approach to suicide-prevention funding.
California withheld a portion of the county’s suicide-prevention funding and allocated it to the state Department of Public Health. This is part of a recent push in Sacramento to centralize suicide prevention within state government rather than allowing local agencies to take the lead.
“For a county like ours, we don’t agree with that philosophical approach and we have formally asked the state to pass the funding back to us,” Williams said.
In the meantime, Santa Clara County’s Public Health Department is essentially set to absorb suicide prevention services, while the county waits for what they hope will be good news at the gubernatorial level.
“We will not let the federal government dictate to us what services we provide,” Williams said. “We will continue to do everything we can to ensure our doors remain open to those most in need in our community. That is our bedrock commitment as a county organization.”
Ojakian and fellow advocates said the board should have pushed harder to retain the suicide prevention positions in their full capacity. Various staff – including Joshi, Steven Adelsheim, Vicki Harrison and Pia Ghosh – in Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences urged the board to retain funding for the vital program.
“Eliminating this valuable team would negatively impact young people and families in our community and undermine the life-saving progress that has been made over many years,” they wrote.
