County commissioners to consider connecting Bert Nash mental health team with 911 center; Wakarusa Drive extension project moving ahead

photo by: Chris Conde
The Douglas County Courthouse is pictured in September 2018.
Douglas County may soon take a step to more directly connect a team of mental health professional from Bert Nash with the county’s 911 emergency dispatchers.
County commissioners at their weekly Wednesday meeting will consider a plan that will allow Douglas County’s Emergency Communications Center, which handles 911 calls, to begin sending members of the Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center’s Mobile Response Team on particular types of calls that involve mental health components.
Currently, the Bert Nash team is assigned calls from Headquarters Kansas, which operates a suicide prevention line. But that arrangement has resulted in insufficient use of the Bert Nash program, Bob Tryanski, director of behavioral health projects, said in a memo to commissioners.
Tryanski also said via the memo that it has been difficult for the Bert Nash team to quickly access urgent issues, and there are too many access points in the mental health team to reasonably keep track of and prioritize.
Tryanski and a work group within the county is recommending that Headquarters no longer be used as a source of calls for the mental health team, but rather that those calls will come from the 911 center.
The County Commission will also consider redirecting up to $45,000 from existing funds in the Douglas County Crisis Line budget to purchase enhanced communication and geolocation tools as the Mobile Response Team transitions from Headquarters Kansas to Douglas County Emergency Communications Center.
In other business at Wednesday’s meeting, commissioners will:
• Consider approving a preliminary engineering contract for a project to extend Wakarusa Drive to a point south of the Wakarusa River.
Commissioners are being asked to approve an approximately $91,000 contract for BG Consultants to being work on laying out the exact path of the new road, and other such details.
The Wakarusa Drive extension is expected to happen in conjunction with the much larger Kansas Department of Transportation project to expand the western leg of the South Lawrence Traffic from two lanes to four.
KDOT plans to start the SLT project this fall, and aims to complete work by 2028. If county commissioners approve the engineering contract on Wednesday, the Wakarusa Drive extension could begin construction in October 2025 and open to traffic at some point in 2026, according to a memo from the county’s Public Works Department.
County commissioners previously have given preliminary approvals to the Wakarusa extension project, but the proposed roadway has created concerns. As the Journal-World reported, city commissioners withdrew their support of the Wakarusa project after hearing concerns from residents ranging from environmental issues to the road damaging land that is sacred to the Native American community. County commissioners, though, decided to move forward on the road project without the city’s partnership.
• Consider the approval of transitioning Douglas County’s Cyber Security insurance provider to Rubrik Enterprise Edition. According to a memo in the agenda, Rubrik will “allow for simplification and ease of management to ensure 100% data recovery in the event of a ransomware attack or cyber incident.”
Douglas County IT requests approval to enter into an agreement with Rubrik’s Backup Solution for a startup cost of at least $113,000. There will also be an annual cost of approximately $79,000, which the County Commission will approve at a later date.
The County Commission’s business meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday in the Douglas County Public Works training room at 3755 E. 25th St. The meeting will also be available via Zoom.