The legislation, named in Hall’s honor, set out to create a system that would allow 911 calls to be easily transferred to counselors at crisis centers who are specifically trained to deescalate and provide services to people experiencing mental health crises.
“We wanted to make sure that they could differentiate between threats to personal safety and a non-threatening behavioral disturbance,” said Taun Hall, who advocated for the passage of her son’s eponymous legislation. “Having the right response is going to make the difference.”
Mental health crisis centers, which formerly received calls directed from the national suicide hotline, now answer calls, chats and texts sent to 988, a nationwide suicide and crisis line that is available 24/7 to those in emotional distress. The easy-to-remember number has seen a significant uptick in use over the last five years, alleviating some of the need for police, fire and other emergency services to respond to mental health crises.
Eager to improve 988 services, agency leaders at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services hoped to deploy the system that allowed 911 dispatchers to quickly route calls to crisis centers statewide by July 2024.
But nearly seven years after Hall’s death, that vision has still not been achieved.
Lawmakers and leaders of California’s mental health crisis centers hoped that by 2026 the state would have a more robust system to address the state’s growing need for behavioral health services. But the project’s delays have frustrated stakeholders.
“The fact that we haven’t moved faster to provide that service to Californians when the funds are available is, frankly, something that is disappointing,” said Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda, who authored AB 988.
The finished 988 project is intended to provide an improved internal call-handling system that mental health crisis centers will use to respond to Californians seeking help and collect information about those calls and chats. Additionally, that system is supposed to integrate the state’s 911 and 988 networks so calls can be more smoothly transitioned between the two, in the event counselors are better suited than law enforcement to handle an emergency situation.
The call handling system is being piloted in just one of 11 crisis centers in California while the state waits for approval from the national 988 administrator before moving forward.
“Cal OES is committed to meet its obligation and continues to work toward full implementation and interoperability of the 9-1-1 and 9-8-8 systems,” agency spokesperson Anita Gore said in a statement.
Though the delay hasn’t limited crisis centers’ ability to respond to 988 calls, it has raised concerns among crisis centers’ leaders and behavioral health advocates that Cal OES is not adequately preparing for the growing demand in mental health services — and highlights the need for increased funding to enable crisis centers to hire more counselors to connect Californians in crisis with in-state support.
“If you take that system away or shrink it or trim it, you are creating a cascade of problems for all the other systems that we’re actually protecting,” said Dr. Jonathan Porteus, the CEO of WellSpace Health, a crisis center that covers Northern California. “This is not the time to put an obstacle in the way of 988 growing.”
The number of monthly 988 calls routed to California centers more than doubled between 2021 and 2025, according to Vibrant Emotional Health, the national 988 administrator. Porteus and several other crisis center leaders expect those numbers to continue increasing as more people in California learn about the free mental health hotline.
“Maintaining consistent funding is not sufficient in a landscape when the demand for services is constantly growing,” said Narges Zohoury Dillon, who serves as the executive director of a crisis center in Alameda County and the president of the 988 California Crisis Center Consortium.
Dillon noted the need for growth is particularly important in regard to California’s ability to respond to text and chats requests through 988, less than half of which are currently answered by counselors within the state who have more in-depth knowledge of local resources available.
911 and 988 not yet a two-way line of communication
In the lobby of a WellSpace Health crisis center, hundreds of multicolored stars are pinned to the walls, bearing the names of individuals who called 988 and were eventually dissuaded from harming themselves by the team of counselors tucked away in office rooms of an unmarked building in south Sacramento.The stars serve as a reminder of why the staff’s work, tiresome and distressing as it can be, is so critical.
Unlike 911 dispatchers, counselors that work at nonprofits like WellSpace stay in contact with a caller for as long as necessary, which can sometimes stretch to over an hour, said Christie Gonzales, WellSpace’s chief operations officer. Conversations over chat and text can last even longer than those over the phone.
Emergency services are dispatched for only a small fraction of calls, which happens if that person or someone in their care is put at imminent risk, Gonzales said. She said that 988 alleviates a burden emergency services were previously shouldering. According to data shared by the crisis centers, California -based organizations answered nearly 90,000 contacts between October and December 2023, only 0.2% of which required law enforcement to respond.
“The goal was that we would have true interoperability between 911 and 988, so that if people needed a police response or EMS, they could get to 911,” said Tara Gamboa-Eastman, the director of government affairs at the mental health nonprofit Steinberg Institute. “That’s not happening.”
While 988 centers have a 10-digit number to call to get through to 911 more quickly, it’s a one-way line of communication, Gamboa-Eastman said.
“We are not directing people from 911 to 988 with our current system,” she said.
Two projects delayed
Shortly after lawmakers passed the Hall legislation in 2022 to establish statutory funding for 988, Cal OES signed a contract with the company NGA to build out the system California crisis centers would use internally to receive calls and allow for the important 911 interoperability component designed to prevent police unnecessarily responding to incidents.The contract set out an ambitious timeline to deploy the system across the state by the summer of 2024. As of January, the project is only being piloted in one center, Buckelew Programs in Marin County.
In response to questions about the project’s delays, Cal OES said it was waiting for approval of authorization agreements with Vibrant Emotional Health and the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration before expanding California’s 988 call handling system to other crisis centers. An agency spokesperson said in a statement that Cal OES expects the agreement to be finalized in the first quarter of 2026.
So far, though, Cal OES has only paid for a tenth of the initial $33 million cost outlined in the NGA contract.
The stalled progress on 988 has coincided with delays on another larger project to modernize California’s 911 system. Cal OES paid contractors over $450 million to build out a more advanced emergency communications system beginning in 2019. Last year, the agency decided to scrap that design and now plans to build out a new structure for 911.
The Next Generation 911 project leader, Budge Currier, who was also in charge of overseeing the rollout of 988 project left Cal OES in late 2024.
It was not clear who was responsible for overseeing the 988 system until Cal OES appointed Steve Yarbrough as deputy director of Public Safety Communications this past September. An agency spokesperson declined to make Yarbrough available for an interview for this story and would not discuss prior personnel assigned to the 988 project.
Bauer-Kahan said that lawmakers had a particular vision for the timeline of the rollout of both systems. She hoped that the launch of Next Generation 911 would happen alongside improvements to 988, and serve as a model for the country.
“The interoperability right now is antiquated at best,” she said. “It is definitely not what we envisioned.”
Locked out from the decision-making process
In 2022, lawmakers approved a surcharge on phone access lines that would fund the expanded 988 system. In the years since, California has collected revenue from the surcharge in the 988 State Suicide and Crisis Services Fund, which is then allocated to Cal OES, the California Health and Human Services Agency and the Department of Health Care Services.The Legislature allocated $30 million to Cal OES during the current fiscal year, the same amount designated the previous year, for 988-related activities. But the agency did not spend all of that money, in part, because the project has not been completed on time.
According to a Cal OES document, the 988 fund had over $45 million remaining in the fund. Those unspent funds have triggered a decrease in the surcharge applied to phone lines, from 8 cents to 5 cents this year, due to the fact that fewer public dollars are needed to refill the state’s 988 fund.
While the surcharge decrease won’t result in crisis centers getting less money from the state, behavioral health advocates are still waiting for the improvements promised by Cal OES, which the state already collected money for.
Increasing the amount of funding crisis centers receive, leaders said, would improve the percentage of 988 chats and texts that are answered in California. Currently, the majority of those types of contacts are answered by providers outside the state who have less knowledge of local resources that might be available to Californians.
Shari Sinwelski, the vice president of crisis care at Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, said that the Los Angeles -based organization can’t hire additional counselors now because it has reached the limits of its budgets. She said that until there’s more money allocated, the organization can’t answer every call, text, or chat from people in California.
Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, D-Santa Cruz, who chairs the select committee on the state’s mental health crisis, said she and her colleagues want to ensure the 988 system provides the best possible service to the public.
“Whether there are obstacles at the federal level or agency coordination, we have to fix it,” she said. She said call centers need to be more involved in the budget process so they can clearly communicate their funding needs.
California receives and allocates funding for 988 through a complex network of federal and state agencies. And crisis centers don’t have the same means as state agencies to communicate funding needs.
“The message that I’m hearing from the call centers is that they are confused. The process isn’t transparent,” said Gamboa-Eastman. “As a result of both of those things, they have no idea how to move forward.”
In a statement, Cal OES spokesperson Matt Notley said, “Cal OES remains focused on constructive collaboration and ongoing oversight and will continue to evaluate progress and take appropriate action to ensure the system meets California’s operational needs.”
Even though these crisis centers are a formal part of the government’s network for providing mental health services, they feel totally locked out from the decision-making process, Gamboa-Eastman said.
“I think the consequence of that is the state doesn’t have the information it needs to make the right budget policy decisions to grow the program,” she said.
Communication and reimbursement challenges persist
The crisis centers have encountered other challenges while working with Cal OES.During a December hearing on the 988 system, Dillon said there was room for improvement in how Cal OES collaborated with the crisis centers, and that some of the feedback 988 providers are giving to the state agency is not being adequately considered. She noted that the 988 centers had requested to meet monthly with Cal OES and the contractor about a year ago. A few of those meetings have happened, but the rest have been cancelled, she said.
Notley said the 988 Technical Advisory Board meets quarterly and Cal OES holds direct meetings with stakeholders. He added that the department intends to improve stakeholder outreach efforts in the spring.
Crisis center budgets have been further strained by reimbursement delays. Over the last two and a half years crisis centers have requested over $400,000 in reimbursements from Cal OES. The agency has yet to reimburse about half of those dollars, which nonprofits spent on technology and other critical resources.
Notley said the agency is working directly with each center to complete reimbursements as quickly as possible. He said that three centers have received reimbursement payments, but six are still pending.
Californians’ reliance on 988 is increasing and that is a good thing, said Gonzales, WellSpace’s chief operations officer because it means more people are accessing mental health services. But that also means the crisis centers will need more resources moving forward.
Gonzales said, “We’re confident that we will need more.”
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