Utah leaders meet to drill down on more changes for homelessness, mental health and jails

Inspired by the “Miami model” in Florida — where Miami-Dade County has been diverting nonviolent people with mental illness away from jails and into mental health facilities — Utah state, city and county leaders are taking the next steps to put a plan into action. 

The mastermind behind the “Miami model,” former Judge Steven Leifman, sat next to Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, and the state’s homelessness coordinator, Tyler Clancy, at the Utah Capitol on Tuesday to brief reporters on what they’ve been working on, based on earlier recommendations by Leifman. 

For three days this week — starting with a closed-door meeting earlier Tuesday also attended by Gov. Spencer Cox, who threw his support behind the effort — state, city and county officials said in a news release they’ll be launching new workgroups and holding “executive team and stakeholder meetings” to implement the plan while drawing on expertise from law enforcement, the courts, behavioral health providers and other community organizations. 

Leifman said his group’s recommendations aren’t just focused on diverting people from homelessness and incarceration — but rather “modernizing” behavioral health services to help people experiencing mental health crises. He said while the U.S. shuttered state mental hospitals, focused on “crime and drugs” and “massively cut housing,” people experiencing mental illness “got thrown into communities … that just were not built for them.”

“So instead of designing a system for them that worked, we blame them and incarcerate,” he said, adding that “70% of people in jail in the U.S. today either have a serious mental illness, a substance abuse disorder, or both.”

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Leifman said his recommendations are not focused on “coddling a criminal” but rather “getting smart, wrapping our arms around the person that needs it and getting them the right care that they need.”

After partnering with Salt Lake County leaders in late 2025, the Leifman Group developed 25 recommendations to improve how state, city and county systems help people with mental health and substance use needs — meant to pull them away from cycling in and out of the courts and jails and into services that can actually help them. 

“Today’s meeting was to launch the work around those 25 recommendations,” Wilson told reporters. “What’s really reassuring to me is the commitment across party lines to solutions and the interest of people who get up every day, care about this work … to come in and recognize that collaboration will not only be a path to a better outcome for an individual who is facing challenges, but also will be ultimately benefiting the taxpayer by the reduction of cost.” 

Leifman Group recommendations

In a report outlining those recommendations, the Leifman Group applauded state and local leaders for having an “amazing amount of coordination and political will” compared to other states to tackle the issue, but also found Salt Lake County faces “significant challenges,” including:

• Still fragmented coordination across systems and agencies.
• Limited data sharing and no unified data hub.
• Insufficient housing — especially deeply affordable and supportive housing.
• Gaps in diversion, supervision, and care coordination.
• A proliferation of committees and bodies with overlapping mandates but no single, unified implementation structure.

The Leifman Group’s recommendations’ key themes, according to that report, included:

• Invest in early prevention — like child trauma screenings — of substance use and mental health concerns to prevent people entering homelessness and criminal justice systems in the future.
• Strengthen crisis response, including changing 911 scripts, expanding mobile crisis outreach teams specifically trained to respond to people experiencing a mental health crisis, and building more crisis receiving centers in the south end of the county.
• Implement universal jail screening and full service and better coordinated multi-agency case management. 
• Expand assisted outpatient treatment and civil commitment options while addressing bed capacity constraints.
• Increase housing systemwide and carefully implement “potential large congregate ‘campus’ models to avoid “risk-mixing,” which the Leifman Group described as co-locating “criminogenically low- and high-risk individuals” that would likely lead to more “recidivism, victimization, and crime.”
• Create a “cross-system data hub and data-sharing protocols” for better coordinated care, accountability, and data-driven decision-making.
• Establish an implementation structure with shared leadership, clear priorities, and subcommittees.

How are state, local leaders already acting?

Last year, state leaders eyed building a massive, 1,300-bed homeless campus in northwest Salt Lake City, but that plan faced intense pushback. Earlier this year the Legislature didn’t put any money toward the campus but rather funded Cox’s administration’s plans to expand shelter, supportive housing, and bolster mental and behavioral health services while also looking to break cycles of “high utilizers” of jails and homeless shelters. 

If successful, state officials have said those strategies could later inform a campus’ operations — or maybe divert enough people that a campus is no longer needed. 

Some of the Leifman Group’s recommendations may take up to 10 years to implement, while others could be adopted in a matter of months, Wilson said. 

Some changes will require more money than others, the county mayor added. 

“There are things that we can do that don’t cost a penny that are just changing policy or investment,” she said, but other changes may require state funding that would need approval from the Utah Legislature. “We are not prepared today to have a legislative ask, but in the weeks to come we will. And I think many of the things (implemented) this year will be systemic change, not big-cost items.”

But Wilson and Clancy noted work has already started — including the recent opening of mental health group homes that are expected to eventually total 90 beds. And state leaders are expanding Salt Lake City’s Project CONNECT, which is a program focused on the city’s 50 most-arrested people that the city has described as a “cross-agency initiative to divert high utilizers of the justice system into treatment to relieve strain on resources.” 

Wilson also said there’s a group already working to evaluate the existing 911 script to include responses tailored specifically for people experiencing a mental health crisis.  

“We know often if somebody’s calling 911, it can be due to a family member or friend’s mental health crisis,” she said. “Yet the dispatch person taking the information doesn’t have the option on their list to (ask), ‘is this indeed a mental health emergency?’ (But) what we need to do before we throw that on the script and get all these dispatch people trained is to make sure that we have an adequate and fully implemented path (to help).”

One recommendation that Leifman pointed out was risk assessments for children as early as possible to prevent spirals later in life. He said oftentimes people who are in jail with mental illness “have horrific histories of trauma.” 

“We need to be screening kids at early ages for trauma as quickly and best we can, getting them help as early as we can, so they don’t end up in the criminal justice system,” he said.

Mendenhall, Salt Lake City’s mayor, applauded the Leifman Group’s recommendations. 

“It’s not just picking up the cookie cutter of Miami-Dade and punching it through Salt Lake County,” she said, but rather it’s tailoring a plan to the state and county’s needs “and helping us arrange it into a much more effective, humane and taxpayer friendly situation so that we can stop spinning the wheels of waste and lack of services for people who need it most.”

Wilson and Mendenhall said in coming months as more details of their plan take shape, they expect to put together funding or legislative proposals for the Utah Legislature’s upcoming session, slated to start in January. 

Clancy also said they’ll be looking at the system’s “capacity needs” and whether that needs to be expanded, “as well as our laws” and if anything needs to change to help implement the plan. 

“Whether it’s looking at things with civil commitment or plea and abeyances … those are all things we’re going to dive into pretty deep here,” Clancy said.

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