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Mount Vernon Fire Chief Bryce to Retire After More Than 35 Years; City Highlights Behavioral‑health Outreach Metrics
Summary
Fire Chief Bryce announced his retirement this month after a more-than-35-year career. City officials also cited recent metrics from the integrated outreach services team showing hundreds of field contacts and dozens of diversions from arrest.
Fire Chief Bryce announced he will retire this month after more than 35 years in the fire service, city presenters said, and the meeting highlighted recent activity by the integrated outreach services team that partners behavioral‑health specialists with law enforcement.
Bryce’s career includes roles as a fire chief in Oxnard, California, and as a division chief with the Orange County Fire Authority before he joined Mount Vernon in 2016. The presentation said he led the department’s transition to a fire‑based emergency medical services model and served as a unified commander for Skagit County during the COVID‑19 pandemic. “Serving as the fire chief of Mount Vernon has been one of the greatest honors of my professional career. I am immensely proud of what we have accomplished,” Chief Bryce said.
City staff also described the integrated outreach services team, staffed by clinicians with master’s degrees in social work, and shared three‑month performance figures. According to the presentation, in the past three months the team recorded 482 field contacts, connected with 57 unduplicated individuals, diverted 32 people from arrest or the criminal‑justice system, and on average provided case management to 40 people. The city said those contacts occurred both independently and at officers’ request, and that the team’s work is intended to address behavioral‑health issues that frequently underlie vagrancy, welfare checks and certain drug‑related calls.
No formal personnel action or replacement timeline for the fire chief was announced during the meeting. The presentation framed the outreach statistics as operational updates rather than items requiring immediate council action.
Background: the city presentation placed the outreach work in the context of public‑safety workload, stating that roughly 25–27% of police calls involve vagrancy, person removal, welfare checks and drug problems with behavioral‑health roots. The presenters attributed the diversion and case‑management numbers to the integrated outreach services team but did not provide a detailed funding breakdown or the team’s long‑term budget status during the remarks.
