The Rifle Police Department presented a request to the Rifle City Council on Wednesday, Nov. 20, seeking approval for a $5,000 grant from the Department of Local Affairs (DOLA). The grant aims to enhance mental health support for the department’s officers and staff.

The no-match grant for $5,000 for yearly mental health would support the staff of the police department. Chief Debra Funston detailed the tools currently being used to support mental health.

“We’ve signed on with Lexipol, they’ve initiated a Cordico app,” Funston said. “What’s really neat about it is that it pulls all the local therapists in town, pulls our employee assistance program, pulls our peer support program all into one application.”

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The app also offers support for financial counseling, substance abuse, family counseling, and other needs. Funston highlighted that the app is accessible not only to Rifle PD staff but also to their families.

“If anybody is having some kind of an issue or they need help with something, it’s a one stop shop, they can click on it and it just has a variety of resources they can reach out to,” Funston said. 

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Other resources offered in the app are for financials, substance abuse, family counseling or other types of help. 

“We also just signed an MOU with Garfield County, to sign on with their peer support group, so we’re hoping to assign three officers,” Funston said. “So we’ll have people in house who can help steer people towards peer support if they need.”

The annual cost of the app is $2,879.10. The grant would also cover mental health evaluations provided by a psychiatrist from Behavioral Health and Wellness in Grand Junction, who conducts two on-site visits per year at $1,000 per day. The total mental health budget for 2025, $3,879.10, has already been allocated.

“We’re a little short of (the) $5000 (budget), usually we end up utilizing that if we have another person who maybe needs a follow-up with Behavioral Health, just some of those miscellaneous expenses that we have,” Funston said. 

Funston emphasized that council approval was required to move forward with the grant application.

“I’ve asked you in years past if this is enough for how we can support the officers and the PD staff,” Mayor Sean Strode said to Funston. “If there are additional costs that come up, I think we can happily revisit that to see how we can support the officers.”

Funston thanked Strode and told the council that three officers had already utilized some of the resources they had available.

“We’ve got quite a few young officers at the department who haven’t experienced a lot of stuff and they had some pretty traumatic events that they had to work with this year and it really bothered them,” Funston said. “It was really neat to see that they had somewhere to go. Two of those officers now want to be on the peer support group, it’s pretty neat how it works.”

Strode noted that mental health is important for everybody, especially law enforcement of Rifle.

“They’re held to a high standard in our community,” he said. 

Following the conversation, council unanimously approved the Rifle Police Department’s request to apply for the DOLA grant.