Luke Bergmann, the man whose vision of a more holistic mental health care system bridged political ideology on the county Board of Supervisors, has tendered his resignation, though he will remain on the job until mid-April.
The resignation comes a little more than six years after Bergmann became county behavioral health director, transitioning into the role in the fall of 2018 as incumbent Alfredo Aguirre prepared to retire in 2019.
Reached early Wednesday evening, Bergmann, 54, said deciding to leave the county was an “anguishingly difficult decision.”
“It is a decision that I feel conflicted about because my colleagues are incredible people, and the work that we are doing is incredible work,” Bergmann said. “I’m leaving for an opportunity that will help me better balance my work and personal life.”
The father of two young children and a young adult, Bergmann said directing the department has been all consuming.
“I’m very eager to spend more time with my kids while they’re young,” Bergmann said.
While he said that he has accepted a position with an organization with a “national footprint,” the director declined to name the organization except to say that the firm will allow attacking mental health care issues “from a different vantage.”
During his tenure, Bergmann saw his department’s annual budget nearly double, growing from $529 million in fiscal 2018 to more than $1 billion in fiscal 2025, according to a recently published report.
County supervisors bought into his ongoing call for a total transformation of the local mental health care system, shifting toward crisis centers at a time when many in the community were calling for the immediate construction of new locked units attached to major medical centers.
While there has been some building of new hospital spaces, most notably a 16-bed stand-alone inpatient facility on the campus of Tri-City Medical Center that is expected to open by the end of June, Bergmann pushed for an “optimal care pathway” that invests most heavily in “step down” resources where patients can receive ongoing care after intensive treatment.
There appears to be some continued buy-in to that vision even though its professorial pitchman is outbound.
In a statement, Terra Lawson-Remer, chair of the county board, called Bergmann a “shining light at our county, driving innovation and the transformation of our behavioral health care system.
“His departure is a huge loss four our entire county,” Lawson-Remer said. “Fortunately, he leaves behind an excellent plan that we’ve worked hard to develop over the past 4 years, as detailed in the Optimal Care Pathways model, and we will continue moving that forward.”
Bergmann arrived at a time of turmoil in the region’s mental health care, shaken by the decision of Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside to close its locked inpatient behavioral health unit. The closure spurred deep conversations on the possibility of losing other similar facilities at hospitals with building plans that would require closing bed space in the city’s urban core.
Over the intervening years, Bergmann convinced leaders that simply building as many new beds as possible, as quickly as possible, was the wrong move. Instead, he argued, investments in resources that could help prevent stays in locked hospitals units would be a better use of limited funds.
Asked to name his proudest accomplishment, Bergmann pointed to his team’s approach to crisis care, which became an urgent problem in North County with the 2018 closure of the inpatient psychiatric unit at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside.
“We built out crisis stabilization units as a regional service that we did not have before and then connected them to Mobile Crisis Response Teams,” Bergmann said. “We now have 44 MCRT teams across the county, and that did not exist before.”
Behind-the-scenes work on payment for mental health care delivered in hospitals, he said, has been just as important in helping to better use existing resources.
Bergmann noted that this work was not his alone.
“I’m immensely proud of the work that the behavioral health services team has accomplished since I’ve gotten here, and, while I’ve gotten a lot of attention for envisioning different ways of doing things, even those aspects of the work have been deeply collaborative between myself and other executive and managerial leadership in BHS,” Bergmann said.
“They are an incredible group of people, and for that reason, I’m confident that the work that we’ve begun will continue.”
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