A newly announced partnership will pair a mental health provider with law enforcement agencies in Midcoast Maine. A mental health liaison from Sweetser will support the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office along with the Bath, Brunswick and Topsham police departments. “We’re doing something. We’re responding to a need in our community,” said Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry. Now at least one year, only one liaison will serve the agencies but leaders hope to expand eventually. “We felt that it was really important to get something going here, a best practice,” Merry said. The liaison will be overseen by Sweetser’s director of crisis services, Alyssa Pelchat. “We’ve been trying to police our way out of mental health concerns for a long time, and this is a different approach,” Pelchat said. Funding, according to the agencies involved, comes from opioid settlement funds with no new tax burden, at least for the first year. “We’ve asked law enforcement to play so many roles over the years, and now we can kind of take ‘social worker’ off of their plate more,” Pelchat said. Sweetser has other liaisons embedded in multiple other law enforcement agencies statewide.