Plans for sobering center take shape

Published 5:00 pm Saturday, June 21, 2014

An effort to build a sobering center in Grants Pass has gathered so much steam in recent months that it has gone from being just a hope to a near certainty.

So, just what is a sobering center? It’s a 24-hour-a-day facility where drunks can stay rather than being arrested or hospitalized.

Sobering centers are not new. Grants Pass Interim Public Safety Chief Bill Landis remembers his days as a young police officer in the late 1980s and early 1990s when there were two such facilities in town. They no longer exist.

Without such a facility, intoxicated people are either taken to the hospital, if it appears their health is threatened, or to jail if some crime is being committed. However, it is not illegal in Oregon to be drunk in public, which means many intoxicated people are simply left on the streets.

If they are jailed or taken to the emergency room, the community pays a high price just so that person can sober up.

With an increasing number of intoxicated transients haunting downtown Grant Pass as a result of decreasing jail bed space due to budget cuts, the absence of a sobering center became a glaring need.

In 2011, Landis voiced his frustration about that need on a local radio show and he discovered a lot of other people were thinking along the same lines.

“Ken Emilio of the Gospel Rescue Mission heard the story and met with me soon after to really begin the planning and vision for what is now taking shape,” Landis said. Retired Pastor Jim Brumbach jumped in as well. Landis lauds both men for their work.

Landis is a charter member of a local organization called Securing Our Safety that is involved in multiple efforts to address public safety shortcomings in Josephine County, including the jail and juvenile justice levy that failed in last month’s election.

He made a sobering center one of that group’s goals. However, as support for the sobering center gained traction Landis said, “I just kind of broke this out.” He and others focused their effort on creating a sobering center while SOS concentrated on other issues.

In October the group created the Grants Pass Sobering Center as an official entity with its own board of directors, which includes Landis and Brumbach. A few months later it obtained its 501c3 status as a nonprofit organization.

The group’s vision is a bare-bones facility with no meals and no showers. It would be a place with 12 to 15 beds that could be used on a short-term basis. It would not provide medical treatment so the overhead would be minimal.

They sought a model to follow and began studying treatment facilities throughout the state. They soon learned there is no ideal template to follow.

“We have studied all the other entities in Oregon,” said Aaron Ausland, CEO of the Ausland Group who volunteers as a consultant to the group. “What we’ve found is that the other sobering centers operating in the state all had very unique operating structures.”

But they found something very close to their vision just down the road in Medford.

The sobering unit of the William H. Moore Center is one arm of the Addictions Recovery Center, which operates multiple programs in Medford. The facility also provides treatment centers, a veteran’s stabilization program and even residential services.

If an intoxicated person is brought to the sobering unit they are offered treatment at a facility on campus. If they refuse, they are kept at the unit until they are sober.

Pat Murphey is the program manager of the Addictions Recovery Center.

“The sobering unit really benefits everyone in the community,” Murphey said. “The operation takes a load off the emergency room and the police force.”

The procedure is as follows:

Police bring an intoxicated person to the sobering unit, which has a capacity of eight. The person is admitted and his name and other pertinent information is recorded and his valuables are inventoried and stored. When they leave after sobering up they exit without an arrest record.

During the admission process an intoxilyzer is used to test the person’s blood alcohol level. If the level is dangerously high the person will be taken to the hospital.

There are three rooms for individuals and a large room that holds five people. Police and staff determine if the detainee should be kept in a room by himself.

If so, and if an individual room is available, a police officer locks the person into a 6 foot by 8 foot room where he is kept alone. Staff are not allowed to unlock the door unless police are present.

The door contains a slot that staff members use to pass through water, Gatorade, soup and crackers in an effort to keep the person hydrated.

“Our goal is to keep everybody safe,” said Edward Smith-Burns, deputy director of the Addictions Recovery Center.

The room is stark and depressing. It’s nothing more than a concrete cube with no windows. There is a stainless steel toilet anchored to the back wall. A few feet away is a thin mat with a flannel blanket at floor level. If somebody falls asleep on the mat, there’s no danger of falling off the bed.

The hope is that once sober, the person will agree to treatment. Few do.

On the other hand the majority don’t make a return trip to the center. “In reality, we don’t see a lot of frequent flyers,” Smith-Burns said.

Murphey said that historically 55 percent of those admitted are making their first “visit” to the unit.

“Once they’re discharged they’re likely to leave,” Murphey said. For reference, he said that in 2013 the unit admitted 1,972 people.

Will Grants Pass pattern its sobering center after the Moore Center sobering unit?

“It’s a pretty good representation of what we’re going to do,” said Rick Jones, who is a member of the Sobering Center board of directors and is the director of Choices, a treatment center in Grants Pass.

Jones said the Grants Pass center will learn from the experiences of the Moore Center. For one thing, the Grants Pass facility intends to use only individual rooms for its occupants because housing intoxicated people with each other has proven to be troublesome at times.

Landis anticipates there will be other changes as well.

“We will be utilizing a lot of how the Moore Center and others operate from their lessons learned and ease of operation,” Landis said. “I don’t have protocols, but it is safe to say we will adopt how other centers conduct their sobering center operations.”

Protocols aren’t needed because the sobering center doesn’t exist yet. But there is a location.

In April the Urban Area Planning Commission rezoned a warehouse at 1010 S.W. Foundry St. so it could be used as a sobering center. The building is 4,700 square feet. It’s owned by the Gospel Rescue Mission, which operates a recycling center on the site.

Ausland said the Sobering Center won’t need that much space, but he hasn’t pinned down how much it will use. “The area remaining in the existing building will be reserved for some yet to be determined ancillary use, or future expansion,” Ausland said.

The Ausland Group has created a rendering of how the exterior will look, but there is still a lot of work to do.

“The hope is we can complete all the details for the design this summer,” Ausland said. He added that it may be open sometime this calendar year.

Even though there will be no treatment available at the facility, the hope is that people who are brought in will voluntarily seek treatment when they are clear-headed.

“We’ve learned that once a person sleeps it off they are more amenable to treatment,” Jones said.

In January, the estimated price tag to build and operate the center for one year was $1 million.

That was before the building on Foundry Street entered the picture. Landis said he anticipates negotiating an affordable lease with the Gospel Rescue Mission. Given Emilio’s support and involvement, that seems likely.

The amount of startup money has certainly been reduced, but until the design work is completed the organization won’t have an estimate of the actual costs. Landis said they have set a tentative annual operating budget of $260,000, but that could change depending on the type of protocol the group decides on.

Raising money has been a focus of the board of directors Ñ which also includes Jeff Hyde, president of Evergreen Federal Bank; Marilane Jorgenson, project manager of Co-Occurring Services; Jeff Sullivan, pastor at New Hope Congregation; and Lily Morgan, a Grants Pass city councilor and a parole and probation officer for Josephine County.

So far, the fundraising has gone well.

Grants Pass has alloted $130,000 from its Public Safety budget.

The Ausland Group has made an in-kind contribution of $73,800 and Evergreen Bank has chipped in $8,500. The Local Alcohol and Drug Planning Committee of Josephine County is providing $50,000 for capital projects and Brumbach is expecting another $25,000 from that group for operating expenses.

Primary Health of Josephine County has provided $20,000 while Asante and the Mid-Rogue Independent Physicians Association have each bestowed $10,000.