PORTLAND, Ore. — The group tasked with spearheading a replacement for Central City Concern's long-shuttered sobering center in downtown Portland has been dissolved as Multnomah County moves forward with the plans they recommended. But some county commissioners are unhappy with the outcome — saying the committee spent many months and untold working hours on a product that doesn't match what the county urgently needs.
Central City Concern shut down its sobering station at the beginning of 2020. For 30 years, it was a place where police, firefighters and other first responders could take severely intoxicated people and allow them to safely sober up for a few hours. Essentially, it was a "drunk tank."
But as substance use changed, CCC said that it was no longer equipped to handle the clientele. Methamphetamines and opioids became more powerful and more common, bringing with them aggressive or psychotic behaviors and overdoses. It wasn't built to be a psychiatric hospital, but was thrust into that role regardless, prompting more and more concerns about safety and oversight at the facility.
After it closed, first responders turned to hospital emergency rooms and jails, or just left people on the streets.
Eventually, Portland and Multnomah County teamed up on the Behavioral Health Emergency Coordination Network, or BHECN. It was a group intended to come up with a solution to the sobering station problem in a new era of drug intoxication and mental health symptoms.
In 2022, the proposal that came out of BHECN was for someone to open a one-stop shop stabilization center, with first-year operating costs of $8.3 million and $2.1 million for capital investments. There weren't any takers, at least none serious enough to get the facility off the ground.
So, BHECN started pivoting to smaller proposals that could work within the existing behavioral health landscape in Multnomah County. For instance, they recently helped produce nine new sobering beds at the Unity Center for Behavioral Health in the Lloyd District, as well as eight sobering and stabilization beds at Providence Portland Medical Center.
In July, BHECN put out a much broader call to potential behavioral health care providers, looking for a whole spectrum of services that could help with crisis and stabilization, but other mental health and substance use services to either side of those as well. Providers that applied could receive funding from the county and city to establish those resources.
And now, with the ball rolling on some of these proposals, BHECN's executive committee has decided to dissolve and focus on shepherding them along. BHECN will remain, but it won't have the top-down structure that it did before.
Unfinished business
Based on the final recommendations of that BHECN executive committee, Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson has proposed her plan for taking up the behavioral health baton, but she's already getting pushback. Commissioners Sharon Meieran and Julia Brim-Edwards want to see the sobering center that started this whole thing.
"It's very much needed. In fact the last year it was in operation, in 2019, more than 5,000 people received services, really to keep them safe and also to keep our neighborhood safe," Brim-Edwards told The Story's Pat Dooris. "When people are in crisis they need some place to go and it needs to be open 24-7."
Brim Edwards said she's spoken with police officers, firefighters and members of Portland Street Response and all agree that the city needs a place where people in crisis can be taken. Sharon Meieran is in full-throated agreement.
"A sobering center is urgently needed — and that's not coming from my perspective as an elected official," Meieran told Dooris. "It's coming from my perspective as an ER doctor who regularly sees people with addiction issues coming into the emergency department and as a volunteer with Portland Street Medicine going out and providing medical care to people living outside."
But Vega Pederson's proposal, which comes from Multnomah County's unspent $60 million in tax dollars for homeless services, does not bankroll the type of sobering center that Meieran and Brim-Edwards envision. She's proposing a 30-60 day stabilization center for people leaving drug withdrawal or sobering programs, short-term transitional housing with recovery services and recovery-oriented permanent supportive housing.
The Story reached out to Vega Pederson for more information, but her office has yet to respond. According to a story from The Oregonian, Vega Pederson issued the following statement to them:
"The holes we are plugging — with a stabilization center, transitional housing, and recovery-oriented housing — are key investments, and come on top of our healthcare partners bringing online 17 sobering beds. With these investments, we can move people from crisis into care and on to stability, both immediately and longer term."
Vega Pederson's plan would cost about $13 million in total. Brim-Edwards and Meieran will both argue in Thursday's county board meeting that they want to see a sobering center built for $10-15 million — not far different from the original proposal that didn't get off the ground — and they said they hope the city of Portland would contribute to the overall price tag.
"I know that, having talked to my colleagues ... none of us wants the options for somebody in crisis to be jail, to be left on the street or to send them to the ER room," Brim-Edwards said. "Because those aren't places they're gonna get the services they really need."
The stabilization center proposed last year was envisioned as a "front door" for crisis care. But many BHECN stakeholders soured on the idea, reasoning that Portland's hospitals already provide multiple front doors, and another drunk tank would be little better than jail — the problem is that there's nowhere for people to go after getting in the door, other than the street. That's what Vega Pederson's plan is supposed to address.
Critics like Brim-Edwards and Meieran aren't convinced.
"We did have (a front door) in the 1990s — approximately 15,000 people a year and the benefit of a sobering center. In fact as recently as 2019, about 5,000 people a year had the benefit of really keeping them safe and our communities safe," Brim-Edwards insisted. "And so, during the pandemic and the aftermath of that, as we come out of recovery, it absolutely makes total sense to be looking at how do we restore this very critical need."