PORTLAND, Ore. — Earlier this year, all the pieces appeared to be falling into place for Multnomah County to finally replace the sobering station that shuttered at the end of 2019, something first responders in particular have been pushing for ever since. But a curveball from the state and a lack of clarity from county leadership has again muddied the waters, leaving the timeline uncertain.
Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards, who led the most recent effort to draft a plan for the new facility, said she's doing everything she can to ensure the sobering center doesn't get put on the backburner again.
"I'm going to continue to push, and ... I feel like I have the sixth man behind me; the community and first responders are absolutely demanding that we do this," she said. "The legislature gave us the money to do it. We have the plan. There's no reason why we can't act with urgency and continue to set this up at the same time."
The Story's Pat Dooris sat down with Brim-Edwards recently to talk about the plan and how things are going on the board of county commissioners, a government body increasingly under scrutiny for its handling of behavioral health of homeless services.
Throwing elbows
Under Multnomah County's longstanding relationships with the city of Portland, the county is broadly responsible for social services. With the metro area grappling with record homelessness, drug use and overdose deaths, that has brought much more attention to the county's role and the way it spends millions of taxpayer dollars than perhaps ever before.
Brim-Edwards is relatively new to the county board, winning election in May 2023. She's served 11 years on the board of Portland Public Schools, and she plans to remain there for another year. Her background is primarily in business, having spent 17 years at Nike, where she was a senior director focused on strategy, public engagement and business continuity.
"Growing up, my parents very much told me that instead of complaining about something to go do something about it, which is how I got on the school board for the first time — and then the second time and then the third time," she told Dooris. "So, I ran for the county commission, so it's a little bit less about saying 'no' than sort of hearing my mom in my ear. She still lives across the street and is sort of like, 'Get in there and, you know, take action and get after something versus just complaining about it and sitting on the sideline.'"
Along with Commissioner Sharon Meieran, Brim-Edwards has become another commissioner likely to either criticize or oppose the way Chair Jessica Vega Pederson is running the county — particularly when policy is formed behind closed doors, without feedback from the public and county commissioners.
One such issue currently at the forefront is the county's drug deflection program, which Vega Pederson has fast-tracked to be up and running by Sept. 1, when Oregon recriminalizes possession of small amounts of illegal drugs.
Under county rules, the chair has a great deal of executive power, while commissioners have relatively little. While they vote whether to approve policy, they often don't have much say when it comes to shaping that policy.
With that in mind, Brim-Edwards has started to harness the bully pulpit more over time, being open with her criticisms and, she says, voicing the concerns of the east Multnomah County residents she was elected to represent.
"I got about a month into it, and I started getting my elbows out and making sure that I was not just going along with, sort of, 'This is how we do things ... It's quiet in the summer, you know, you could take some time off' or whatever," she said. "It's like, no, we have like huge crises is happening in our community and the county is key to changing it, so I'm going to get my elbows out, insist that we have agenda items that we move forward, that we like, actually hold people accountable, that the money we're spending is spent well. Spend on the things that we told people we were going to be spending on against the problems that our community expects."
Plans and complications
For over 30 years, first responders could take highly intoxicated people to Central City Concern's sobering station, placing them on an involuntary hold. It was essentially a drunk tank; a place where people could sober up in a relatively safe and monitored environment.
But before it closed, horror stories were beginning to emerge from the sobering station, as the clientele were increasingly intoxicated on powerful drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl, posing a risk of harming themselves or others. The facility wasn't equipped to handle those kinds of cases, so CCC abruptly shut it down at the end of 2019.
As a result, first responders essentially have three options for those individuals: taking them to the emergency room, taking them to jail, or leaving them on the street.
Last September, under pressure from Meieran and Brim-Edwards, Vega Pederson allocated $150,000 for a study to look at the development of a new sobering center, tapping Brim-Edwards to lead it. In April, Brim-Edwards introduced her plan, which anticipated an "aggressive" timeline for development — launching with at least some bed capacity in the first half of the 2025-26 fiscal year.
RELATED: Multnomah County looks to empty office building in Northwest Portland for potential sobering center
"I talked to the chair, and she tapped me to pull together a group to create a 24/7 drop-off sobering center that would replace the (Central City Concern sobering station) that closed in 2019," Brim-Edwards said. "So, we had law enforcement officers, providers; we had three commission offices involved; we had the health department.
"We put together a plan which was based on best practices. I traveled around to different places to look at sobering centers that were effectively doing two things; one, giving people who are intoxicated a safe place to sober up. But the second important piece was that it also was addressing a community livability and a community safety issue for the rest of the community."
The Oregon Legislature complicated that picture somewhat. Earlier this year, lawmakers passed House Bill 4002, which imposed recriminalization of drug possession as of Sept. 1. It also introduced the option for counties to stand up their own drug deflection programs, allowing people arrested for drug possession to seek treatment instead of prosecution.
For Multnomah County, the legislature's overhaul of drug policy did come with good news; the state kicked in $25 million for development of a “behavioral health drop-off center.” But the tight timeline for recriminalization meant that standing up a deflection program took precedence over sobering. The result is that deflection and sobering have become linked, possibly to the latter's detriment.
Right now, the plan seems to be that Multnomah County will open a deflection center in September, add 10 sobering beds to the facility by spring 2025, then eventually open a much larger, more permanent sobering facility. But that last piece — the 35-50 beds that Brim-Edwards envisioned in her plan — currently isn't expected to happen until fall of 2026, according to Vega Pederson.
The sobering saga
With the timeline already beginning to stretch, there's a well-justified fear that Multnomah County's new sobering center will never get off the ground — a fear informed by experience. This isn't the first time that the idea has crashed and burned.
In 2022, Multnomah County struck a deal with the city of Portland to take the helm of the Behavioral Health Emergency Coordination Network, or BHECN (pronounced "beacon"). The network, which predated the county's takeover, involved some 80 different stakeholders and about 200 people, all focused on working together to solve the greater Portland area's behavioral health crisis.
One of the initial goals for BHECN was to come up with a plan for a new sobering center.
But over time, the concept of a 24/7 drop-off center quietly fell away as BHECN succumbed to something like mission creep, attempting to address the entire spectrum of behavioral health needs in Multnomah County. In a lengthy investigative piece, The Oregonian reporter Maxine Bernstein found the effort failed due competition for funding, the lack of a single strong champion, and a rift between public safety and behavioral health priorities.
"This was a big issue when our sobering group came together because BHECN kind of died of its own weight ... because it's like, 'We're going to set up this whole system at the same the same time,'" Brim-Edwards said. "And it was a sort of pass-off between former chair Deborah Kafoury and the current chair, Jessica Vega Peterson.
"And we said from the very beginning, we're going to do the first thing that we we know the community needs, and this is a public safety piece. And we're going to acknowledge that the whole rest of the continuum of care — more withdrawal, detox, more treatment, more recovery housing — all needs to happen. But if we try and create a plan where it all happens at the same time, we aren't likely to be successful. So, we're going to get this front door in place and know that we're going to build out the rest of the system."
There are still many people involved in the earlier effort with "BHECN trauma," Brim-Edwards said, which she's aware of even if she wasn't directly involved. For her, the lesson is to stay focused on the task at hand.
Brim-Edwards is still having to fight to keep the scope of the sobering center focused enough that it will be viable, she said. It's not envisioned as a place that can deal with medical or psychiatric emergencies, but a place that can do triage and short-term sobering, located close enough to a hospital that emergencies can be outsourced there.
"I'm going to push for the plan that we put forward, that we know we need," she continued. "And we had the health department, providers, law enforcement, all at the table, and they all said we need all those other services. So it's not just all we have to do is get the sobering center. They said we need more detox, we need more treatment, we need more recovery housing. And that shouldn't be a reason why we build that other capacity that we don't open a sobering center.
"We had conversations at the very beginning that we're not, we're not going to build the Cadillac. We're building the front door. And we'll be very methodical about also building out the capacity — that it's not just all we need is a sobering center. But if you say we're going to do the whole thing, the sobering center probably doesn't happen with the speed and urgency that it should be."
She has a kindred spirit in Portland Police Chief Bob Day, who penned a letter to Vega Pederson last month to protest the delayed timeline on the sobering center facility.
"I haven't agreed to that timeline," Brim-Edwards said. "Nor, as you can see, has Chief Day. And I don't think the community has agreed to that timeline, either."
In the meantime, Portland is not entirely without sobering beds; BHECN succeeded in getting the ball rolling on some improvements, if piecemeal ones. Providence Portland Medical Center opened up its SARA Unit, an eight-bed stabilization and recovery area attached to the ER, in late 2023. The Unity Center for Behavioral Health plans to open its own nine-bed sobering unit later this summer.
Even so, Brim-Edwards is clear that Multnomah County should be persistent in setting up its deflection program and opening a dedicated sobering center, without the former stealing impetus for the latter.
"I think the county is capable of doing both," she said. "And I think if the county only addresses deflection, this community would demand more — because deflection is only for those who are caught with a possession of a personal amount of drugs. And we know a sobering center would address and support a much larger group, and we absolutely need that. So we can't let deflection become a reason why we don't do this other action."