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Today, Multnomah County officials distributed a draft of their latest plan to create a new Portland-area sobering center.
The proposal comes after a previous, botched effort to replace Portland’s last sobering center, which shut down in 2019. Since then, fentanyl has created a crisis on Portland’s streets. The county’s last effort to replace the center delivered a widely criticized product that wouldn’t allow law enforcement to use the facility as a drop-off site.
The newly proposed sobering center would cost $25 million to build and $14 million a year to run and would serve not only people seeking to safely sleep off a high, but also people brought there against their will by police. According to a timeline included in the plan, it could open within two years if the design process begins next month. The Oregonian first reported the plan Sunday.
The plan, spearheaded by County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards, is the culmination of a month of meetings of city, county, police and nonprofit leaders and was prepared by an outside consultant. According to the draft document released today, the group settled on a plan to refurbish an existing 20,000-square-foot building into an up-to-50-bed “24/7 first responder drop-off center” that would “divert from jail and hospital emergency departments.” The county earmarked $150,000 last fall to spend on the early phases of the project.
The center would be divided into areas for voluntary and involuntary patients, accompanied by an “in-house” transportation service, similar to the Central City Concern Hooper Inebriate Emergency Response Service, or CHIERS, vans that once shuttled drunken people to the downtown sobering center prior to its being shuttered.
Patients could be held involuntarily at the facility for several days and would have the option to stay longer to manage withdrawals.
Much of the funding will likely come from the state. Lawmakers are currently weighing a plan to recriminalize possession of small amounts of illicit drugs, accompanied by funding to create new programs to divert people from jails and prisons. The county has asked the state for $25 million to build such a “deflection” center.
According to the plan, the ongoing costs of running the facility would be paid by the county, the cities that use it, and matching funds from the state.