Nonprofit Central City Concern closed its publicly funded Northeast Portland facility where intoxicated people were brought to sober up as an alternative to jail on Friday and ended its roving van service that transported people there.

The agency said the sobering station and the Central City Concern Hopper Inebriate Emergency Response Service, also known as CHIERS, are no longer available. There currently isn’t a plan in place to replace them.

The sobering station and van service had operated by Central City Concern since 1985 and was meant to provide a safe space for people to recover from alcohol or drug use. More than 3,000 people used it in 2018 and most spent six to eight hours there, according to the nonprofit. The city of Portland largely paid for its operations.

The closure comes after Central City Concern officials told representatives with the City of Portland, Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties as well as other cities and medical service providers last month that they planned to close the sobering station imminently. Nonprofit officials cited concerns for the safety of patients and staff, who they said were no longer able to give the level of medical care required by most people who arrived at the center.

The agency said they received more and more patients in the midst of a mental crisis, agitated from opioid or meth use or a combination of both, leading to increased safety risks.

“More and more, we’re seeing people ending up in the sobering center when they should be in places where they can be given medication and a higher level of monitoring until their crisis subsides,” Dr. Amanda Risser, Central City Concern’s senior medical director of substance use disorder services told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an interview last week. “We don’t have medicine, we don’t have padded safety rooms and we don’t have the resources at the sobering center to do the hands-on intervention that happens in psychiatric centers. It just isn’t an acceptable risk anymore.”

She said the agency recently implemented new screening criteria for accepting patients that weeded out people at high risk to threaten or harm themselves or others. Patients with a high potential for violence were redirected to a hospital, Risser said.

Risser said the station accepted eight to 10 people a day before the new screening was implemented and but just two to three afterward.

“It’s difficult to close a program that has been such an important part of the community for decades,” Risser said in a statement Friday. “But closing the Sobering Station makes room for a new approach to treating people in crisis and incapacitated by drugs and alcohol. We look forward to supporting our partners in this effort.”

The nonprofit said it is still figuring out what the next steps are for the two dozen full-time and on-call employees who worked at the sobering station.

The agency’s current contract with the City of Portland expires June 30. The nonprofit said it first told the Portland Police Bureau in August that it didn’t plan to renew the deal to operate the sobering center or CHIERS van service.

The Portland Police Bureau announced Dec. 23 that its officers would take inebriated people to hospital emergency rooms.

The nonprofit had contracts for sobering services with Portland and Washington County and sent invoices to all other agencies that transported patients there. The Washington County contract was sent to expire Jan. 21.

More than 2,700 people or around 85% of people who arrived at the sobering center from July 2018 to June 2019 were brought by Portland police. The agency also received patients from law enforcement agencies as far away as Canby, Sandy, St. Helens and McMinnville.

Central City Concern’s Detox Center in North Portland will remain open. Hooper Detox is a subacute center that admits patients voluntarily for medical treatment of their withdrawal symptoms. Patients can stay there for days and receive medications in a center staffed with nurses, physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants.

Brian Terrett, a Legacy Health spokesperson, said hospital emergency departments have been bracing for the impact of the sobering station closing, but haven’t seen a larger than normal influx of intoxicated patients.

He said hospitals in the area did see a notable decrease in wait times for patients when Unity Center for Behavioral Health opened. Unity was created to relieve the burden on ERs who were ill-prepared to deal with people in the midst of psychiatric distress and needed a long period of intensive monitoring and care. So when those people were no longer in ERs, people with physical injuries and illnesses could move through the department faster.

Terrett said sobering center patients could cause the same backlog since they need to be monitored. Emergency departments are designed to treat people in ERs and then move them to other areas for recovery, he said.

“Any time anything is introduced into that system that’s not designed to be handled in that way, it’ll create challenges and problems,” Terrett said. “We believe the only way to solve this problem is for the community to come together and find a solution.”

“We have said we would be more than happy to be part of that conversation, but again it needs to be a community-wide conversation.”

Molly Harbarger of The Oregonian/OregonLive staff contributed to this report.

-- Everton Bailey Jr; ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 | @EvertonBailey

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