ADVERTISEMENTSkip

................................................................

Morgan has had too much, so he’s being taken in to sober up. Smith, one of nine community services aides whose sole job is scooping men like Morgan off Gallup streets, opens the back of the wagon. He coaxes Morgan inside to join the three other men picked up in the last 30 minutes.

The men are on their way to Na’nizhoozhi Center, Inc., a 20-year-old institution created through a joint agreement to reduce public intoxication in Gallup.

The four parties responsible for NCI – the Navajo and Zuni tribes, McKinley County and the city of Gallup – are scrambling to find a solution to keep the center running after a change in the federal allocation process left the center without its main source of money.

Without a funding miracle, the nonprofit will run out of money by July 15. The city, which owns the detox center building, has promised to take over basic operations temporarily and look for a new operator, but the question of sustainable funding is very much up in the air.

The 150-bed center takes in an average of 59 people per day and monitors them as they sober up for up to three days. It also offers some therapy and counseling services.

Residents of Gallup describe the pre-NCI days as bleak and overwhelming: Some 300 inebriates were rounded up on average each day, dropped into a “drunk tank” and let out the next morning to drink again.

Long-time Gallupians said they came to dread the time every day when a parade of half-drunk men would stumble down Boardman Avenue in central Gallup and walk right back into liquor stores and bars.

And it wasn’t just the annoyance of public intoxication. In 1989, in the city, 52 people died from exposure, police rounded up inebriates more than 34,000 times and more than 365 people died from alcohol-related deaths: being struck by cars or trains or becoming victims of violent crime or hypothermia, according to NCI and the Navajo Nation Division of Behavioral Health.

John Allen, Gallup Police Department deputy chief, said he’s “extremely worried” that a closed detox center could take a huge toll on public safety, emergency rooms and police resources.

“I can remember 20 years ago, being on patrol, and one of our aides picking up 200 people in one night,” Allen said. “…The amount of street crime related to those intoxicated people was just tremendous.”

The center’s uncertainty leaves people like Martha Thomas, a client at NCI’s 60-day treatment program, worried about her future. Thomas started drinking when she was 9 with short periods of sobriety since.

“I don’t know where I would be without them,” said Thomas, who has been sober for more than a month. “Everybody needs to come together. Our people are dying.”

Funding earmark lost

A combination of factors has left NCI in this position, operating on a skeleton crew and facing closure.

It costs around $1.5 million a year to fund the center, not including supplemental grants the center has won over the years for the prevention of HIV, fetal-alcohol syndrome and other drug-alcohol abuse programs.

The current crisis has its roots in a federal funding change in 2010. Until then, the money for NCI went to the Navajo Nation as part of a larger pot of money, but it was earmarked specifically for the center.

With the change, requested by the tribe, the federal government removed the earmark so the tribe had discretion over how to spend the pot of money. Now, the tribe is seeking bids from similar centers in small towns that border the reservation for the money that used to go to NCI.

Larry Curley, director of the tribe’s Behavioral Health Division, said those other towns face problems similar to Gallup’s.

“The problem that the Nation saw – there were other similar problems in other parts of the Navajo Nation,” he said. “When you take a look at NCI, they’ve been given more than a million dollars a year for the last 20 years.”

As for the county, officials are reluctant to give the center all of the money from a unique liquor sales tax, opting instead to focus on youth prevention. That’s despite a recent law passed in the legislative session that, if approved by county voters in the next election cycle, raises the liquor-excise tax from 5 to 6 percent and allows the funds to go specifically for detoxification.

City leaders say they would have to draw from their general fund to run the center should the county not allocate more of the liquor-excise tax money, but they say it’s not their responsibility to fund therapy, counseling or other long-term care for addicts. They point out that the city has paid for the building and regular patrol officers who, in addition to the nine community service aide vehicles, spend day and night bringing inebriates to NCI.

The funding crisis has also drawn in the governor’s office. Gov. Susana Martinez vetoed an emergency appropriation at the last legislative session that would have funded NCI for another several months. The veto drew strong criticism from local elected representatives.

A governor’s spokesman on Friday called the appropriation an “earmark” and said it’s not the state’s responsibility to fund the local center. Enrique Knell pointed to the recently passed liquor tax reform as a funding model, even though money from the tax could not be put toward the center until a year after the next election.

“As far as we can tell, no information was provided to the administration that its closing was imminent,” he said in a statement. “Running this non-profit is a fundamentally local need, and the local governments should be contributing.”

Data show center works

NCI officials have pointed to the numbers as proof that their social detoxification and therapy programs are working, and they say smaller towns don’t see the same influx of people from the Navajo Reservation as Gallup.

According to data provided by NCI:

⋄ In 1983, almost 40,000 people, twice the Gallup population, were admitted for protective custody at the center; in 2012, just over 20,000 inebriates were held at NCI.

⋄ Also, 380 of 435 enrollees in one of the center’s therapy programs, which focus on traditional healing methods, were sober and participating in an outpatient program six months after graduating.

⋄ Finally, the number of exposure deaths decreased from more than 50 in 1989 to an average of over four a year between 2007 and 2012, according to Gallup police.

Jay Azua, the center’s director, said that, even if the city decides to maintain basic detox services and hire a new operator, it would take five to 10 years to build the center back up to the current level of services and expertise offered by NCI’s staff of drug-and-alcohol counselors.

“Why do they want to reinvent the wheel?” Azua said. “Why would you just shut it down just to open it up again?”