The Recovery Centers of King County is a 27-bed facility on First Hall which, for years, has been the place where low-income and homeless people have been nursed through physical withdrawals from alcohol and opiates.
In a surprise move, the nonprofit is abruptly terminating its contract with King County and will admit its final clients on Friday.
“We were aware that they were having financial challenges,” said Jim Vollendroff, director of King County’s Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division. “We’d been talking to them about those for awhile now with the understanding that they give us 30 days’ notice of discontinuing the contract—they’d been saying that all along.”
But RCKC was not able to provide 30 days’ notice of its shuttering.
King County council member Dave Upthegrove, chair of the county’s Health, Housing and Human Services Committee, only got the news about RCKC’s abrupt closure yesterday morning. “Obviously, this is very concerning and we need to come up with a strategy immediately.”
Upthegrove said he has personally referred a friend of a friend to RCKC recently. “We’ve had huge, huge underfunding for treatment and mental-health services,” he said. “Losing this contract is an immediate, short-term problem in the county.”
Without a county detox center, he said, people who are physically addicted to alcohol or opiates, but cannot afford to pay for treatment, would have no place to go. Sudden withdrawal of alcohol, if not properly supervised, can be fatal. Opiate withdrawal, while extraordinarily painful, is typically not life-threatening.
Vollendroff said the county has secured a fast, stopgap contract with Fairfax Hospital and Cascade Behavioral Health for 27 20 temporary detox beds, effective immediately, and will announce a request for proposal (RFP) for a new contract to come into effect on July 1. “We’re hoping to expand the capacity,” Vollendroff said, “to two 16-bed facilities.”
Typically, Vollendroff explained, someone with a physical addiction to alcohol or opiates would be referred to the facility by emergency services, a sobering center, or a substance-abuse center, after a financial screening to demonstrate that the individual is, in his words, “low-income or indigent.”
The alcohol detoxification process, he said, takes approximately three days; opiate detox takes five. The county subsidizes the facility and pays a higher rate per client admitted if the detox center refers the person to longer-term treatment. “So we incentivize further treatment,” Vollendroff said, but there’s no requirement—and no limitation on the number of times an individual can be admitted.”
How often do individuals return to the detox center? Vollendroff said he didn’t know what the current numbers were, but past data had showed that “surprisingly, we serve a number of people who are new to our system.” People come from all over the state for treatment in King County, he said, to begin their detox process at RCKC before going on to a live-in treatment program.
RCKC, he said, has “been a contractor with King County for decades. We had a great partnership with them and are saddened to see them go out of business.”
RCKC did not respond to requests for comment.
This article has been updated.
