A look inside one of the room at the Phoenix Centre in Kamloops. (Photo via Sian Lewis)
An updated business case for a sobering and assessment centre in Kamloops is still recommending the 10-bed facility be set up at the former Phoenix Centre downtown.
Social, Housing, and Community Development Manager, Carmin Mazzotta says the business case has also identified the Day One Society – formerly the Kamloops Society for Drug and Alcohol Services – as the ideal operator for the long-sought facility near Royal Inland Hospital.
“They have space within their existing building on the lower floor of that Phoenix Centre building to accommodate – with some improvements – a sobering and assessment centre,” Mazzotta said.
He says the facility would need the province to fund just under $400,000 in renovations, with annual operating costs estimated to about $2.6 million. The centre is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week with security on site to ensure clients and staff are safe.
“There are renovation costs but that is a lot lower than funding a new build,” Mazzotta added.
Mazzotta tells Radio NL he’s optimistic that this new business case – which goes before Council on Tuesday – will finally lead to progress.
“There has been a significant amount of changes in the social and health sector in the last few years,” Mazzotta said, on the NL Noon Report.
“I mean the last time the business case was submitted, that was a few months before the toxic drug supply was declared a provincial public health emergency. So the scale of need has really increased for these kinds of services.”
A sobering centre is meant to provide a medically supervised place for people to come down from their most recent stint with drugs or alcohol, as an alternative to locking someone up overnight or having the medical system take care of them.
People taken to these facilities are given information and guidance on seeking longer-term treatment when they check out.
“You think about a sobering and assessment centre, it is that 24-hour acutely intoxicated phase and to have something where you have this medical type of response, and then in morning as folks sober up, there is an opportunity to go straight into detox upstairs,” Mazzotta said.
“That is a real strength of the business case.”
Mazzotta says the updated business case builds on the one that was submitted to the Ministry of Health in March of 2016, to no avail.
“At the 2022 UBCM Convention, the Minster of Mental Health and Addictions said ‘you know what, send me an updated version of that and we can take that into consideration,'”Mazzotta said.
“So we wanted to have something that reflects the current scale of need, current partnerships, and current community readiness.”
On Tuesday, Kamloops City Council will decide whether or not to send the updated sobering centre business case to Jennifer Whiteside, the Minister of Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Adrian Dix, the Minister of Health, and Susan Brown, the President and CEO of Interior Health.
City Council is also being asked to send a letter to Whiteside asking for a formal response regarding the business case, which cost about $30,000 to update.
“We’ve been working on the sobering conversation since back when Superintendent Lecky was here,” Deputy CAO Byron McCorkell said during the Oct. 31 City Council meeting.
“You heard in conversations locally as well that there’s support within our institutions here, so we’re very hopeful that we’ll finally see six years of work come to fruition with a sobering centre.”
