After about a year and a half of meetings, debates, public hearings and planning, the Albuquerque City Council on Monday approved a plan to spend millions of dollars in money aimed at curbing the worst effects of the ongoing opioid epidemic.
However, that approval didn’t come without pushback.
Albuquerque will be getting a total of $80 million over the next 13 years, which will be paid out in annual installments.
The resolution, which was sponsored by Councillor Tammy Fiebelkorn, directs where the current balance of $21 million will initially be allocated, and guides where future funds will go.
The bulk of the money, $10 million, will be funneled to nonprofit organizations in the form of one-time grants to support facility improvements and equipment that will improve services.
About a week ago, Mayor Tim Keller criticized the council's plan for the grant money, saying it would “tie up the funds to build new facilities, which would take years.”
But because of a last-minute amendment sponsored by Councilor Nichole Rogers, that money can also be used to bolster services.
Rogers said she had conversations with providers around the city who said getting money from the state to improve facilities is easier than getting money to directly fund services like treatment programs.
“So I think I'll just stand by our providers and experts who have called for this,” she said.
An annual allotment of $2.3 million will go to the mayor’s office with the stipulation that 40% of that will go towards helping disconnected youth and 60% towards treatment efforts. However the mayor's administration had been pushing for even more funds to support the Gateway Center, which focuses on housing, homelessness and behavioral health.
Chief Administrative Officer Samantha Segel told the council the extra funds were necessary for Gateway to fulfill its intended purpose.
“We built these programs and these environments,” Segel said, “based upon an expectation that opioid settlement funds would be available for services.”
The administration has been pushing the Gateway Center as an entire system of care to help people in several areas at once.
“We as a city have invested … in a system of support to ensure that individuals have a bed, shelter, home, food and other pieces that are needed to ensure that they are stabilized,” Segel said, “and then be in a position to begin thinking about treatment and recovery.
Fiebelkorn sponsored an amendment that would have raised the limit on the Administration’s funds for the first year, but it failed. She said she thought raising the administration’s funding for the first year was a “legitimate compromise,” but also expressed concern over how it has handled Gateway’s budget so far.
“I do think that there has been a lack of planning to fund the Gateway system,and that the citizens of Albuquerque are paying for that,” she said, “and I don't want the citizens of Albuquerque to pay for that.”
Councilor Dan Lewis said he would have supported the amendment if the administration had been more clear that the money would go directly to providing treatment services.
“But it looks like a lot of this is for a lot of operating stuff,” he said. “Honestly, it seems like a lot of this money has gone into a black hole with Gateway.”
The city teamed up with Bernalillo county to develop a plan on how to spend the funds in a process that included meeting with various stakeholders, holding public town halls seeking input, and more.
Fiebelkorn said it was that process that guided them on where to spend the bulk of the money.
“What we had to do was make some hard decisions, and what we think, from the community input, the most important thing was that they wanted to see funds go to the nonprofits who were already providing treatment in our community.”
Another $2 million will be specifically allocated to small and medium-sized recovery and addiction service providers to help ensure they remain viable long-term, and will be distributed by the city’s Department of Health, Housing and Homelessness.
About $1.8 million will go to support Albuquerque Public Schools’ Crossroads Program that focuses on substance abuse prevention and intervention. Fiebelkorn said that’s key to heading off addictions before they start.
“We are going to see a noticeable change in the number of young people who are entering into opioid crisis in their own personal lives,” she said. “And I think that will make this whole thing worthwhile.”
The plan originally included some more aggressive harm reduction measures, aimed at keeping people alive first, in the hopes of getting them into recovery and sobriety later. Those did not make it into the final resolution.
Overdose Prevention Centers, for example, which were cut out of the plan late last year, are places where people who use drugs can do so under medical supervision. Globally there has never been a death at one, according to the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, and studies show they reduce crime, paraphernalia and public drug use in their vicinity.
At the time Fiebelkorn voiced concern over the lack of political will for such interventions that she said can keep people alive.
“We are not basing the decisions that we have to make on science and the suggestions from the experts, but rather on individual, in my mind, prejudices.”
The remaining balance of about $7 million and all future funds will be directed towards projects and programs aligned with the final strategic plan for the funds, which was completed last fall.
The plan focuses on eight core categories:
- Connecting Disconnected Youth
- Comprehensive Education
- Peer Support Expansion
- Recovery Housing
- Community-Based Treatment Access and Quality
- Leveraging the Sobering Center
- Naloxone Access Expansion
- Expand Mobile Crisis Response Services
The money comes from legal settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors that shield them from lawsuits, but force them to pay billions of dollars to state and local governments around the country.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
