Sobering center could save city $3M per year
CITY HALL — A proposed sobering center for public drunks may do little towards reducing vagrancy, City Manager Susan McCarthy said this week.
Elected leaders have pledged to open a sobering center in Santa Monica within a year, saying homelessness continues to plague the city. McCarthy said officials are actively studying the proposal, including looking at the old jail behind City Hall as a possible site, but warned against inflated expectations.
“Sobering centers in other communities do not solely treat the homeless and, in fact, the mentally ill homeless who are also inebriated seem to be a category not served in many of the model programs,” McCarthy told the City Council.
McCarthy said police and human services staffers are discussing the concept with other communities, and studying whether there are peak times the sobering center would be in demand, like after paychecks are issued and on weekends. A detailed report is expected to be delivered to the council in January.
Newly elected City Councilman Bobby Shriver championed the issue of homelessness during his campaign and pledged when he took office earlier this month to open a sobering center before his first year in office was complete.
“During the time that I did my dozens and dozens of coffees that I did in my campaign, there was no bigger issue than homelessness,” Shriver said at the council meeting. “People are very, very energized about it.”
Shriver was joined by City Councilmen Bob Holbrook and Herb Katz in urging City Hall to expedite its study of a sobering center, something that was backed unanimously by the rest of the council. McCarthy said staffers recently had begun looking at the sobering center concept in a more focused way, though it has been looking at the option since a dialogue started in the community more than a year ago.
“We understand there is a feeling of urgency about getting to a set of solutions,” she said.
The earlier sobering center proposal, which targeted a site at 911 Pico Blvd., surfaced in the summer of 2003. It was quashed after neighbors complained about safety issues. Santa Monica Fire Department Capt. Bruce Davis championed that effort, saying a sobering center would be like fast-tracking the local jails and would free up valuable resources.
In 2002, the Santa Monica Police Department received 3,106 calls related to intoxication and booked an average of 4.5 people per day on public drunkenness charges. The SMFD responded to another 963 alcohol-related calls, and Santa Monica and St. John’s hospitals lost a combined total of $250,000 by devoting medical resources to intoxicated people who were sobering up, according to Davis.
By giving public drunks some place to go other than jail or the hospital, the city would save more than $2.9 million a year, Davis added.
One location now being studied is the old jail behind City Hall. Though the rest of the old police building is to be demolished, the three-story jail is part of City Hall’s historic structure. Judy Rambeau, a spokeswoman for the city, said officials were also considering moving the city’s cable TV operations into the old jail.
“Everybody’s looking at what might be the possibilities,” Rambeau said Friday. “It’s an interesting space... You can’t change it too much, you want to retain the historic nature of it. So what are you going to do with it?”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 18, 2004. Read the original PDF.