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Politics & Government

Commissioner questions location of planned detox/rehab center

Glenn Eckhart says Salisbury Township site could be hard to access in an emergency.

Lehigh County is proceeding with a plan to a drug and alcohol detoxification/rehabilitation center in Salisbury Township but one commissioner says it’s going in the wrong location.

At last Wednesday’s meeting, County Commissioner Glenn Eckhart, who lives in Salisbury, said the plan to put a $4.4 million on Riverside Drive next to the county work release prison for low-risk offenders is a bad choice.

 “There’s only one way in,” Eckhart said. “It’s a two-mile road that pretty much dead ends.”

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 The 31-bed, 15,510 square-foot facility is to be built along the Lehigh River – a remote spot the county chose after exploring other locations over the years that drew objections from neighbors.

“It doesn’t seem to have ever been a disagreement over ‘is there a need?’ Tom Muller, county director of administration, said previously. “The issue has been ‘is it going to be in my backyard?’”  The county hasn’t had a detox/rehab facility since 1996; it hopes to start construction in January and open the center in late 2012.

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But Eckhart said with no other paved road entrance or exit at the Riverside Drive location, it could be hard for firefighters, ambulance crews and police to get to the site in an emergency. “It is and could be a legal issue if there were ever a disaster in the area,” he said.

County Human Resources Director Jan Creedon said Salisbury Township police and fire chiefs were consulted on the facility plans and the county made changes to take their comments into account. “I believe any concerns on the part of emergency responders have been addressed,” Creedon said later.

Salisbury Township Commissioners approved the land development plan in February on the condition that the center only accepts residents of Lehigh and Northampton counties. The county objected to that restriction and filed suit.

Creedon said there’s enough need in the Lehigh Valley to fill the beds but the county wants to make sure the center is viable in the future, regardless of changes in funding and demand. “Nobody can say what’s going to happen to funding and we might have to draw from outside the Valley because of that,” she said.

The county is using state funds it accrued from the Health Choices Reinvestment fund to build the center, which Creedon said will be money well spent.

“A great part of the homeless population has addiction issues, they end up in our shelters or incarcerated,” she said. “It costs more to keep people incarcerated than it does to return them to a healthy life in the community.”

 

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