Travis County opened the Sobering Center in 2018 with a goal to reduce the congestion of the county’s jail and hospitals with folks who were publicly intoxicated. Instead, they would be sent to a quiet building downtown on Sabine Street. They could eat a snack, drink some water, sleep it off and leave the next morning.
To date, over 13,000 people have gone to the Sobering Center. Some are college students or tourists who had a rough night, but some are people struggling with alcoholism or substance-use disorder who need more than a bottle of water and a bag of pretzels.
That’s why the Sobering Center is opening up a newly renovated second floor, which will provide a safe place where people can recover until they get connected with a long-term rehabilitation program.
Ashlyn Branscum, development and communications manager at the Sobering Center, said the services on the second floor will especially help people without insurance, as it can take days to be admitted into a rehab program.
“We had a guy who we saw a lot of (who was picked up by authorities) 75 times in 135 days, which is a really high first responder utilizer,” Branscum said.
About a dozen of those times he landed at the Sobering Center.
“He was living on the streets, he was a veteran and he was uninsured, and so our staff made the decision to kind of just keep him on the fly and we were able to get him connected to treatment after staying here for a couple days,” she said. “Then that was kind of when we realized, ‘Oh, we can do this for other people.’”
Renee Dominguez/KUT News. The newly renovated second floor of the Sobering Center offers a place for clients to stay for a few days or weeks while staff connect them with long-term rehabilitation services.
The second floor has a bright room with 11 twin beds and partitions for patients to recover in, as well as a small kitchen and a shower. It also has three private rooms that can be used for detoxing after the Sobering Center obtains a medical license, CEO Laura Elmore LeBlanc said.
“I think something the public often isn’t aware of is you can die coming down from alcohol withdrawal,” Elmore LeBlanc said. “Medical detox is required to get someone safely sobered and detoxed without threat to life, and that resource just doesn’t really exist in this town.”
Elmore LeBlanc hopes the second floor will be operational by this fall, but first, they need to secure funding for the staff. At minimum, they need an additional $500,000 a year. That funding could come from the city of Austin, Integral Care, Central Health or private donors.
The investment will be well worth it to the community, she said. A third-party public health researcher found that for every $1 the community spends on the Sobering Center, the community gets back $2. Those dollars are saved by diverting folks from Travis County Jail or an emergency room.
“The more diversion we do and the more bodies we can fit in here, the more money we save the community,” Elmore LeBlanc said.
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