By CARL E. FEATHER - Staff Writer - cfeather@starbeacon.com
ASHTABULA TOWNSHIP — Turning Point, a long-term residential facility for recovery from chemical addiction, is taking a hiatus courtesy of the poor economy.
Kathleen Kinney, executive director of the Lake Area Recovery Center (LARC), said the facility will close Wednesday and remain shuttered until early July, when LARC’s new fiscal year begins. Kinney said this is the first time in the facility’s history of 30-some years that it has had to close because of a lack of funding.
“I’ve never known it to be this bad,” Kinney said. “Even in the 1980s, funding was not that bad, in general. ... Everything is much worse.”
“Quite a few” employees will be laid off as a result of the closing, although Kinney said it is hard to put an exact number on them because so many of the positions are part time. She said all of the employees have indicated a willingness to ride out the closing and return in July.
The decision is not a matter of LARC losing one large funding source, but rather a slow erosion of funding from different sources. Until this spring, the agency was able to keep programs running by belt-tightening and tapping into a reserve.
“Over the last several years, we basically used our reserve,” Kinney says. “We don’t have it anymore to live on.”
Because the closing has been anticipated for several months, the staff was able to reduce occupancy gradually to minimize the impact on clients. Kinney said there are about a dozen clients remaining in the 26-bed facility. Residents typically spend two to four months at Turning Point as they complete their treatment programs, then move into an outpatient phase of treatment.
“We have been anticipating this would happen, and we were really careful about admitting,” she said. “Everybody who is there has a plan and a place to go. All of them are taken care of.”
Turning Point serves clients who typically have no financial resources or insurance, and Kinney said there is no other comparable service like it in Ashtabula County.
Kinney said LARC serves about 1,400 unduplicated individuals annually. Turning Point affects a relatively small number of those clients, but it consumes a sizable portion of the budget because it is a 24/7 operation.
Aside from consolidating two day programs into one, Kinney does not anticipate the shrinking budget to affect other LARC programs the remainder of this fiscal year.
Concurrent with the decrease in funding, the need for services continues to grow.
“We are always busy, but we are very, very busy now,” Kinney said. “The reality of it is, the majority of people who are in chemical-dependency services are at a point in their lives when their finances are depleted and they don’t have insurance.”
“These are bad economic times for everybody,” she added. “Unfortunately, it hits us at a time when the need is great.”
Kinney calls this a “very sad time” and said former clients who found sobriety and recovery at Turning Point have expressed their concern about the temporary closing. She says although finances are tight right now, there is hope the next fiscal year will bring some additional funding sources that will allow LARC to provide year-round residential services.
“We have no intention to make (the closing) permanent,” she said. “It’s always been a really key part of what we do.”
