Grand Traverse County commissioners will vote Wednesday to spend over a half million dollars in opioid settlement funds on three local projects, including expanding the Traverse City Police Department’s Quick Response Team to serve clients countywide, enhancing the local Drug Court, and creating a syringe disposal program for the homeless encampment at the Pines. The projects represent the first major disbursals from the county’s opioid settlement funds, which total $1.3 million to date and are expected to reach several million dollars more in the coming years.

A local taskforce met multiple times over the last year to create recommendations for addressing the local opioid epidemic using county settlement funds. Grand Traverse County is among thousands of municipalities across the U.S. that sued the manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies behind the drug crisis. According to a memo from County Deputy Administrator Chris Forsyth, in addition to $1.3 million already received from settlement agreements with those entities, Grand Traverse County is expected to receive at least $5.6 million over the next 15 to 18 years, though that amount “likely will increase,” he wrote.

The taskforce has developed a needs assessment and strategic plan that “sets forth recommended funding priorities intended to improve the prevention, care, and treatment of opioid use disorder,” according to Forsyth. That plan will be presented to commissioners at a future meeting. In the meantime, taskforce members recommended disbursing funds now to address two of the highest funding priorities in the strategic plan: $300,000 to the Grand Traverse Sheriff's Office to expand the TCPD’s Quick Response Team (QRT) countywide, and $164,000 to 86th District Court to enhance the court's Drug Court program.

The QRT is a grant-funded program initially designed to provide an overdose response team on the TCPD and get Naloxone (Narcan) into the community, TCPD Social Worker Coordinator Jenn Holm said this spring. However, “it’s blossomed into something much bigger than that,” she said. “We have a prevention focus with our program, and individuals can actually be a part of it before they ever overdose.” The QRT now partners with dozens of agencies to provide a “huge supportive web” for program participants, many of whom come from the Pines, Holm said. To be eligible, individuals must meet two of three criteria of experiencing homelessness, substance misuse, and mental health issues.

Until now, QRT participants could only be in the city limits, since it’s a TCPD program. However, the $300,000 opioid settlement allocation to the Sheriff’s Office would allow that program to expand to serve clients across Grand Traverse County. Holm notes that out of 77 individuals who were screened out of the QRT program, 52 (68 percent) lived in the county but were outside city limits. Those individuals would be eligible for support under the expansion. The majority of QRT referral calls to date (88 percent) have been from individuals experiencing homelessness, but Holm anticipates county QRT calls will “likely relate more to overdose, mental health, and homeless prevention” issues.

To support the expansion, “one additional mental health professional would be needed to include a vehicle, one peer support person, two beds secured with Addiction Treatment Services, as well as additional ancillary items to include a computer and training,” according to Sheriff Mike Shea. The Sheriff’s Office plans to use a certified deputy already included in the department’s staffing plan to start, then gather data to see if a deputy designated specifically to the QRT is needed in the future. Shea requested $300,000 be allocated annually for the next three to five years to support the QRT expansion.

The overall goal of the QRT is to help reduce law enforcement calls and better coordinate services for vulnerable residents, according to Holm. “We’ve had some success already (in the city), so hopefully we can take that wider and help the entire county,” she tells The Ticker.

The $164,000 allocation to 86th District Court would support the court’s Drug Court program. According to 86th District Court Administrator Gwen Taylor, the program was created as a “direct response to the opioid crisis in 2017.” Participants – individuals charged with felony crimes involving drug abuse – must submit to twice-weekly urine tests. That testing is expensive at $28 a pop, according to Taylor, meaning participants can be required to pay over $200 per month.

“The individuals who enter our program are nearly always extremely unstable in all aspects of their life: physical, mental, housing, and financial,” Taylor wrote in a memo to commissioners. “Most enter the program unhoused and unemployed with very little, if any, personal resources. Paying for the tests that are required is often impossible for them at the outset. Even ongoing in the program this is a large burden on them when they are trying to become stable, which is a lengthy process.”

The county’s allocation would help cover testing for participants for the remainder of 2024. The court also plans to use funds to create a new treatment court coordinator/probation supervisor position. In feedback shared by state and federal treatment court organizations, “the largest concern they expressed was the lack of a coordinator, which they indicated is essential to a successful program,” Taylor noted.

The third proposed disbursement – submitted by Commissioner TJ Andrews – would transfer $50,704 to Harm Reduction Michigan to create a syringe disposal program for the homeless encampment at the Pines. Andrews wrote that there was as an “emergent public health concern associated with needle disposal in the Pines,” specifically an absence of “highly secure syringe disposal boxes.” Andrews said the health risk posed by used needles circulating is a “developing situation in the Pines that warrants immediate attention and an effective community response.”

In a memo, Pam Lynch of Harm Reduction Michigan said that Pines residents have witnessed individuals there taking syringes out of on-site biohazardous waste containers to reuse. Though the containers were likely placed “with good intentions,” Lynch wrote, the reality is they are often insufficient and can actually be “counterproductive by presenting greater HIV and viral hepatitis risk.” Lynch said that what’s needed instead is a “specially designed impermeable and inaccessible device for collecting used syringes – to block syringes being taken out.”

Harm Reduction Michigan’s funding request will cover the installation of at least one of those special disposal receptacles, which Lynch said the organization would commit to regularly emptying. The organization will also increase its on-site HIV and viral hepatitis testing and prevention services from once a week to twice a week at the Pines. Holm, who regularly works with Pines residents, says harm reduction as a general concept is “useful for this population.”

“Recovery is not a linear journey,” she says. “We can support people using in safer ways, and then reduce and ultimately stop it.”