Binge-drinking is a problem in Austin that officials hope will be addressed with the opening of a sobriety center next fall.
The facility is set to provide a safe place for people cited for public intoxication to sober up and receive referrals to treatment programs. The center will potentially be located at the current Travis County Medical Examiner's Office, 1213 Sabine St., Austin.
Through this center the city, county and local health care providers expect to realize cost savings, and law enforcement officials will be able to spend more time on patrol because they will no longer have to book these individuals into jail, officials said.
Here are some statistics about public intoxication in Austin as well as a breakdown of the sobriety center by the numbers:
There have been about 3,400 public intoxication incidents in the county in the past year.
Bill Brice, vice president of operations for the Downtown Austin Alliance, sat on the committee that planned the implementation of the sobriety center. He said most of the approximately 3,400 offenses resulted in the offender going to jail or the emergency room.
"In either outcome there are resources being used to address the problem that probably aren't appropriate," Brice said. "It's overkill in terms of resources being applied to address the problem. The sobriety center provides that option for someone who is not in a medical crisis due to their inebriation but also perhaps not violent not guilty of any other offense related to the public intoxication."
Booking someone into jail for a public intoxication offense can take more than two hours. Taking an offender to the hospital can eat up four or more hours of an officer's day.
At the Houston Recovery Center, a similar facility to the one that will be established in Austin, the average time a police officer spends taking a public intoxication offender to the recovery center is eight minutes, Brice said.
"Those resources are quickly back on the street," he said. "This is critically important downtown because we have such limited police resources."
Nearly 1 in 5 adults in Travis County reports that they binge-drink.
According to
survey results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 19.5 percent of adults say that they consumed four or more drinks (women) or five or more drinks (men) on one or more occasions in the past 30 days. The median rate among U.S. counties is 16.3 percent.
During its first 10 years, the sobriety center is slated to have total expenditures of $23 million.
The city of Austin will cover about 78 percent of that cost, and the rest will be paid for by the county, according to county documents. The
facility was recommended in 2015 to have 27 full-time-equivalent positions and capacity for 30 to 40 beds.
A local government corporation will oversee operations at the facility. Its board of directors is composed of 9 members.
The Travis County Commissioners Court and Austin City Council decided Sept. 20 to form the local government corporation. The board of directors comprises four county appointees and four city appointees as well as one jointly appointed director. A
list of the directors can be found here.
