Tucson Built an Opioid Sobering Center That Works — Then Left It Two-Thirds Staffed

Michael Schaeter walked into a converted building at 250 S. Toole Ave. in downtown Tucson and, in his words, got taken in immediately. No waiting room triage, no jail intake, no six-hour ER hold next to a cardiac patient. Just a bed, a clinical assessment, and someone asking what he actually needed. Ninety-one percent of the people who’ve come through that door since January tested positive for fentanyl. Ninety-six percent of them left with a referral to real treatment. That is a genuinely good number for a genuinely hard problem, and Pima County built it with opioid settlement money instead of another task force report.

A treatment model that’s outperforming its own budget line is being strangled by a staffing plan nobody funded to completion, and that’s the actual scandal here — not the money, the hiring.

The Sobering Alternative for Recovery Center opened in December using $1.8 million from the Regional Opioid Settlement Advisory Council, part of the $126.8 million Pima’s region is owed under the One Arizona Agreement that’s sending Arizona $1.215 billion over 18 years. Fifteen beds, open 24/7, run by Community Bridges with CODAC Health and the University of Arizona’s nutrition school pitching in. In its first three months it took 138 people who’d otherwise have ended up in a patrol car or an ER bed, most referred straight from Tucson PD. Average length of stay climbed from 10.7 hours in January to 89.3 hours by March — the difference between a hold and an actual stabilization window. People stayed longer when they got a psychiatric evaluation or stayed on medication for opioid use disorder, which is exactly what a sobering center should be doing.

Here’s the part that should worry anyone who cares whether this survives its pilot year: as of late March, only 11 of 19 budgeted positions were filled. Eight open slots, concentrated in nursing and behavioral health — the exact roles that decide whether a 96-hour clinical stay is actually clinical. Patient Bonnie Joerz told AZ Luminaria she’s waited four or five hours for help because there simply weren’t enough staff on shift. Meanwhile the data systems are, in Health Department Director Theresa Cullen’s own words, “insufficient” — January’s records show every single patient logged a zero-minute triage time, which isn’t a clinical outcome, it’s a broken form nobody fixed for a month. Twenty-five incidents disrupted referrals in the first two months; the county still doesn’t have clean numbers on law enforcement deflections or patient satisfaction.

None of this means kill it. It means the county is about to make a renewal call — due within three months of the June 1 report, roughly September — on a program proving the concept works while quietly failing to staff the concept properly. $1.68 million of the original $1.8 million is still sitting there. Unemployment among SAFR patients is 100%; 97% are unsheltered. These are the people the settlement was written for, and the fix isn’t more pilot data, it’s a hiring plan that matches the budget the county already approved. Track the renewal decision at Arizona Watch, and if you’re weighing opioid treatment in Pima County right now, ask any facility how many clinical positions are actually filled — not budgeted, filled.

Pima County didn’t fail to build the sobering center. It failed to finish hiring for it, and that’s a much easier problem to fix before September than after the beds go empty.