By Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this month, City Councilmember Maritza Rivera proposed a budget amendment directing the city’s Human Services Department to analyze “the appropriateness and feasibility” of using King County’s sobering center, which provides people a place to recover from the acute impacts of alcohol and drug intoxication, “to address individuals arrested under Seattle’s drug possession laws, including an evaluation of the need and feasibility for such a facility to be secure.” The amendment is now in the council’s “consent package” of amendments slated to pass without further discussion.

But King County says it has no interest in converting the sobering center into a secure facility for people arrested for public drug use and possession, and says neither Rivera nor Council President Sara Nelson, who supports Rivera’s amendment, has reached out to the county to discuss their idea.

“The City of Seattle has not spoken to us about these budget requests, and the County has no intention of changing the model to what the Councilmembers describe,” King County Department of Community and Human Services director Kelly Rider told PubliCola. “The intended purpose of this facility is to serve people living unsheltered to sleep off acute alcohol or drug intoxication or opiate overdose and connect them to treatment, housing assistance, and other supports.” 

During a recent council discussion, Rivera said the sobering center was a facility the county “had [operated] pre-COVID, actually, and had not reopened. I know that they’re looking to r- establish and reopen it.” In fact, the county’s sobering center has been open continually in various locations, mostly the Yesler Building in Pioneer Square, since before the pandemic, and has been operating out of the Yesler Building since 2022.

However (as a more recent staff description of Rivera’s amendment acknowledged) it has faced challenges finding a permanent location. In 2022, a plan to move the sobering center to an existing Salvation Army shelter in SoDo was thwarted by anti-shelter efforts led by, among others, Chinatown/International District activist Tanya Woo—who subsequently ran for city council, lost, got appointed, and then lost again.

Rivera said the sobering center could be a place where people who use drugs in public “can sober up, and then we can offer services and they can consent and then go get the treatment that they that they really need.”

The sobering center, which is operated by Pioneer Human Services, currently offers case management and can direct people to treatment and other services, but it does not compel people to “go get treatment” and most people who leave the facility do so by walking out the door. Its primary purpose is to relieve downtown emergency service providers by giving people under the influence of substances a safe, dry place to go that isn’t the hospital or jail. Sobering centers have been around, and serving this specific, limited purpose since the 1970s.

The county is still looking for a building to permanently house the sobering center, allowing the county to double its current capacity from 30 to 60 people a night.