An Arizona-based contractor will have a unique method of getting paid to operate Mayor Lurie’s forthcoming RESET Center that hopes to sober up public drug users, as they’ll be paid based on how effective the center is.
Below we see the current condition of what will be SF Mayor Daniel Lurie’s new RESET Center (Rapid enforcement, support, evaluation and triage center), Lurie’s attempt to clean up SF’s street drug use issues that previous mayors have also tried to fix. This place will be a 26-month pilot program, where people who get arrested for publicly using drugs would not be sent to jail but instead be sent in here, to sober up, and then hopefully be connected with (optional) recovery services. It would have 25 beds total for this purpose.
We do not begrudge Mayor Lurie for trying new and different methods on San Francisco’s drugs and homelessness challenges, considering that previous strategies have yielded some fairly dubious results. But Mayor Lurie’s RESET Center has basically been deemed illegal by the SF City Attorney, via a secret memo unearthed by Mission Local. So if a city facility is basically a sitting duck for which the city could be sued at any given moment, that sounds like maybe not an effective program.
But there are other ways in which the RESET Center may end up standing out as a uniquely effective program. The Chronicle reports that the Arizona-based contractor that won the deal to run the center will be paid based on the center’s results and outcomes, or basically, how effective it is.
According to the Chronicle's reporting, “It’s the first time the city has entered into a performance-based contract for public health or homelessness services.”
“Job No. 1 is to make this site successful, so we’re laser-focused on that,” SF Health and Human Services chief Kunal Modi told the Chronicle. “But the notion of having more of our contracts linked to outcomes for which a contractor is accountable and payment is linked to those outcomes is definitely something we foresee spreading.”
The SF Board of Supervisors already approved a $14.5 million price tag for the RESET Center. But the Arizona-based firm Connections Health Solutions (which does business in California as ConnectionsCA) will apparently have varying, incentive-based compensation based on drop-off times, staffing, how many arrestees genuinely sober up, and how many people actually take the recovery services.
Per the Chronicle, the contractor is still expected to be paid a minimum of $530,000 to $657,000 per month to operate the center. It is expected to open in April.
Image: Google Street View
