At meeting, View Royal residents wary of addiction treatment plan
View Royal residents expressed suspicion over a proposal to put a residential addiction treatment facility in the former provincial youth custody centre.
Our Place, the downtown support house and soup kitchen, wants to set up a new addiction treatment centre for 50 men at the former provincial youth custody centre at 94 Talcott Rd.
The facility would offer live-in treatment for addiction and chronic homelessness. Treatment would be voluntary and last from one to two years.
About 25 people attended an information meeting with officials at the former youth prison.
The centre is currently being used to provide transitional housing for people who were living at the tent city in downtown Victoria. They are scheduled to be gone by the end of the year.
Josh Peterson, who has two daughters, 12 and 14, said the transitional housing has brought some frightening upsets: active addicts and mentally ill people having episodes.
“My wife is a runner and she won’t run by here now,” Peterson said after the meeting.
“I just think any good will that was here, they took advantage of.”
Our Place officials did their best to convince the View Royal residents that a residential treatment facility would be a much better neighbour than the existing transition house.
“It will be an abstinence-based program. That will be the biggest difference you will notice,” said Don Evan, executive director of Our Place Society.
“People living here now, many are in active addictions and there is no requirement for them to address those.”
The proposed treatment centre would be closed, with clients staying in place except for approved outside visits to groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, or for employment.
The new centre would also be completely sober, with residents having gone through detox before arriving.
The residential treatment plan has been developed in consultation with Guthrie House, a 32-bed treatment facility operated under the umbrella of the provincial Nanaimo Correctional Facility.
It’s hoped the province can initially fund the treatment facility with $4.7 million over seven years. After that, it would be privately funded.
Before the centre could open, the municipality of View Royal would have to approve rezoning. That application would have to be made by B.C. Housing, owners of the facility.
Opened in 2002, the original facility was designed to house as many as 60 young people. The province announced it would close down in 2014.