In a Lewis County meeting on Monday, after a commissioner-sanctioned presentation by a resident who spoke about her mother’s experience getting referrals to medical care through Gather Church in Centralia, Kylie Sexsmith asked Commissioner Lindsey Pollock not to approve a contract with the church for the recovery navigator program.
Pollock serves on the board of Great Rivers Behavioral Health, an administrative government organization with one representative each from Lewis, Pacific, Grays Harbor, Wahkiakum and Cowlitz counties. It’s in charge of reviewing state funding for mental health, housing and some other social services with a nexus in behavioral health and homelessness.
Recovery navigator is run in each county in Washington, per state law. The program serves as a point-of-contact for health care referral, especially for people struggling with substance abuse disorder. As Pollock put it, before the Washington state Supreme Court’s Blake decision, many people the program serves would have received a drug possession charge.
When the contract is up for renewal in June, Pollock can’t choose on her own whether the board will approve or deny it with Gather Church. But, she told Sexsmith Monday the board is carefully evaluating the contract. She initially used the word “investigation,” but later clarified no outside organization was involved, just that the Great Rivers board and its executive director are evaluating the program and the contract.
Later, in a private conversation, Sexsmith stated on Facebook, and Pollock confirmed, the commissioner said she was almost certainly not going to vote for approval of the contract with Gather a second time.
Two Sides
Fully understanding the conflict between the church and the county requires understanding two people, who, whether intentionally or not, have become the faces associated with opposing sides of the conversation on homelessness in Lewis County.
One is a conservative, outspoken, highly-involved county commissioner from Centralia: Sean Swope.
About one year ago, at Swope’s behest, Lewis County took a microscope to all contracts with various housing, behavioral health, substance abuse disorder and harm reduction agencies. He repeatedly stressed that taxpayers’ dollars were being spent on the problem without “accountability” being written into the contracts.
By accountability, he means a hope that service providers would track benchmarks for clients — as in, the numbers of people who remain sober, get jobs, are in stable housing, etc. — and those contracts and/or services would hinge upon the benchmarks being met.
More than once in conversations around the topic he’s mentioned giving people “a hand up, not a hand-out.” Sexsmith used the same phrase in her presentation Monday.
The other is Cole Meckle, pastor of Centralia’s Gather Church.
Gather does everything a normal church does: Bible studies, sermons and worship. And, like most churches, it has branches in humanitarian efforts, too.
Staff and volunteers for the church run a food box program that delivers hundreds of free boxes of food across the county each week, a weekly hot meal kitchen, a clinic for the narcotic-dependence treating medication suboxone, a clothing bank, harm reduction, a child care center and various other wraparound services for people experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, substance abuse disorder and and more.
According to Swope, in the span of one week during the summer of 2022, four people at Lewis County’s largest homeless encampment, Blakeslee Junction in Centralia, overdosed. Each was revived with Narcan — a medication that rapidly reverses the effects of narcotic overdose. At the time, Swope told The Chronicle the medication had been provided to the residents by Gather Church.
One might argue the two have more in common than not; both have a keen interest in homelessness in their community. It is their approaches that vary.
Swope said he encouraged Sexsmith to share her story and will further encourage Centralia Police Chief Stacy Denham to share his experiences working with the program because he’s concerned with recovery navigator specifically.
“This is solely focused on the recovery navigator program,” Swope said on Friday. “There are great things that Gather Church does. There is no question they help people. With this specific program, it is not being done correctly.”
As Pollock pointed out, it is a very new program. Data is still being taken in on its process and effectiveness.
Sexsmith’s main concern was the amount of time it took for her mother to be admitted into a care facility. Moreover, she claims the church dropped the ball and wasn’t working to get her in a facility and that a staff member lied to her about coordinating with one facility. She further accuses the church of being money-motivated.
“As big pharma has shown us, there is no money in people that are well,” Sexsmith said.
Asked about their role after her presentation, Gather said it was not able to address Sexsmith’s claims, citing medical privacy laws.
Meckle wrote in a statement to The Chronicle, “Due to the fact that we are a behavioral health agency, we are held to the highest standards of (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and that includes a higher level of protection for substance use disorders and mental health. Therefore, we are not at liberty to make any statements regarding any individual in the community and any protected health information.”
The organization doesn’t provide clinical intervention such as detox or inpatient care, but staff can write a prescription for suboxone while clients wait to be admitted, and then it’s Gather’s role to set up the referral.
An organization called Destination Hope and Recovery runs the recovery navigator programs in Pacific and Grays Harbor counties. Pollock said they’ve been successful and mentioned them on the topic of other organizations that could be chosen for the contract if not Gather Church.
Robin Cozad, co-owner of Destination Hope and Recovery, told The Chronicle that timelines between referral and health care vary greatly.
“There’s a lot of disparity in the way that treatment is able to be provided,” Cozad said.
People on Medicare can only be treated at one facility in the state, Cozad said. People who test positive for usage of benzodiazepines have severe limitations on where they can receive care because withdrawal can be deadly and patients need 24/7 surveillance. People who are using methamphetamine or another drug that is not an opiate, Cozad said, are deprioritized because of the prevalence and deadliness of heroin and fentanyl.
Usually, he said, a patient can be admitted to a detox program in a few days. Beds for inpatient care, however, can take a lot longer. Pollock said that’s the case in Lewis County too, mentioning one instance where Cascade Community Healthcare had a month-long waitlist for beds.
Other issues for timeframes include a patient’s willingness. Recovery navigator, to a point, is non-coercive, Cozad said, and doesn’t have the authority to admit people without their consent.
Sexsmith said she went back and forth with Gather staff, including through periods of not hearing from them, for a total of 57 days. During that time period, she said her mother was diagnosed with pneumonia and COVID-19, which, Sexsmith said, also delayed her admission to an inpatient program.
Currently, she said, her mom is living with Sexsmith’s sister in “the great state of Texas” and has been through a detox and care program and is two months sober.
At the end of her speech, she spoke directly to Pollock, saying “funding Gather Church, that makes you an accomplice and part of the poison killing our country.”
Pollock said that was a misunderstanding about her role, and that the process for the contract is being reviewed, adding she’d be happy to meet with Sexsmith in private.
What frustrated Swope about the story, he said, was what he saw as a lack of consistent support.
“Addiction is a very tough situation and there has to be that repetitive interaction with people to help them get to where they need to be to break that cycle. The recovery navigator piece of this is supposed to continually make contact and see people through the process,” Swope said, later adding, “They’re supposed to be the hand-hold.”
Pollock said she was assigned to her position on the Great Rivers Behavioral Health board when first taking office in 2021. She said it isn’t exactly in her wheelhouse, as she’s more interested in infrastructure projects, and wouldn’t fight to keep the spot.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t appear Swope needs to take her role on the board or bring in new speakers in order to convince Pollock to vote against the Gather contract, as she told Sexsmith she’s “99.9%” sure that would be her decision come June, barring any significant new information.
“Like I said, this is a very very new program. It has not been designed and fleshed out from contact all the way through treatment,” Pollock said. “The main thing that has been focused on this first year has just been how to get in touch with these folks. … the next step is how to monitor through that treatment.”
