A new office providing treatment for people with substance use disorder has opened in Richford, aiming to fill a gap in human services in the small border town.
Turning Point of Franklin County, a St. Albans-based community center, opened the office Feb. 9 and is offering free walk-in services there, including recovery coaching and peer support. The facility is at 53 Main St., across from the Northern Tier Center for Health, and it will be open weekly on Wednesdays.
Richford resident Levi Irish, who recently served as the town’s economic development coordinator, said these services have been a missing node in the local support network for people whose lives and families are affected by substance use disorder.
“We still have this misconception sometimes that addiction is a choice,” Irish said. “I’m very excited to know that there’s going to be people in town that are without judgment and people can go to a safe space to talk to them.”
The office is funded by a roughly $50,000 grant from the Vermont Community Foundation. That money will support two years of operations in Richford — mainly paying for staff — said Karen Heinlein-Grenier, executive director of Turning Point of Franklin County.
Heinlein-Grenier said the organization has long been aware that its services were needed in the Richford area, but until recently, it did not have the funding for an office there.
In addition to its main location in St. Albans, Turning Point of Franklin County runs an office in Enosburg Falls, about a 15-minute drive from Richford.
For residents who do not have access to a car, Heinlein-Grenier said, the only option to get to the organization’s in-person programming has been a Green Mountain Transit commuter bus that runs between Richford and the St. Albans Town Industrial Park.
The issue, she said, is that this bus runs only once a day in each direction, leaving Richford at about 5:30 a.m. and getting back at about 4:30 p.m.
“It left them on the street in town all day,” she said of people who took the bus to the St. Albans Turning Point center, “when that wasn’t the best place for them to be.”
Heinlein-Grenier also said that, when people were temporarily housed at a Richford hotel in 2020 through Vermont’s general assistance housing program, the town did not have many of the services — including treatment for substance use disorder — that would have helped those people.
Fewer than 20 different households lived at the hotel, which at the time was called The Crossing, between April and October 2020, according to Tricia Tyo, deputy commissioner of the Department for Children and Families’ Economic Services Division.
The state decided to end its relationship with The Crossing, Tyo said, due to concerns from the community about substance use there and concerns that some guests were making the hotel, and the town, unsafe.
Irish said emergency responses did increase in Richford while people were living at The Crossing — which now goes by the name Mokah’s — and agreed that concerns from town residents prompted the hotel owner to end the program.
Looking forward, she hopes the recent investment in substance use disorder treatment will spur other organizations to invest in Richford residents, too.
The town has long struggled with higher-than-average poverty rates and lower educational attainment, and residents have told VTDigger they would benefit from more human services and local economic opportunities.
“Hopefully,” Irish said, “we just keep making all these positive moves toward getting more support and more agencies into our community.”
