Thomas Breen photos
Democratic mayoral challenger Tom Goldenberg: "This is an inappropriate place" for a methadone clinic.
APT patient Jeffrey Culp: "What happens to the people where this place saved their lives?"
A Democratic mayoral candidate traveled to Congress Avenue to call for the immediate closure and relocation of a controversial methadone clinic.
One of the clinic’s patients posed the candidate a question: What about the many lives that have been saved from the depths of heroin addiction by the APT Foundation’s treatments? One saved life, he continued, is his own.
That mayoral campaign-season back and forth took place Tuesday afternoon at the corner of Congress Avenue and Ward Street in the Hill.
Tom Goldenberg, who is one of three Democratic challengers and two independents vying to unseat two-term incumbent Justin Elicker, hosted the press conference to criticize the APT Foundation’s opioid addiction treatment center right next door at 495 Congress Ave. He cited his own recent experience spending a week visiting different New Haven area methadone clinics, including the Congress Avenue site, as inspiring his close-or-relocate-now call.
Hill neighbors have long raised concerns about loitering, illegal drug dealing, and occasional bouts of violence outside of the methadone clinic, which stands adjacent to a residential neighborhood and right across the street from the John C. Daniels elementary and middle school.
Goldenberg with campaign field director Jayuan Carter before Tuesday's presser.
On Tuesday, Goldenberg, joined by campaign field director Jayuan Carter, amplified those quality-of-life concerns and called for the privately owned and operated site to close its doors. “This is an inappropriate place” to have a methadone clinic for the medication-assisted treatment of people struggling with opioid addiction, he said. “This place needs to be relocated or shut down immediately. … This community deserves respect.”
Alluding to a recent announcement by Mayor Justin Elicker and APT Foundation CEO Lynn Madden that the APT Foundation is looking to move its Congress Avenue clinic to a to-be-constructed new building on Long Wharf, Goldenberg said that that move should be quicker. “Not in five years. Not in one year. Not next month, but today.”
Goldenberg said that methadone clinics like APT’s should be located exclusively in industrial-zoned areas. He said that APT’s other methadone clinics on Long Wharf and in West Haven and North Haven are in industrial areas, and work just fine.
If elected mayor, he said, he would push to change New Haven’s zoning code to permit methadone clinics only in industrial areas. He also said he would consider filing a lawsuit against the APT Foundation to try to uproot it from Congress Avenue, though he did not have any answer as to what legal grounds he would cite to try to force the clinic to move via the courts.
Asked about what the roughly 700 patients who currently receive methadone treatment from APT on Congress Avenue should do if the Hill site immediately closed, Goldenberg said the city should work with APT and transportation services like Veyo to make sure the displaced patients can get to a different location, ideally on Long Wharf.
Culp wheels up to talk with the candidate.
That’s when Jeffrey Culp, a 52-year-old East Haven resident, pulled up to the press conference on his bike.
He listened to Goldenberg’s close-it-now pitch, and had a question of his own: “What happens to the people where this place saved their lives?”
Culp said he was speaking from firsthand experience. He said he travels to the Congress Avenue site six days a week to receive methadone treatment. He’s been doing that since 2013. Culp said that this very clinic helped him curb his prior addiction to heroin — he no longer feels the “cravings” to use opioids, he no longer looks to steal to feed that addiction. He said he now holds down a steady job as an arborist. All thanks, he said, to the Congress Avenue methadone clinic. “This is the ideal treatment,” he said.
“I’m a proponent of methadone treatment,” Goldenberg said. “It’s an excellent, evidence-backed treatment. I’m saying this facility, it doesn’t belong next to a school.”
APT's 495 Congress Ave. clinic
“I agree with that one,” Culp said. Culp also agreed with Goldenberg that the Congress Avenue site “is not like the other satellites” that APT runs in North Haven and West Haven and elsewhere. Those other sites don’t have as much loitering or drug dealing outside, he said. That’s because the Congress Avenue site serves a sizeable homeless population, he said. “They fall through the cracks. What do we do about them?”
“We need to make sure that everyone who comes here is taken care of, and that we take them to a facility that works,” Goldenberg said. He repeated that Long Wharf or East Street would be a much better location. As for Congress Avenue and Ward Street, he said, “this is not an appropriate place.”
Elicker: "Not A Thoughtful Way To Address A Complicated Challenge"
In a phone interview after Goldenberg’s presser, Elicker described the mayoral challenger’s call for industrial-zone-only locations of methadone clinics as “unproductive.”
Such a prohibition would block successful methadone programs like Cornell Scott Hill Health’s on Minor Street, he said, and it would run counter to prevailing best practices of making sure that such necessary healthcare services are accessible to the people who need them and not shunted off and concentrated in one remote area.
Elicker said his administration has been working with APT to find a new location for its Congress Avenue clinic. He said that the city and APT are still planning on having that Hill service relocate to a new to-be-built building on Long Wharf.
In the meantime, he said, the city has worked to make that area safer for residents and students by having a police presence on most days at school drop-off and pickup times, adding lighting to the street, and putting up a fence to try to keep away loiterers and potential drug dealers from school property.
The mayor dubbed questions about drug dealing and violence “very legitimate concerns” from neighbors. But calling to immediately close a privately owned and run health care clinic that serves 700 patients and then try to limit methadone clinics only to industrial zones would be a “crude way” to move forward, he argued.
Big picture, he continued, his administration’s focus is “harm reduction” when it comes to figuring out where methadone clinics should be allowed to operate, and how. “We need to provide more treatment, not less.” Those treatment sites, he continued, must be “built to minimize outside impact” on surrounding neighborhoods. He noted that the Congress Avenue clinic does not have adequate interior space for patients to wait before and after they receive treatment. He pledged to work with APT on that issue, as well.
Simply saying that methadone clinics should only be in industrial areas, Elicker concluded, “is not a thoughtful way to address a complicated challenge.”
Click on the video below to watch Goldenberg’s press conference in full.
Drug addiction is a product of our society. We should not push its treatment into the margins. Our communities should foster clinics and other treatment resources in all areas.