City considers changes to resource center after drug incident | Western Colorado

Councilman Cody Kennedy said based on the information the city council has received about the incident, it may be time to stop funding the resource center.

Kennedy said if the city didn't work on the resource center, he expected the city council would work with City Attorney John Shaver to get it declared a nuisance property.

“I fully supported this cause,” Kennedy said. “I was excited to do something good for people downtown and provide additional resources, but what I hear and learn is that people who are trying to recover and get off drugs are afraid to go below.”

According to police documents, a Western Colorado Drug Task Force detective saw people smoking marijuana and “controlled substances” at the resource center.

Charges arising from the incident included public use of marijuana, obstruction, possession of a controlled substance, failure to appear in court and possession of drug paraphernalia, police records show.

None of the charges in the incident involved violence or rose to the level of a felony.

City staff have proposed including $415,800 in the 2025 city budget to fund operations at the resource center, which opened in January at 261 Ute Ave. opened as a place where unsheltered and other vulnerable people can receive services during the day.

“I am strongly opposed at this point to giving them additional money to keep doing what they are doing,” Kennedy said. “It concerns me that we are, sorry, funding a crack house in the middle of Grand Junction.”

Mayor Abe Herman disagreed with Kennedy's characterization of the resource center.

“At our mid-year check-in we had 30-1,000 services done, we have hundreds of people in there per day,” Herman said. “When we decided to fund this with the $900,000 and set this thing up, if someone asked you, 'Do you think there could be drug arrests on this property at some point?'”

Herman continued, “It's part of dealing with a certain population, and that doesn't mean it's 100% of the population, so I think there were eight drug-related arrests in all the visits and all the services provided.” Let Just keep in mind that this is not the entire population.

“And that doesn’t mean there don’t need to be significant improvements to the way it works and that it can’t be tightened up.”

Herman questioned whether it would be fair to take away the services offered by the resource center from a large portion of Grand Junction's struggling population, the vast majority of whom are not involved in criminal activity.

“I think perspective is important,” Herman said. “I think we shouldn’t be reactionary about things like this. We need to think about how we start making things happen.”

Councilwoman Anna Stout noted that when the city had other troubled properties, it included those properties in a performance plan to improve the situation.

Stout also said closing the center would “diffuse the problem.”

“I don't think we've gotten to the point where we've given that, raised that expectation with a fair warning and worked with them to try to mitigate the issues and that seems to be what we're doing do now, so I do.” “I don't support an immediate closure yet,” Stout said. “And the reason I’m not is because they’re going somewhere. What do we do when we close these doors, we end up with a problem that spreads, we don’t have a focused space and we don’t have partners to work with to figure these things out?”

Councilman Scott Beilfuss said he spends a lot of time at the resource center and the center does a lot of good, but the center will likely have to move.

Community Development Director Tamra Allen said city staff hadn't figured out how a move or change in model would work and therefore didn't include funding for those things in the proposed 2025 budget.