Organizations helping Porter County residents recover from addiction are getting a share of the county's opioid settlement money. The county council finalized a $50,000 appropriation Tuesday.
That includes $10,000 for the Portage Recovery Association to open its "So-Bar" coffee house, $10,000 for Three20 Recovery Center in Chesterton to help leverage additional grant funding from the town and the state, and $10,000 for roof repairs at the Moraine House in Valparaiso. "[If] they can sustain that, they can slowly start working on the inside stuff, so that [Moraine] House will remain intact, so the facility will remain in Porter County, so the judges can use that to put people at," council member Greg Simms explained.
The Porter County Juvenile Detention Center was also allocated $20,000. Half of that will go toward the Juvenile Justice Jeopardy game that travels to schools throughout Porter County, while the other half will go toward a youth mentoring program.
"They get volunteers from the community, and they take some of these kids out and do stuff — fishing, maybe to Zao Island, whatever it is — and this helps defray the cost because, these people, they don't get paid for that," Simms said.
That leaves $10,000 in opioid settlement funds still unallocated. Simms said the county may set up a committee to distribute the money from future years' installments.
The county has already used a portion of the settlement money to create a police resources and outreach (PRO) coordinator position.