The Montgomery County Council has postponed moving a clinic for drug addicts away from a elementary school, saying it wants to wait to move the clinic to a permanent home instead of moving it immediately to a leased space.
The methadone clinic is in a neighborhood in Rockville and is next to Meadow Hall Elementary School and Rockville High School. It has been in the community for about 20 years, much to the chagrin of its neighbors.
“These individuals do not belong next to a school,” said Christine Finney, who lives near the clinic and said her family has been harassed and threatened repeatedly by people being treated by the clinic and their friends.
In response to the neighborhood’s complaints, County Executive Ike Leggett included $2.3 million in his proposed budget to relocate the building to a leased space in a commercial area on Rollins Avenue. The new space would be away from schools and accessible by the Twinbrook Metro station. The 10-year lease and operating costs would require more than $900,000 in county money a year.
“[The clinic’s location] has been a long-standing problem,” said Leggett spokesman Patrick Lacefield. “We wanted to try and get it out sooner rather than later.”
But council members, who are facing a budget deficit of more than $600 million for the next fiscal year and several hundred million the year after, balked at the prospect of moving the clinic to a leased space rather than a county-owned building.
“We want to do it just once, and we want to make sure that it’s moving to a location that is both cost-effective for the county and permanent,” said Council President Phil Andrews, D-Gaithersburg/Rockville.
A potential location for the clinic, Andrews said, is the current Montgomery County Police Department’s headquarters on Research Boulevard in Rockville, which is slated to move to the GE Tech Park building in Gaithersburg. Andrews said the clinic could move into the old police building in two years.
But Finney said the County Council has turned a deaf ear to her and her neighbors’ pleas to move the clinic quickly. She said she recently contacted state officials asking for help after seeking county assistance for years.
“I’m not going to wait for the county anymore,” she said.
