The Bridge Street Recovery drug rehabilitation facility in Bennington is on schedule to start taking on clients June 1. The substance use and mental health treatment company also anticipates breaking ground on its Peterborough detox facility this September, general partner Stephen Bryan said on Wednesday.
The Bennington facility, on the site of the former Highland Inn across from the Crotched Mountain ski area, is intended to serve patients in their final stages of recovery from substance use disorders before transitioning to a halfway house or sober home. Although admissions might trickle in at first, Bridge Street Recovery anticipates scaling up to full capacity at the 40-bed facility in their first six months of operation, Bryan said. The company is currently interviewing staff and already has some clinicians in place, Bryan said, so they’ll be able to supply program services from day one. It was “pleasantly surprising” that the renovations on site were going smoothly, on time, and on budget since starting last October, a “rare” occurrence for such a big project, he said.
“We’re plugging away,” on the 64-bed medical detox facility proposed for Peterborough, Bryan said. The Peterborough Planning Board first approved construction of the detox facility at 25 and 30 Bridge Street, located behind the Peterborough Plaza off Route 101, in Aug. 2018, but construction was delayed as Bridge Street Recovery partners worked out financing and realized they’d need to upgrade their materials to meet building code for the institutional medical facility. “We’re starting from the beginning again,” after all that, Bryan said. The project has acquired interested lenders, and they hope to break ground around the first of September, he said. The two facilities are intended to compliment one another, with patients beginning treatment in Peterborough and transitioning to the Bennington facility after 30 days or more. The Peterborough facility is set to be an ASAM Level 4 facility, providing medically managed intensive inpatient services for adolescents and adults, with 24-hour nursing care and daily physician care, with counseling available 16 hours a day. That rating is the highest intensity of services on the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s continuum of treatment, according to the ASAM’s website. The Bennington facility will not require the same licensing as an outpatient program, but they’ll be seeking JCAHO certification through the Joint Commission, Bryan said previously.