By Bruce Dammeier, Pierce County Executive.
Last Friday was a great day in Pierce County! Not only did we continue getting vaccines into the arms of our residents, but we held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Crisis Recovery Center (CRC) in the Parkland/Spanaway area.
For those of you who’ve been with the County awhile, you know that we’ve been working on this for about the last four years or so as part of our focus on bolstering access to behavioral health care.
As with other initiatives, COVID took its toll on this project and slowed us down significantly. Perhaps that’s why everyone associated with making the new CRC possible was nearly giddy at Friday’s ceremony.
A small, social distanced group gathered at the CRC in beautiful weather and we livestreamed the event. If you didn’t get a chance to see the ceremony, you can see a recap here:
And, if you have a bit more time to spare you can watch and enjoy the entire event at here.
There are many people to thank for their persistence and commitment to seeing the new CRC to completion. I want to especially thank Steve O’Ban of our Executive Team for his skill in pulling the partners together to fund the CRC. From there, Karl Imlig, Dean Paxson and Deborah Anderson managed the design and construction of the facility. Speaking of construction, we had fantastic and flexible partners in BCRA, our design firm, and Lincoln Construction. We had many challenges in bringing this project to fruition and their support and dedication to this new facility made all the difference. Lastly, I’d like to thank Recovery Innovations, International. We have handed the keys of the CRC over to RI as the operator of the new center. RI has several similar sites across the U.S. (and Australia!) and their professional input and expertise were invaluable.
I’d would also like to thank our County Council – past and present for their strong support of the CRC. It is a important priority for many of them – Marty Campbell and Jani Hitchen were able to join us for the event. I would like to give a special shout out to former Councilmember Rick Talbert. He was a very strong voice and key in engaging the community at the very beginning of the project.
Before I finish this blog, I want to salute the people and organizations that we will celebrate this Saturday. One of my favorite events of the year is the annual Volunteer Recognition Brunch. I’m disappointed that we can’t get together in person to salute and thank the hundreds of people who help us serve our residents. It’s always an inspiring and uplifting event. However, we did create a video to recognize some of the folks we plan to recognize tomorrow in a virtual setting, and I look forward to sharing it with you in next week’s blog!
I’m always a bit more upbeat this time of year – more hours of daylight and better weather are good for the soul. Spring is just around the corner and we are seeing signs of containing the pandemic beast.
Hang in there – we’re getting close!
First published on the Pierce County website.